Conscious Personal Awareness
by Jeff Hubing
In the late 1940s, A.W. Tozer was on an overnight train from Chicago to Texas when the illumination of the Holy Spirit enabled him to write one of the most significant spiritual classics of the last century, The Pursuit of God. He wrote all night and the rough draft was finished by the time he got off the train. If you haven’t read it, I urge you to pick it up at your earliest convenience and let its message soak into your soul! It is a prophetic critique of the busyness and hollowness of modern life, and an invitation to seek the Lord and find Him.
In the opening chapter, Tozer writes that “God is a person, and in the deep of His mighty nature He thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves desires and suffers as any other person may. In making himself known to us He stays by the familiar pattern of personality. He communicates with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions. The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion. This intercourse between God and the soul is known to us in conscious personal awareness.”
Tozer’s burden was that God’s presence among us should not be reduced to a doctrinal affirmation; rather, it should be the experienced truth of those who have a living and vibrant relationship with Christ. In other words, Christmas should never stop with a simple affirmation of what ‘happened’ – it should lead us forward into the consistent experiential reality that God is with us now, and every minute from now on.
How do we cultivate this experiential reality? First, we have to believe in it. This is what Tozer refers to as ‘conscious awareness’. This is not like a program that keeps running ‘behind the screen’ that we give a wink and a nod to while functionally ignoring it as we give our time and attention to other things. Conscious awareness is the process by which we repeatedly re-direct our gaze to the face of the Person of Christ, who is ever among us and ever prepared to help us know Him better. It is how we learn to concentrate on Him. That is not passive; it is the aggressive directing of our thoughts and affections to the Lord.
Then, we build on what we know, in pursuit of what we don’t yet know. Tozer called this “the soul’s paradox of love.” He says that being born again and entering God’s Kingdom is “not an end, but an inception, for now begins the glorious pursuit, the heart’s happy exploration of the infinite riches of the Godhead. That is where we begin…but where we stop no man has yet discovered, for there is in the awful and mysterious depths of the Triune God neither limit nor end.”
Psalm 34:8-10 urges us to “taste and see that the Lord is good” and promises that “those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.” If we truly find God to be good in our lived experience, it will generate an appetite in us to know Him more. This invitation stands for us today. May we respond to it with courage and come to delight in the Person of God as our awareness of Him increases day by day.
In the late 1940s, A.W. Tozer was on an overnight train from Chicago to Texas when the illumination of the Holy Spirit enabled him to write one of the most significant spiritual classics of the last century, The Pursuit of God. He wrote all night and the rough draft was finished by the time he got off the train. If you haven’t read it, I urge you to pick it up at your earliest convenience and let its message soak into your soul! It is a prophetic critique of the busyness and hollowness of modern life, and an invitation to seek the Lord and find Him.
In the opening chapter, Tozer writes that “God is a person, and in the deep of His mighty nature He thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves desires and suffers as any other person may. In making himself known to us He stays by the familiar pattern of personality. He communicates with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions. The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion. This intercourse between God and the soul is known to us in conscious personal awareness.”
Tozer’s burden was that God’s presence among us should not be reduced to a doctrinal affirmation; rather, it should be the experienced truth of those who have a living and vibrant relationship with Christ. In other words, Christmas should never stop with a simple affirmation of what ‘happened’ – it should lead us forward into the consistent experiential reality that God is with us now, and every minute from now on.
How do we cultivate this experiential reality? First, we have to believe in it. This is what Tozer refers to as ‘conscious awareness’. This is not like a program that keeps running ‘behind the screen’ that we give a wink and a nod to while functionally ignoring it as we give our time and attention to other things. Conscious awareness is the process by which we repeatedly re-direct our gaze to the face of the Person of Christ, who is ever among us and ever prepared to help us know Him better. It is how we learn to concentrate on Him. That is not passive; it is the aggressive directing of our thoughts and affections to the Lord.
Then, we build on what we know, in pursuit of what we don’t yet know. Tozer called this “the soul’s paradox of love.” He says that being born again and entering God’s Kingdom is “not an end, but an inception, for now begins the glorious pursuit, the heart’s happy exploration of the infinite riches of the Godhead. That is where we begin…but where we stop no man has yet discovered, for there is in the awful and mysterious depths of the Triune God neither limit nor end.”
Psalm 34:8-10 urges us to “taste and see that the Lord is good” and promises that “those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.” If we truly find God to be good in our lived experience, it will generate an appetite in us to know Him more. This invitation stands for us today. May we respond to it with courage and come to delight in the Person of God as our awareness of Him increases day by day.