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Remember God Chasers? You might not if you weren’t Pentecostal or Charismatic in the late 1990s, but this little volume made quite a stir, selling a total of 1.5 million copies in “Spirit-filled” churches and conferences ‘round the world. Penned by classical Pentecostal revivalist Tommy Tenney, it shook a lot of us up back in the day, encouraging us to put “good Christian things” in their perspective but to make our single-hearted focus pursuing God himself. It was a fascinating book and very timely. (Think Oral Roberts-meets-John Piper, and you’ll have Tenney’s “God-soaked” piety in a nutshell.) And yet a decade later, a wave of God-chasers are feeling a little winded. Perhaps we were sprinting and not training for a marathon? Whatever the reasons, the church today is ready to hear good news of God’s chasing us. This is the thematic evolution undertaken by Tim King and Frank Martin in their new book Furious Pursuit.
For a book whose cover (and even to a certain degree, writing style) seem destined for Crossings and Kay Arthur crowd, the contents of Furious Pursuit belie a penetrating search beyond the contemporary American Christian experience: When we feel like we’re not doing enough in our pursuit of God, we need a radical reorientation to the reality of God’s relentless pursuit of us.
Martin shares a story early on that is familiar to many I think. In the “honeymoon” stage of life with Christ, the depth of feeling and divine exchange could be found in abundance:
Hour upon hour I whiled away my adolescence sitting in that small, dark room, praying, worshipping, meditating, seeking to draw nearer to God, and weeping at the power of his presence. My passion for God seemed endless and unshakable. i
Anyone who has been through a close-knit youth group or had a family member or mentor who modeled God-intoxicated living can relate to these moments. How fleeting they can be, though! In just a few short years, it’s amazing the estrangement that can creep in to even the most heavenly of love affairs. Martin continues,
I lived, I worked, I chased girls. I remained morally upright, but only out of habit. In front of my friends and family, my religious facade was convincing, but my feelings toward God were dead. Nothing but memories remained between us. And the worst part of it was that God didn’t seem to care too much either. He appeared to be as apathetic about the loss as I was. It was as if he’d never known my name. ii
Furious Pursuit does a good job picking up where many “Christian self-help” titles leave off, sharing adult reflections on passion, pursuit, and God’s language of love for a lifetime. The authors call us to readjust our expectations—not dumbing them down, but sharpening them in the crucible of Scripture and honest experience.
One of the high points of the book for me was their development of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel’s age of love, a maturing process by which we can realize and then respond to God’s love for us. Here are the words from Ezekiel, referring to God’s people collectively:
As for your birth, your umbilical cord wasn’t cut on the day you were born, and you weren’t washed clean with water. You were not rubbed with salt or wrapped in cloths. No one cared about you to do even one of these things out of compassion for you. But you were thrown out into the open field because you were despised on the day you were born.
I passed by you and saw you lying in your own blood, and I said to you in your blood: Live! Yes, I said to you in your blood: Live! I made you thrive like plants of the field. You grew up and matured and became very beautiful. Your breasts were formed and your hair grew, but you were stark naked.
Then I passed by you and saw you, and you were indeed at the age for love. So I spread the edge of My garment over you and covered your nakedness. I pledged Myself to you, entered into a covenant with you, and you became Mine. iii
In sacred text we are introduced to a God who is not some mild grandfather but rather a lover—capable of pity and even desire. God wants us, with all of the connotations that this raises. And yet, contrary to our volatile experiences with torrid affairs, there is safety here, there is covenant. I think King and Martin are wanting to take us each on an archetypical journey where we enter into the Bride’s struggle with her identity and that of her Lover, and come out of the other side with a settled restiveness of the divine-human relationship.
The end result of such inside-out discipleship (foreign in our day) is a transformation of consciousness whereby we embrace God almost on a “peer” basis—not because of anything particularly meritorious on our part, but because of the story:
The age for love is the moment when we become intuitively aware of God’s pursuit of us. We begin to see that in God’s economy, everything has meaning and purpose. Nothing happens to us that God isn’t using for us. We’ve stepped out of our own small story and into sacred space, God’s space. We’ve entered God’s story. iv
Daring to believe that we’ve entered into God’s story, here and now, has a subversive effect on many of our religious energies. Self-proclaimed “Christian atheist” Don Cuppit once observed—correctly in my opinion—this about the evolution of faith through the ages:
Each individual adherent was guaranteed his share—indeed, an equal share—in religious happiness. But as time went on and the faiths became institutionalized, control of the community everywhere fell into the hands of a ruling group of religious professionals. Priests, scribes, interpreters, and lawyers, they guarded tradition and monopolized control of the sacred text, worship, doctrine, preaching, and religious law. The religious life of the individual was now lived in subjection to a large and bureaucratic salvation-machine, and personal experience of the highest religious happiness was deferred to the heavenly world after death. Thus a faith-tradition that had originally delivered personal liberation now delivered only a condition of extreme religious alienation, and so it remains to this day. v
To put it another way, eternal life begins now…do we dare live by its energies? What Cupitt calls “religious happiness” is the integration that we all instinctively anticipate as promised “abundant life” in Christ. Why do we defer this? Why did we allow religion to reframe the parameters of God’s immediacy?
If Jesus Christ is “God with us” then we have been elevated and completed. God is not disgusted with us—God’s Spirit has made her home in us! Dysfunction, as King put it, is “loving” from a place of need; full function and mature relationships spring from loving out of completeness.
There is something I’d like to see developed further, if King decides to pick up his pen again: Is there a point in this mature completeness where we don’t “need” God but desire God? Could many of the “personal relationships” with Jesus Christ produced today be described as co-dependent?
So the verdict: A very good read. I found that in this deceptively Lucado-esque tome, King and Martin passionately deconstruct condemning, detached, and dualistic approaches to God and faith. It is a must-read for soccer moms, working Joes and seminarians everywhere.
i Furious Pursuit, pg. 17
ii Furious Pursuit, pg. 17
iii Ezekiel 16:4-8, taken from the Holman Christian Standard Bible
iv Furious Pursuit, pg. 134
v Cupitt, Mysticism After Modernity, page 3
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"And the worst part of it was that God didn’t seem to care too much either. He appeared to be as apathetic about the loss as I was. It was as if he’d never known my name."
sounds interesting.
You've made me hungry for more of the book. I identified with everything you shared. I'll definitely get it tomorrow if I can find it! Thanks for sharing.
Michael, I just stumbled across your review of our book "Furious Pursuit" and wanted to say thanks for the kind comments. Yours is one of the more intuitive reviews I've read--very well crafted. It's always a thrill to hear that our message is resonating with readers.
God bless! And keep writing!
Under the Mercy, Frank Martin
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"And the worst part of it was that God didn’t seem to care too much either. He appeared to be as apathetic about the loss as I was. It was as if he’d never known my name."
sounds interesting.
Posted by Hippo | Posted at 12/08/2006 12:34 PMYou've made me hungry for more of the book. I identified with everything you shared. I'll definitely get it tomorrow if I can find it! Thanks for sharing. Posted by Stander | Posted at 12/10/2006 5:57 PM
Michael, I just stumbled across your review of our book "Furious Pursuit" and wanted to say thanks for the kind comments. Yours is one of the more intuitive reviews I've read--very well crafted. It's always a thrill to hear that our message is resonating with readers.
God bless! And keep writing!
Under the Mercy, Frank Martin
Posted by Frank Martin | Posted at 03/30/2007 10:27 PM