A.W. Tozer — The Pursuit of God, Ch. 7

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1. “Faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God” comes from A. W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God, chapter 7, “The Gaze of the Soul,” first published in 1948. Tozer wrote the book near the end of the 1940s while pastoring in Chicago. Reports from those close to him say he drafted the manuscript during a train ride, praying through each chapter as he wrote. The tone of the whole book reflects that intense, devotional focus. The line appears as Tozer is explaining what Scripture means by faith. He looks at the bronze serpent in Numbers 21, where Israel is healed simply by looking, and then at Jesus'use of that story in John 3. Tozer argues that in the Bible to “look” and to “believe” amount to the same thing. Israel looked with their physical eyes, but believers now look with the inner eyes of the heart. On that basis he concludes that faith is the soul's steady, intent gaze toward God. He then expands the point. The Psalms speak of lifting our eyes to the Lord. Hebrews tells us to run the race “looking unto Jesus.” For Tozer, this looking is not a moment of feeling but a posture of life. It is the continual turning of the heart away from itself and toward the living God. He compares it to the human eye, which does its work by looking outward rather than inward. Real faith, he says, is occupied with God, not with measuring its own strength. The book itself sits in the middle of Tozer's lifelong effort to call the church back to a deeper, more God-centered spirituality. He believed Christians had become distracted by activity, noise, and shallow religion. This chapter is one of his clearest attempts to remind believers that faith is a living, active fixation on Christ as Savior, not an abstract doctrine. To “gaze” on a saving God is to trust him, lean on him, and make him the focus of one's inner life.