“Sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that other reality, the City of God, shining around us . . . That is the curse inherited by every member of Adam’s tragic race.”
– A. W. Tozer

When I was maybe eight years old, I realized I didn’t know God. I knew about Him, of course, but in my mind, He was an old man who lived in a time where water flowed from rocks. The Bible said to pray without ceasing, and I pictured myself standing in the living room with all my things—the toybox, the little kitchen and play shopping cart, the books and blocks and dolls. I pictured myself walking past all those things, kneeling in a corner with my face to the wall, and praying. All. Day. Even worse, I imagined my siblings staring at me as they played house. Was that what it meant to face trials and tribulations? I wondered.

In his book The Pursuit of God, theologian A.W. Tozer talks about our current state of connection to God. He says all the things most of us know: God is everywhere, God sees us. But, as Tozer says, many of us “go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.” This was true for eight-year-old me, and even twenty-one-year-old-me catches herself living like this. How would I live if He were standing next to me all the time?

And there is the problem. “We do not deny the existence of the spiritual world,” Tozer says, “but we doubt that it is real in the accepted meaning of the word.” God is in fact standing with me all the time, but I’m blind and deaf to Him. Nowadays there are glasses and hearing aids and surgeries to repair our physical senses. Can anything be done for us spiritually?

Tozer’s idea is that we must redetermine our relationship with God. We live in a world that largely has no relationship, so even if we believe, our lives aren’t naturally centered around Him. You (probably) don’t have worship music blasting at your workplace. There’s the internet, which we can never totally escape, full of advertisements that remind us of everything we want or need, full of news that sends us worrying about our world, full of gossip that makes us bitter about people we’ve never heard of in our lives.

How are we supposed to see and hear God?

Tozer puts it bluntly: “Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. . . . The flesh whimpers against the rigor of God . . . and begs for . . . a little indulgence of its carnal ways. . . . Let the average man . . . be forced into making a choice between . . . God and self . . . and God will take second place every time.”

Of course, we can’t stop going to work, and while stepping back from technology is good, it’s probably unwise to go cold turkey at first. But we have to look, really honestly look, at what separates us from God. Are we only praying when we want something? Has an idol taken over our life? And I’m sure we tell ourselves, “I’ll just read the Bible later.” Exploring these things shows us what needs to go, and as it goes there will suddenly be space for God. It’s not that He wasn’t there before; we just had too much in the way.

And God wants to step in. Tozer writes, “When we lift our inward eyes to gaze upon God we are sure to meet friendly eyes gazing back at us.” He later points out, “Our break with the world will be the direct outcome of our changed relation to God,” and, “Made as we were in the image of God, we scarcely find it strange to take again our God as our All. . . . Nothing will or can restore order till our hearts make the great decision: God shall be exalted above.”

Eight-year-old me couldn’t comprehend this. But as I got older, I learned what praying without ceasing actually looked like. It’s a conversation carried on as you eat breakfast, go to work, brush your teeth, get the mail. It creates a bridge between realities and makes the spiritual reality much more accessible.

Tozer warns us of our tendency to divide “our lives into two areas—the sacred and the secular.” But if we clear out ourselves and focus on letting Him in, we’ll find our senses becoming clearer and clearer. Suddenly, even as we’re doing homework and bills, we’ll find ourselves moving with a new clarity and joy, like God is standing there right with us.

Which He always is. And now we can see Him.

I would love to explore this in further articles. Leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments!