Book Club Questions for The Pursuit of God

1.Tozer opens by describing "increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself." He calls this hunger "the only real harbinger of revival" he can detect. What does it say about the state of the church that genuine hunger for God — not programs or activity — is singled out as the most hopeful sign of life?

2.Tozer uses the image of the altar on Mount Carmel: the stones are laid, the sacrifice is divided, but there is no fire. What does "fire" represent in this metaphor, and where do you see the "no fire" problem showing up in churches or Christian communities you know?

3.He quotes John Wesley: "Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this." How does this quote challenge common assumptions about what it means to be a "good Christian"?

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?

2.He writes that the doctrine of justification by faith "has in our time fallen into evil company" and been used in a way that actually "bars men from the knowledge of God." This is a striking charge. What does he mean? Do you think he is right?

3.Tozer says, "The modern scientist has lost God amid the wonders of His world; we Christians are in real danger of losing God amid the wonders of His Word." What does it look like to lose God in His own Word? Have you experienced this?

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?

2.He says that in the Garden, God was in the deep heart of man, and gifts were on the outside — but that sin reversed this, putting "things" at the center and pushing God to the margins. How does this reversal show up in the practical texture of daily life? What does it feel like when a "thing" occupies God's place?

3.Walk through the Abraham and Isaac story as Tozer tells it. He says that Isaac "represented everything sacred to his father's heart: the promises of God, the covenants, the hopes of the years." What made Abraham's attachment to Isaac particularly understandable — and particularly dangerous?

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?

2.He distinguishes carefully between the omnipresence of God and the "manifest Presence" of God. We have fled from the manifest Presence — like Adam hiding, or Peter crying "Depart from me." What is the difference between knowing God is everywhere and actually experiencing His Presence? Which do you know more of?

3.Walk through Tozer's description of the tabernacle — the outer court, the holy place, the veil, the Holy of Holies. What does each stage represent in the soul's journey toward God? At which stage do you think most Christians are living?

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?

2.He draws attention to the sensory language the Bible uses for knowing God: "taste and see," garments that "smell," sheep who "hear," and the pure in heart who will "see." What is Tozer arguing by pointing to these passages? What does this suggest about how God intends us to know Him?

3.Tozer carefully distinguishes between *reality* and *imagination*. He says faith does not visualize or project — "imagination projects unreal images out of the mind and seeks to attach reality to them. Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there." Why is this distinction important? How might confusing imagination with faith lead someone astray?

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"?

2.He states plainly: "God is here. Wherever we are, God is here. There is no place, there can be no place, where He is not." Then he quotes Jacob's astonished cry: "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not." Why is not knowing God is present a recurring human tragedy? What keeps us from awareness of what is always true?

3.Tozer makes a distinction that is crucial to the chapter: the *Presence* of God and the *manifestation* of the Presence are not the same thing. God can be present while we are entirely unaware of Him. What, on our part, is required for His Presence to become manifest?

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?

2.He distinguishes between the written Word of God (the Bible, confined by ink and paper) and the living Voice of God that fills the universe and gives the written Word its power. This is not a demotion of Scripture but an elevation of it — the Bible is powerful because it *corresponds* to a Voice that is still speaking. How does this help you read the Bible differently?

3.Tozer proposes that the "universal Voice of God" may be the hidden source of humanity's restless conscience, its longing for immortality, its moral intuitions. He suggests that great artists, poets, and moral philosophers may have been "haunted by the speaking Voice, laboring and striving like one possessed." Do you find this a compelling or a troubling idea? Why?

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?

2.He turns to the story of the bronze serpent in Numbers 21. The bitten Israelites simply had to *look* at it to live. Jesus interprets this in John 3 as a picture of saving faith. What does the *looking* capture about faith that other descriptions miss?

3.Tozer says: "Faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God." He then adds that it is "not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God." How does this definition connect the moment of conversion to a lifetime of Christian living? Does it change what you think conversion is *for*?

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?

2.He describes God as the fixed center of all existence: "I AM" — the one point that does not move. Everything else is measured from Him. He compares this to a sailor shooting the sun to find his position. What happens to a person's life when they try to navigate from any fixed point other than God?

3.Tozer says: "Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and to bring Him nearer to our own image." Be specific: in what ways do people — or do you — try to modify God to fit their preferences?

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?

2.He identifies the burden Jesus invites us to lay down as an inner one — not poverty or political oppression, but the burden of *pride*: "the heart's fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and enemy." How much mental and emotional energy do you spend protecting your sense of self? Is this a burden you recognize in yourself?

3.Tozer describes the meek person with a memorable phrase: "He has stopped being fooled about himself. He has accepted God's estimate of his own life." This is not self-deprecation but clear-eyed accuracy. What is God's estimate of us — both the humbling part and the exalting part?

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?

2.He says Jesus "knew no divided life" — He did "always the things that please" the Father, with no distinction between act and act. What does it mean to say that Jesus never performed a non-sacred act? How does the incarnation itself disprove the idea that the physical is inherently unspiritual?

3.Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:31 to do *all* things — including eating and drinking — to the glory of God. Tozer says: "If these lowly animal acts can be so performed as to honor God, then it becomes difficult to conceive of one that cannot." Do you believe this? What would it look like for your most mundane daily tasks — commuting, cooking, working — to be genuinely offered to God?

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?

2.Zwemer describes Tozer as "a self-made scholar, an omnivorous reader with a remarkable library" who "seemed to burn the midnight oil in pursuit of God." The book, he says, "is the result of long meditation and much prayer." What is the relationship between intellectual seriousness and spiritual depth? Can one substitute for the other?

3.Zwemer notes that Tozer is familiar with "the saints and mystics of the centuries — Augustine, Nicholas of Cusa, Thomas à Kempis, von Huegel, Finney, Wesley and many more" and says this gives the book "catholicity of outlook." Having now read the book, how did Tozer's engagement with this broader tradition enrich his argument?

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?

2.Which chapter or theme hit you hardest? Was it the tyranny of things (Chapter II), the inner veil of self (Chapter III), faith as a gaze (Chapter VII), meekness and rest (Chapter IX), or another? What made it land so powerfully?

3.Tozer writes in the Preface: "if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame." Has your candle been lit — or made to burn more brightly — by reading this book? Where do you see evidence of that in your life?