What Is My Purpose in Life as a Christian? — Tozer’s Plain Answer
⏱ 14 min read
You have been asked the question — in a small group, in a counselling session, in your own head at three in the morning — and the answer you give out loud is never the answer that fully satisfies the asker, or you. To love God and love people. To raise my children well. To use my gifts. To serve. The phrases are not wrong. They are correct in the way the headlines of an article are correct — accurate as far as they go, but never going as far as the actual question wants them to go. The question of what is my purpose in life as a Christian keeps surfacing, year after year, because the headline answers do not quiet it.
This is the slow version. A. W. Tozer wrote The Pursuit of God in 1948, on the night train between Texas and Chicago, in one sitting, with a borrowed Bible and a yellow pad. He was a self-educated pastor who read the medieval mystics with the appetite of a man who knew his own century was starving for something the bookshops were not stocking, and the book he produced is one of the few twentieth-century devotionals that the modern Christian woman picks up and finds — within four pages — has named what her soul has been quietly asking for. The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow contemplative reading into a structured daily practice, if you would like a place to take the question after the article. For now — read slowly.
Tozer’s plain answer to the purpose question is not a slogan. It is a description of a posture, and the posture is the one most modern Christian women have either never been taught or have lost track of in the busyness of the years. The answer is in The Pursuit of God in three passages, taken together. We will walk them in order.
The first passage: the holy paradox of love
“To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart. … Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Read it once. Then again, slowly, with attention to the phrase the children of the burning heart.
Tozer is doing something subtle here. He is naming a kind of Christian most twenty-first-century Christian women have not been told they are allowed to be. The too-easily-satisfied religionist is, in Tozer’s diagnosis, the Christian who has reduced the faith to a transaction — assent to a list of beliefs, completion of a list of practices, achievement of a state called saved — and then settled into it as if the transaction were the whole point. The transaction is not the whole point. The transaction is the door. To have found God and still to pursue Him is what the soul that walks through the door discovers itself doing.
The children of the burning heart are the Christians who, having been received, are still seeking — not because they doubt that they have been received, but because the receiving has awakened a hunger that the once-and-done framework cannot hold. They have found Him. They are still pursuing Him. The pursuit, in this passage, is the purpose.
This is the answer the modern Christian woman has been quietly waiting for. What is my purpose in life as a Christian? The over-busy answers she has been given — to serve, to evangelise, to raise the children, to use the gifts, to be a good steward — are not wrong, but they are downstream. They are activities of the woman whose primary orientation is the pursuit of God. Tozer is telling her that the activities are not the purpose. The activities are what the purpose looks like from the outside. The purpose itself is interior — the burning heart that wants Him more this year than last, that has been finding Him for two decades and is, somehow, more hungry now than when the finding started.
The finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking. Notice the temporal logic. Tozer is not describing a sequence in which the seeking ends. He is describing a sequence in which the seeking is what makes the finding itself sweeter. The Christian life is not — in Tozer’s reading — a brief seeking followed by a long having. It is a long seeking that, with each finding, deepens into more seeking, because the One being sought is infinite and the heart’s capacity to receive Him expands with each step deeper in.
For you, this is what reframes the chronic restlessness about purpose. The restlessness is not a sign that you have failed to find your purpose. The restlessness is a sign that you are doing the purpose. The pursuit is the calling. The seeking is the vocation. The woman who is, at thirty-eight, still asking what is my purpose in life as a Christian and feeling vaguely guilty for not having settled the question — that woman is not failing. She is, in Tozer’s vocabulary, a child of the burning heart, and the chronic asking is the burning.
(If the daily practice of this kind of seeking has been the thing that keeps stalling, how to start a faith journal when you don’t know where to begin walks the slowest possible re-entry. And if the mornings keep collapsing under the weight of everything else, how to start your day with god (morning routine that sticks) is the companion piece.)
The second passage: I want to want Thee
“I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, that so I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Read it slowly. Then read it again, paying attention to the strange grammar of I want to want Thee.
This is one of the most quietly devastating prayers in the twentieth-century devotional tradition, because of who it gives voice to. The Christian woman who can pray I love God with my whole heart is rare. The Christian woman who can pray I want to love God with my whole heart but find that I don’t, fully, most days is universal — and has been told by most of the discipleship material she has read that this admission is something to be ashamed of, hidden, fixed by trying harder.
Tozer puts the admission in the mouth of a prayer. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. The desire is the missing thing. The Christian life keeps being described as a life of love for God, and the woman knows, in the honest part of herself, that the love is intermittent, the desire is patchy, the longing she reads about in the saints is not what her Wednesday morning interior feels like, and the gap between the prescribed devotion and the actual interior is the gap she is most ashamed of.
And then comes the line that turns the prayer. I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Tozer prays not for the desire — he prays for the desire for the desire. The prayer is recursive. The woman who finds she does not love God enough is permitted to pray for the wanting of love, and the wanting itself becomes the door.
This is — astonishingly — Tozer’s plain answer to the purpose question, in its second form. What is my purpose in life as a Christian? It is to ask Him, every day, to make you thirstier than you are. The purpose is not a state you achieve — now I love God enough — but a posture you keep returning to: make me want You more than I do today. The thirst is the purpose. The slow increase of the thirst is the work.
For the modern Christian woman, this releases the chronic guilt that her devotion does not match the prescribed picture. I want to want Thee is a prayer for the woman whose interior is honest about its own shortfall. The shortfall does not disqualify her from the purpose. The naming of the shortfall — and the asking, day by day, for more thirst — is the purpose, in motion.
Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Notice who begins the work. Not the woman. Him. The woman’s part is to ask Him to begin, again, today. The work is His. The asking is hers. The asking is small. The asking is daily. The asking is the practice.
