I’ve been on a book by A.W. Tozer for a week now, it’s actually a compendium of some of his teachings while he was alive.

There’s no way we wouldn’t have thought him archaic, rigid or like most people like to say today, ‘radical’, because his teachings are concentrated and honestly don’t have some of the padding we see often in our day today. I’m unsure if to attribute it to a decline in seasoned teachers, or merely a lukewarm devotion expressed to the things of God today.

Either way, something in me is deeply stirred when I read from some of these “believers of old’ and sometimes I’m deeply concerned looking at the church today. Nonetheless, excited, because we drink from deep wells to become same springs to provide same depth to our generation, here and now.

I’ve often learnt and taught that God will never neglect the desire of a believer to know Him. God delights in being involved and relied on, not because He suffers a hero-complex, but because He created us that way; to come to be dependent and sustained on and by Him.

Reading Tozer tonight, he says “God will respond to our effort to know Him”.

Definitely several notches higher from just a desire. Effort speaks of desire fused in knowledge, intentionality and zeal. That’s the one God responds to.

I think it’s easy to have desires, it takes much more to make that desire an effort to get what one seeks.

Our cultivation of the knowledge of God in us must be characterised of effort that is reflected in our daily choices; what we do, where we go, the people we’re with, the things we say etc.

It’s easy to see effort as compared to mere desire. So today, I hope you spend some time meditating on how much effort you exude to actually know this God.

I know the doctrine of today stands a good distance away from works, but expressing our desire by showing effort is not the same thing as attempting to work our way to know God.

May God find that the entirety of our life is consistent with what we profess to Him in our prayer times.