The Pursuit of God

1.Tozer teaches the doctrine of "prevenient grace" — that before a man can seek God, God must first have sought the man. How does this doctrine protect us from pride in our own spirituality, and how does it simultaneously refuse to let us be passive?

1.Tozer describes a "tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess," and says the pronouns "my" and "mine" are "verbal symptoms of our deep disease." Do you find this diagnosis to be accurate? What are the "things" most deeply rooted in your own heart?

1.Tozer opens with Augustine's famous line: "Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee." He says this is "the origin and interior history of the human race." Do you feel that restlessness? What do you typically do with it?

1.Tozer says that for most people, God is "an inference, not a reality" — a deduction from evidence rather than a personally known Person. He says this is true even for "millions of Christians." Does this description fit anyone you know, or your own experience at certain seasons? What is the difference between believing God exists and knowing Him?

1.Tozer carefully separates the doctrine of divine immanence from pantheism. What is pantheism, and why does he reject it? What is the crucial difference between saying "God is in everything" and saying "God dwells in His creation while remaining distinct from it and transcendent above it"?

1.Tozer argues that "self-expression is inherent in the Godhead" — that God is by nature continuously communicating. He says "God is speaking," not "God spoke." What difference does the present tense make? How does it change the way you read the Bible or move through an ordinary day?

1.Tozer is dissatisfied with most teaching on faith, which he says reduces it to "believing a promise" or "reckoning the Bible to be true," often illustrated with stories of answered prayer. What is missing from these accounts? What does Tozer think is the essential nature of faith?

1.Tozer says the Fall was "most certainly a sharp change in man's relation to his Creator" and that salvation is fundamentally "the restoration of a right relation." He uses the parable of the prodigal son to illustrate this. In what sense is conversion not primarily about guilt management but about the restoration of a relationship?

1.Tozer opens with a striking observation: take the Beatitudes and reverse them, and you have an accurate description of the human race — proud, pleasure-seeking, arrogant, self-satisfied, cruel, corrupt, quarrelsome, retaliatory. Do you find this to be an accurate diagnosis? What does it say about the radicality of Jesus' vision of human flourishing?

1.Tozer identifies the sacred-secular divide as "one of the greatest hindrances to internal peace" for Christians. Describe the divide in your own words. Do you experience your life as divided between "religious" time and "ordinary" time? What does that feel like?

1.Zwemer opens with a kind of wonder: this book was written by a busy pastor in Chicago, on South Halsted Street, amid "haunts of wretchedness and need." What does it say about the nature of the pursuit of God that it was possible — indeed, was practiced intensely — in such an un-monastic setting?

1.Tozer's central argument is that God is a Person to be known, pursued, and experienced — not merely a doctrine to be affirmed. Having spent twelve weeks with this book, how has your understanding of what it means to know God deepened, shifted, or been challenged?