A note before the third passage. The daily small practice of I want to want Thee is the kind of slow contemplative ground the Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around. Not a heavy commentary. A short passage, a contemplative question, room for one honest sentence — the daily home for the kind of slow purpose Tozer is describing here. If you have been trying to live this kind of thirst without a structure that holds it, the workbook is the held form of it.
A pause — the body knows this too
Sit somewhere quiet for a moment. The teaching has a body to it, and the body is where the abstract vocabulary becomes most usable.
Press both feet flat against the floor. Let the shoulders drop by an inch — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Let one slow inhale come in. On the exhale, notice — gently — the chronic question you have been carrying. The what am I for question. Hold it lightly. Then take one more slow breath. On the second exhale, let your hands open in your lap, palms up, and silently let the prayer Tozer prayed be the one you pray: I want to want Thee. Not I do. Not I will. The honest one. I want to.
The body that has been bracing against the purpose question — the chest tight, the shoulders up, the jaw set against the chronic not-knowing — usually softens at this prayer, because the prayer permits the honest version. The body has been working harder than it needed to. The purpose is not a thing you achieve by force. It is a thirst that grows, day by day, in the woman who keeps asking for it. The thirst is gentler on the body than the achievement was. Let one more exhale go all the way out. Then read on.
(For the kind of evening practice that lets the I want to want Thee prayer become a habit, a daily prayer journal that holds the asks you’re embarrassed to pray is the practical companion to this slow Tozer reading.)
The third passage: kindred personalities
“God formed us for His pleasure, and so formed us that we as well as He can in divine communion enjoy the sweet and mysterious mingling of kindred personalities.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Read it once. Then again, slowly. The phrase that does the work is kindred personalities.
Tozer is making a claim that the popular devotional culture rarely makes plainly. The purpose of the Christian life is not service. The purpose of the Christian life is not even worship, in the narrow churchy sense of that word. The purpose of the Christian life is communion — and Tozer’s word for the communion is the mingling of kindred personalities. God is a Person. You are a person. The two of you were made to mingle, in the same way that two old friends mingle on a long evening — their thoughts, their attention, their delight in each other interleaving in a way that no transactional language can quite capture.
The startling part of the sentence is kindred. Tozer is saying that you and God are kindred — the same kind, in the small mysterious sense the word kindred allows. He made you for the kind of personhood that is capable of communion with His personhood. The capacity is not metaphorical. The capacity is the answer to what is my purpose in life as a Christian. You were made for the mingling. The mingling is the purpose. Everything else — service, calling, vocation, family, work, the long list of activities that Christian women feel pressured to specify their purpose in terms of — is downstream of the mingling.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the answer that finally quiets the question. What is my purpose in life as a Christian? It is to be a person who, in small daily ways, mingles in communion with the Person who made you. The mingling is the calling. The mingling is the vocation. The mingling is the long slow shape of a Christian life, and everything else — the job that may or may not be the right job, the season of mothering, the years of caring for an ageing parent, the writing or the teaching or the small ordinary stewardship of an unremarkable life — is the form the mingling takes in that particular season.
This is the answer Tozer wrote on the night train between Texas and Chicago. He had read the medieval mystics enough to know that the modern Christian had been given the wrong question. The right question is not what should I do with my life as a Christian? The right question is how am I mingling, today, with the One who made me to mingle with Him? The doing follows. The doing always follows. The doing is the natural overflow of the mingling — never its substitute.
The sweet and mysterious mingling of kindred personalities. The line is worth keeping somewhere near the page. It is a clearer statement of the Christian purpose than most of the books on the shelf at the Christian bookshop will offer you, because it does not reduce the purpose to a function. The purpose is not a function. The purpose is a Person, and a relationship, and the slow daily mingling of the two persons who were made — as Tozer carefully says — kindred.
(The sibling articles in this Father-Analysis cluster sit at how to know god’s will for your life — murray’s three tests and how to discern god’s calling — ignatian discernment, which together hold the question of purpose from the Murray and Ignatian directions.)
What the three passages, together, are actually saying
Read the three in sequence. The children of the burning heart. I want to want Thee. The mingling of kindred personalities. Tozer is describing one thing in three vocabularies.
The first names the heat of the Christian life — the burning that keeps the heart, year after year, wanting more of God than it currently has. The second names the honest prayer of the burning heart — the daily admission that the desire is smaller than the desire ought to be, and the asking for the desire to grow. The third names the destination the burning and the asking are moving toward — the mingling of kindred personalities, the slow patient communion of the Person who made you with the person you are becoming.
Tozer’s plain answer to what is my purpose in life as a Christian is, then, this: you were made for Him, and your purpose is the slow daily life of becoming a woman whose mingling with Him is the centre of gravity from which everything else flows. The calling questions, the vocation questions, the what am I supposed to do with the next ten years questions — those will, in the woman whose centre of gravity is the mingling, become clearer with time. They become clearer from inside the mingling, not from outside it.
What you can do this week is the small thing. Pick one of the three passages. Write a line from it on a small piece of paper. Put it where you will see it — by the kettle, in the car, beside the bathroom mirror. Each morning, read the line slowly. Then go into the day. The day will, at some point, surface the line again — usually at a moment the words have unexpected weight. The line and the day will have a small conversation. That conversation is the slow practice. That conversation, repeated for years, is what is my purpose in life as a Christian, in motion.
Get Seven Days of Stillness — free
A free gift from Hayley Louisa Mark. A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week.
No noise. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you wish.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds Tozer’s slow vocabulary of the burning heart in proximity to the One you were made to mingle with.
The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Tozer’s vocabulary — the burning heart, the wanting to want, the mingling of kindred personalities — into a daily companion built for the woman whose purpose question is, at last, ready to be answered as a Person and not as a function.
