Host: Good morning. This is The Pursuit Podcast for Sunday, October eleventh. Today we finish the Preface to The Pursuit of God, where Tozer names the hunger in the church and tells us why he wrote this book.

Reader: Psalm thirty-four, verse eight. O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.

Reader: From A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, the Preface. I trust I speak in charity, but the lack in our pulpits is real. Milton’s terrible sentence applies to our day as accurately as it did to his: “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.” It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God’s children starving while actually seated at the Father’s table. The truth of Wesley’s words is established before our eyes: “Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers.

Reader: There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this.”

Reader: Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for the dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of people who hold “right opinions,” probably more than ever before in the history of the Church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the “program.”

Reader: This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.

Reader: Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the Living God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such way as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth.

Reader: The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.

Reader: This book is a modest attempt to aid God’s hungry children so to find Him. Nothing here is new except in the sense that it is a discovery which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame.

Reader: —A. W. Tozer
Chicago, Ill. June 16, 1948

Host: Tozer is saying something that should stop a Bible-loving people in their tracks: it is possible to sit at the Father's table and still go hungry. It is possible to hold every right opinion about God and not know Him. He quotes Wesley's sobering point, and Scripture says the same thing more sharply. James chapter two, verse nineteen: Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. Right doctrine is good, and Tozer insists on it. Sound exposition, he says, is an imperative must. But doctrine is the road, not the destination.

Our Lord said this to the most careful Bible students of His day. John chapter five, verses thirty-nine and forty: Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life. They had the scrolls, they knew the words, and they missed the Person the words were pointing to. That is Tozer's warning. The Bible is not an end in itself. It is the means by which the Holy Spirit brings us to Christ, and through Christ to the Father.

This also explains his grief over worship becoming a program. Jesus told the woman at the well, in John chapter four, verse twenty-four: God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. Truth without spirit becomes a lecture. Spirit without truth becomes a performance. The Father seeks worshippers who come with both, to Him.

And so the psalmist's invitation: O taste and see that the LORD is good. Tasting is personal. No one can do it for you, not a preacher, not a deacon, not a book, not even this one.

Here is one way to carry this into today. This is the Lord's Day. Before you open your Bible or walk into worship this morning, pause and ask simply, Lord, let me meet You, not only learn about You. Then listen for Him in the reading, in the singing, and in the preached Word. Come to the table expecting to be fed.

Host: Father, we thank You for Your Word, and for every faithful teacher who has opened it to us. Keep us from resting in right words alone. By Your Spirit, bring us through the Scriptures to Jesus Christ, and let us taste that You are good. Where our fire is small, make it real. In Jesus' name, amen.

Host: They that seek the LORD shall not want any good thing. Psalm thirty-four, verse ten. Go with God.