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We’ve spent years in conversation with many hundreds of Christian thought leaders, asking them questions. Among these questions is this: What resources have made the biggest difference in your spiritual life? Their answers have been remarkably consistent. This is one of the 10 most recommended.
Somewhere between Chicago and Texas, on a train rumbling through the night, a pastor pulled out a pen and began to write. He had no outline, no plan — only a hunger. By the time he arrived, A.W. Tozer had drafted a book that would outlive him by generations.
That book was “The Pursuit of God.” Published in 1948, it remains one of the most cherished works in Christian spirituality — a slim volume with an outsized claim on the hearts of those who have read it.
A Self-Taught Mystic
Tozer was not a likely candidate for influence. Born in 1897 in rural Pennsylvania, he came to faith at 17 after hearing a street preacher in Akron, Ohio. He never attended seminary. He never earned a degree. What he had instead was an insatiable appetite for God and an unusual willingness to pursue him in prayer, often for hours at a time, often on his face.
He pastored Southside Alliance Church in Chicago for 31 years, wrote more than 40 books and became one of the most quoted voices in 20th-century evangelicalism. But those who knew him said his real life happened in the hidden hours — alone with God, pressing into a presence most believers only talked about.
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What the Book Actually Does
“The Pursuit of God” is structured as 10 meditative chapters, each circling the same burning question: Is it possible to truly know God — not just know about him, but know him the way one knows a friend, a father, a lover of the soul?
Tozer’s answer is yes. But the path, he insists, is not passive. It requires surrender — what he calls the removal of the “veil” that hangs between the believer and God. That veil is not made of distance or mystery but of self: our possessions, our reputation, our need to control. Only as these are laid down, Tozer argues, does the presence of God become real.
The prose is urgent, almost pleading. Tozer writes like a man who has tasted something and cannot bear to see others settle for less. His sentences are short, rhythmic and heavy with longing. Readers often describe the experience of reading him as both convicting and wooing at once.
A Book That Will Not Leave You Alone
If your faith has grown routine — if you have found yourself going through the motions of belief without the fire that once accompanied them — “The Pursuit of God” will not let you stay comfortable. Tozer has no interest in religious performance. He wants something deeper: a heart laid bare before the God who is, as he puts it, “always previous” — always already pursuing us before we think to seek him.
The book is brief enough to read in an afternoon. But readers often find themselves returning to it for years — underlining new sentences each time, discovering that the words have grown sharper as their own hunger has deepened.
It is, in the end, less a book to be finished than a companion for the long journey toward the One who first set out to find us.
“The Pursuit of God” is available in print, e-book and audiobook from major retailers and Christian bookstores.