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.

There is a difference between knowing about a person and knowing them, and faith lives or dies on it. I can recite a stranger’s date of birth, his job and his opinions and still have never once sat across a table from him. Tozer’s worry is that a great deal of religion stalls at exactly this spot. We gather true statements about God and quietly mistake the pile of them for a relationship with him.

When Jesus prays in John 17:3 that eternal life is to know God and the one he sent, the knowing he means is the warm, personal kind, the sort of word you would use of a husband and wife rather than of a student and a textbook. He is not promising information. He is promising acquaintance. Jeremiah lands in the same place when he says the only thing worth being proud of is not cleverness or strength or money but understanding and knowing the Lord (Jeremiah 9:23 to 24). The clever can miss him. The slow of speech can have him.

I find that oddly freeing. It means the most important thing about me is not how much theology I have managed to store, but whether the God I stored any of it about is someone I have come to trust.

If our pictures of God keep shrinking him down to our own dimensions, the only real cure is for God to speak for himself, and the quiet surprise of the Bible is that he does. In Exodus 34:6 he passes in front of Moses and says his own character out loud. He describes himself as full of compassion and grace, patient rather than quick-tempered, and overflowing with a loyal love that does not run dry. He does not leave us to guess his mood. He announces it. Long before we work up the nerve to ask what God is like, he has already told us, and what he tells us is gentler than most of us are braced for.

This instinct ran through the whole of Tozer’s ministry. He never had the formal training, and he grew wary of a Christianity that had become mostly machinery, full of programmes and activity with the living God somewhere off to one side. He is remembered for pushing people back towards the pursuit of God himself rather than the apparatus built around him. The sentence at the head of this page is that same pursuit in miniature. Put the machinery down for a moment, he is saying, and look hard at the God the machinery was ever meant to be about.

When I am honest about the God who turns up in me by reflex, he is usually not cruel so much as preoccupied. A sort of manager: competent and fair, running a large operation, who notices me mainly when a target is missed and is otherwise busy elsewhere. You do not pour your heart out to a manager. You file a tidy report, keep your desk in order and try hard not to become a problem. For years that was the unspoken shape of my praying.

I can even guess where he came from. A childhood where being loved felt bound up with performing well, a couple of church settings heavier on requirement than on welcome, and my own long habit of assuming the worst about how I am seen. None of it was chosen on purpose. It simply settled, the way silt settles on a riverbed.

The damage is quiet but real. If God is a distant manager, I never quite know whether I am loved or merely tolerated for as long as I stay useful, and rest becomes impossible, because the next assessment is always on its way. Setting that grey figure beside the God of Exodus 34:6, who names his own kindness out loud before I have proved a single thing, is slow and unglamorous work. It is also the work that matters most.

I read this line as a private accusation for years before I noticed the pronouns. Tozer does not say the most important thing about you is what comes into your mind. He says our minds, and the most important thing about us. That is a room. A congregation, a whole denomination, carrying a picture of God between them.

Which changes the target. He is not aiming at atheists here. His readers were already in a pew on Sunday with sound doctrine to hand, and the sentence lands on them precisely because their doctrine is fine. You can argue with an unbeliever. You cannot easily argue with a church that agrees with every word of the creed and has quietly stopped expecting any of it to be true this week. I have not seen Tozer name a particular preacher or movement as his target in that opening chapter, so I will not put one in his mouth. But a shared picture of God is a real thing, and it gets handed on in what a church sings, what it hurries past, and what it never quite says out loud.

I have seen this sentence in swirly font under a sunset, doing service as general encouragement to think positive thoughts about God, as though Tozer were handing out a wellness tip. That is close to the opposite of what it does. Read slowly, it is not cosy at all. Whatever is running through your head about God right now, unedited, is exposing you. Hardly mug material.

The second misuse is ours as much as anyone’s. Reaching for “Tozer said” to open a talk, as a badge of seriousness, then moving straight on to whatever we had already planned to say. Used like that the line does no work at all. It becomes borrowed authority from a dead man rather than an invitation to see something uncomfortable about yourself.

There is a third drift, quieter than the other two. People turn the sentence into a verdict on doubt, as though wrestling with God, or being furious with him, proves a faulty picture that must be repaired before you are allowed back to prayer. That misreading has teeth in it. This is an opening diagnosis, not a gate you have to get through first.

Here is my honest trouble with it. Say this to someone whose mind, through trauma or scrupulosity, throws up blasphemous or violent images of God that they never chose and cannot switch off, and you have just told them the most important thing about them is the very thing tormenting them. That is not a fringe worry. The loop in religious anxiety runs like this: an unwanted thought about God arrives uninvited, and the frightened response is to examine it for hours, as though it were a reading of the soul’s temperature. Tozer’s sentence, taken at face value, feeds that loop rather than breaking it.

There is a milder version for the rest of us. What comes into my mind about God at two in the morning, exhausted and afraid, is usually not my settled belief about anything. It is what tiredness does. Treating that flicker as diagnostic makes people responsible for the involuntary furniture in their own heads.

