According to Tozer, “… Before a man can seek God, God must first have sought the man.”  God’s work of enlightenment within us, therefore, is the secret cause of all our desiring and seeking and praying.  Tozer says, “We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit.”2

From the beginning of time God has been seeking men and women who have a heart like His so that they would desire Him and do his will (1 Sam. 13:14, Acts 13:22, Isa. 65:2). There is, however, only one way that anyone can truly desire Him with a pure heart: it is by accepting God’s Son and resting in Him, thus by allowing Him to transform them and renew their heart and mind (Romans 12:2).

Now the way it works, the way God makes us desire Him is through His Son; when we accept Him He gives us His own Spirit in our heart, which is the spirit of adoption by whom we cry out “Abba Father” (Rom. 8:15).

To explain it further, the reason why we become motivated to seek God and to desire Him is because we are really seeking Him through Jesus who is responding to His Father’s love.  Accordingly, because we are in Christ, when God the Father delights in the Son (Isaiah 42:1), we also feel that delight and are drawn to Him in love.  And remember, we are in fact His sons and daughters; we are joint heirs with Him.

And so, we, joyfully, delight in God. And we find, surprisingly, that our desire for Him is a heavenly and holy desire that continues to bubble up from our heart as out of the very heart of God.

2 A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Christian Publications, n. d.), p. 11.