The Most Important Thing About You

This line is the opening sentence of A.W. Tozer’s The Knowledge of the Holy, published in 1961, only a couple of years before he died. Tozer was an American pastor in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and he spent the better part of three decades pastoring in Chicago. He never went to college and taught himself, reading widely. The book grew out of a worry he states plainly: that the church of his day had quietly let its idea of God shrink, and had not even noticed. So he wrote a short, chapter-by-chapter study of God’s character, his holiness, his goodness, his mercy and his unchanging nature, as a piece of repair work.

What strikes me is where he chose to start. Not with a definition of God, not with a proof that he exists, but with us. With what happens inside an ordinary head the moment the word God comes up. Before we ever examine God’s character, he says, look honestly at the picture you are already holding. That is a humbler and more searching place to begin than it first sounds.

It is worth slowing down on the exact words. Tozer does not say the most important thing about us is what we believe about God, or what we would confess if asked. He says what comes into our minds when we think about God. He means something more involuntary than a doctrine: the image that surfaces before you have tidied it up for company.

I can hold a perfectly orthodox view of God on paper and still feel, in some wordless way, that he is mainly cross with me. That feeling is the picture actually running my life. Tozer’s point is that the confession and the picture can drift apart, and that the gap between them is where a great deal of joyless religion takes root. The opening line works less like a statement and more like a question put to the reader. Not what would you write in an exam, but what rises up in you when you are frightened, or ashamed, or on your own at three in the morning.

If the trouble is a God shrunk down to our own size, then more imagination will not save us. We do not need a more colourful mental image; we need a more accurate one, and accuracy of that kind has to come from outside our own heads. This is where Tozer’s instinct runs alongside Scripture’s, which never tells us to picture God in whatever way we find most comforting. It keeps pointing us instead to the places where God has actually shown himself.

And the clearest showing is Jesus. John 1:18 makes the point that no one has ever seen God, and that it is the Son who has made him known. Hebrews 1:3 speaks of the Son as the one in whom God’s glory and very nature are revealed. So when I want to correct the picture in my head, I do not look inward and try harder. I go and watch how Jesus is with people. The scripture echo on this quote, John 17:3, ties the knots together: knowing God and knowing the Christ he sent are not two separate tasks but one.

The honest test of all this is small and ordinary. When I make a mess of something, is my first move towards God or away from him? Whatever I do by reflex tells me which God I am really carrying. For a long time my instinct was to go quiet and sort myself out a little before I prayed, as though he needed me presentable at the door first. That is not the Father Jesus shows us. That is a figure I had pieced together out of old anxieties and a few stern faces from years ago.

What helps me is not dramatic. I read the Gospels slowly and let Jesus argue with the picture, noticing that the people who came to him in the worst state were the ones he was kindest to. Sometimes I say back to God, out loud, what is genuinely true of him, and I keep saying it until it begins to feel true. It is slow going, because the wrong picture has had years to practise. But Tozer is right that as the true one sharpens, the rest of me settles behind it.

• When something goes wrong in my day, is my first instinct to move towards God or to hide from him, and what does that reveal about the God I am actually carrying?
• If I am honest, where did my deepest and most automatic picture of God come from, and how much of it has Jesus actually been allowed to correct?
• Is there a part of me that holds all the right words about God while quietly living in front of a smaller, harsher one?
• What would I do differently this week if I really trusted that the Father is exactly as kind as Jesus showed him to be?

If you would like to keep going, you could sit with more from A.W. Tozer or explore verses gathered by theme.