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Chapter 04 - Apprehending God

In this chapter Tozer talks about an average man’s belief in God. He purports that to most, God is an inference, not a reality. The presence of God is reduced to things like hearsay, a deduction, an ideal, but He remains personally unknown to the individual. Tozer admits that for millions of proclaimed Christians, God is no more real to them than to the unbeliever and have merely attached themselves to an ideal or principle to live by.

Scripture teaches that God is a God that can be known with as much immediacy and intimacy as any other person or experience. Psalm 34:8 cries out, “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” Matthew 5:8 states, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” In order to be able to know God a saving work must first take place, for the unregenerate man is dead in sin, with no ability to respond to or rightly understand His Creator. So as children, of God, once regenerated we have the ability to know God, but Tozer asks of “the very ransomed children of God themselves: why do they know so little of that habitual conscious communion with God which the Scriptures seem to offer? The answer is our chronic unbelief. Faith enables our spiritual sense to function. Where faith is defective the result will be inward insensibility and numbness toward spiritual things. This is the condition of vast numbers of Christians today” (49-50).

Tozer discusses two key words: reality and reckon. Reality speaks to the fact that God has objective and independent existence apart from whatever notions man may have about Him. The worshipping heart “finds Him here when it wakes from its moral slumber in the morning of its regeneration” (53). The word reckon refers not to imagination to that which seeks to attach to reality unreal images projected from the mind. Faith is not like that because it does not create anything, it only recognizes that all along God was there and is a very firm and unchanging reality. He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.' (Hebr 11:6)

I can’t say it better than Tozer: “As we begin to focus upon God the things of the spirit will take shape before our inner eyes. Obedience to the word of Christ will bring an inward revelation of the Godhead (John 14:21-23). It will give acute perception enabling us to see God even as is promised to the pure in heart. A new God-consciousness will seize upon us and we shall begin to taste and hear and inwardly feel the God who is our life and our all. There will be seen the constant shining of the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. (John 1:9) More and more, as our faculties grow sharper and more sure, God will become to us the great All, and His Presence the glory and wonder of our lives” (56).

"Therefore let us not judge one another anymore, but rather determine this—not to put an obstacle or a stumbling block in a brother’s way. I know and am convinced in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but to him who thinks anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean. For if because of food your brother is hurt, you are no longer walking according to love. Do not destroy with your food him for whom Christ died. Therefore do not let what is for you a good thing be spoken of as evil; for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. For he who in this way serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men. So then we pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another...Now we who are strong ought to bear the weaknesses of those without strength and not just please ourselves. Each of us is to please his neighbor for his good, to his edification." - Romans 14:13-19; 15:1-2

 P.S. This issue has nothing to do with food or alcohol. =)