And God himself does not seem to work that way with the frightened. When Elijah collapses under the broom tree and asks to die, he is not corrected or catechised. He is fed, and allowed to sleep (1 Kings 19:4 to 8). The mending comes later, and gently. I do not think Tozer meant to hand anyone a stick to beat themselves with. But the sentence on its own does not build in that mercy. Someone has to add it.

If I used this in a talk, I would not explain it. I would ask people to test it live. Thirty seconds of quiet, say the word God to yourself, and notice honestly what actually turns up, not what you would write on a form. The silence does more than any commentary of mine could, because this is a question, and questions want answering rather than restating.

I would not stop there, though, and this is the part I would rehearse so I did not fumble it. Before anyone moves on, say out loud that whatever surfaced is a starting place and not a grade. Bring it to Jesus. Do not be ashamed of it. Otherwise you have handed a room a mirror and no door, which, given the damage above, is not a kind thing to do to people you are meant to be looking after.

I am confident this is the real opening line of The Knowledge of the Holy, a book still in print, and not one of the floating misattributions that plague quotation sites. What I cannot vouch for is every version of the wording you will meet. It gets reordered as “the most important thing about you is what comes into your mind when you think about God”, subject and predicate swapped round, and I genuinely do not know whether that is a phrasing Tozer used elsewhere himself, a paraphrase that slipped its quotation marks, or simply the drift of a much-copied line retyped slightly wrong a thousand times over.

Both say roughly the same thing, so little is lost. But the swapped version is also the singular one, “you” rather than “us”, and that quietly drops the thing I like most about the original. I would rather tell you plainly that variants exist than pretend every copy you meet is word for word what he wrote.

1961. Church membership in America had been climbing all through the fifties, “under God” went into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and “In God We Trust” became the national motto in 1956. If you were counting, faith was winning.

Into that, Tozer drops a first sentence saying none of the counting matters. Not the membership rolls, not the motto on the coins. What matters is the thing that flickers through one ordinary head at the word God, unbidden, on a Tuesday.

I want to be careful here. I have no evidence he was aiming at the boom, and I am not going to invent a motive for a man who cannot correct me. But the timing sits oddly with me and I cannot stop noticing it. A culture congratulating itself on how religious it had become, and a pastor opening a book by asking what is actually in your head. Whatever he meant by it, the question outlasted the boom, which is more than the boom managed.

There is a misuse of this line that has nothing to do with sunsets, and it bothers me more than the fridge magnets ever did.

Someone has been genuinely damaged by teaching. Not by drift, not by silt settling on a riverbed, but by a small, punitive, score-keeping God preached on purpose, from a pulpit, in the songs, in the way failure got handled on a Wednesday night. Years later they cannot pray. And this sentence gets reached for, kindly even, and it quietly moves the fault. Not “what you were taught was wrong” but “you need to fix the picture in your head”, as though the picture had got in there by itself.

I have watched that happen at exactly the moment a harder conversation was about to open, and watched it close the conversation instead. Tozer is diagnosing an inward drift. He is not writing a church a way out of what it actually taught. If a congregation handed somebody a cruel God, the mending is not only that person’s private homework. Somebody with the standing to say it needs to say plainly that the teaching was the fault, not merely the residue it left behind.

Somewhere behind this quotation, whether Tozer intended it or not, sits a passage rougher than John 17:3. Paul says the people he has in view knew something of God and would not honour him as God, and traded his glory for an image of their own making (Romans 1:21 to 23). That is not an innocent picture nobody chose. That is a swap. Glory handed back over the counter for something smaller and easier to keep in the house.

Tozer’s sentence is gentler than that. It treats a shrunken God mostly as drift: a hard childhood, a thin sermon, sediment. Something that happened to us rather than something we did. Most days I think that mercy is exactly right, and it is certainly what I would reach for with someone frightened or worn out at the end of themselves.

But Romans will not let me keep the diagnosis accidental for everybody, always. Some small Gods are inherited. Some are chosen, quietly, at about two on an ordinary afternoon, because the real one asks more than I feel like giving. I find I need both. Tozer’s kindness for the picture I never picked, and Paul’s flat honesty for the times I have.

Here is the question the sentence has never answered for me. Tozer writes “us” and “our minds”. Is that actually true of everyone? Think of someone raised with no religious furniture at all, who has never pictured God because the question simply never arrived. Not rebellion. Absence. Is the most important thing about her a picture of a God she has never once wondered about?

Put that way, it sounds like a claim you could only make from inside, mistaking the shape of one tradition’s furniture for the shape of every mind there is. I do not think Tozer was trying to flatten anyone. But lifted out of the room he was speaking into and reprinted as a bare fact about “us”, the sentence claims more ground than it can honestly hold. It is true, and worth building a life on, for anyone already reckoning with God in some form. For someone who genuinely is not, it says considerably less than it sounds like it says.

Which is worth knowing before you quote it at a colleague over a sandwich. It is a line for the pew. It goes off in your own hands, not somebody else’s.

• 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.