How to Develop a Heart for God — Tozer on the Burning Heart
⏱ 14 min read
The honest version of the question has shame in it. You used to want Him. You remember it. The years when the Bible was alive on your knees, when the worship songs moved something in your chest you could not name, when prayer felt like talking to someone who was actually in the room. And now — a year in, or three, or seven — the wanting is quieter. The disciplines are still in place. The Sunday is still kept. The reading is still done. And the heart of it, the felt longing, has gone from a fire to embers, and you have not known whether the embers are a failure on your part or a season He is moving you through.
The question how to develop a heart for God is the question of a woman who has been a Christian long enough to know that the heart is the actual point, not the activity. You can keep all the activities going while the heart goes cool, and you have suspected, in the quiet, that this is what has been happening. The asking is not the asking of a beginner. It is the asking of a long-walking believer whose desire has thinned and who would like, slowly, to be re-warmed.
This is the slow version of the answer. A. W. Tozer, the twentieth-century pastor and editor whose The Pursuit of God was written on a single overnight train ride between Texas and Chicago in 1948, will be our older voice. Three passages, slowly read. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Tozer’s central pastoral conviction, taken across the whole of The Pursuit of God, was that the burning heart is given, not manufactured. You cannot work the heat back into the embers by trying harder. The heat is the Spirit’s gift, and the woman who wants the burning heart back is being invited not to produce it but to show up to the daily small place where He gives it. The developing of a heart for God is the long, patient, daily presenting of yourself to the One who alone can re-kindle what He kindled in the first place.
(If the larger felt sense has been distance — that He has not been near, that the silence has been the harder part — why God whispers instead of shouts is the quieter companion to this slower article. If you have been wondering whether you actually understand who He is — whether the cooling has come from a thin theology rather than a thin heart — what are the attributes of God walks Tozer’s plain answer. And if the felt distance has been the long shape of years, why does God feel so distant walks Augustine’s older grammar of it.)
The thing developing a heart for God is not
It is not the manufacturing of feeling. That is the first thing to settle.
The modern Christian woman, especially the one who has come up through the warm-hearted streams of the church, has often inherited a quiet assumption: that the heart for God is something she is supposed to generate — by the right music, the right book, the right conference, the right small spiritual hack. The assumption is gentle and well-meant and not entirely wrong; the practices do matter. But Tozer, gently, would set the assumption down. The burning heart is not a feeling you produce. It is a given. You cannot work it up. You can only show up to the place He gives it.
The shift is small and important. Developing a heart for God, in Tozer’s grammar, is not the same as producing one. The developing is the patient daily showing-up. The giving is His. The two are not the same verb, and confusing them has been the source of years of self-recrimination for women who have tried to manufacture the warmth and have come away empty. The warmth is not yours to manufacture. The showing-up is yours to keep doing. He will do the rest.
The first passage: the children of the burning heart
“Thine own eternity is round Thee, Majesty divine! 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 read it again, slowly.
Notice the line at the centre. To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love. Tozer is naming something the modern Christian woman often does not have the vocabulary for. She has been taught, in much of the church, that finding God is the end of the search — that conversion, or the moment of warm-hearted decision, settles the seeking once and for all. Tozer corrects this, gently and with old-master authority. The seeking does not end at the finding. The finding is what makes the true seeking begin.
This re-frames the cooling. You have not lost the heart for God because the seeking has continued past your conversion. You have lost the heart for God because, somewhere in the years after, you stopped still pursuing Him. The finding became a settled past-tense fact. The pursuit, which was supposed to keep going — deeper, longer, more daily — quieted. And the embers are the symptom of a pursuit that has been paused, not a soul that has gone bad.
The children of the burning heart. That is the phrase worth keeping near the page. Tozer is naming a category of Christian — not the most disciplined, not the most learned, not the most outwardly impressive — the children of the burning heart. These are the women and men whose lives have been organised around the daily continuing pursuit of the God they have already found. The burning is the natural result of the still pursuing. The pursuit is the fuel. Stop the pursuing, and the heart cools. Resume the pursuing, slowly, in the small daily forms, and the heart begins, by degrees, to warm again.
How do you develop a heart for God? Tozer’s answer, in this first passage, is precise. You take up the still pursuing. You become, in the quiet of your daily life, one of the children of the burning heart — not by working up feeling but by re-establishing the small daily seeking that the burning is the natural overflow of.
They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night. Read that line slowly. The fathers and mothers Tozer is pointing back to were not warm because they had figured out the right technique. They were warm because they were seeking — daily, hungrily, with the kind of holy persistence that does not let up once the felt heat has cooled. The seeking is what kept the heart burning. The seeking is what would, slowly, warm yours.
The somatic that goes with the seeking
Pause here. Tozer’s vocabulary has a body to it, and the body is where the cooling has actually settled.
Sit somewhere quiet. Place one hand, gently, on the centre of your chest — over the sternum, where the older Christian writers said the heart sat. Notice what is happening there. The body of the woman whose heart has cooled often has a small contracted feeling in the chest, just behind the sternum — a quiet inward holding that has been there so long the body has forgotten it is doing it. Take one slow inhale, and on the exhale, let the small contracted place soften by a fraction. Not by force. By the same kind of release you give a tight shoulder when you remember it has been holding.
Stay there for thirty seconds. The hand on the chest, the slow exhale, the small softening behind the sternum. That place — the place under your hand — is where the burning Tozer is describing actually lives. The cooling is not a metaphor only; it has a body. The re-warming, when it comes, also has a body. The slow daily attention to that small place, in the chair, with His name on your breath, is the body’s part of developing a heart for God. The heart is not only metaphorical. The body’s chest knows when it has been seeking and when it has been keeping itself slightly closed.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is built around this kind of small daily attention. One page each evening, a short passage, room for one honest sentence, no demand to perform. The journal is not the cure for the cooling — He is — but the daily small practice keeps the hand on the chest, in the chair, in His presence. The warming comes back, when it comes back, in that body, in that place, by His timing.
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
This is the most piercing of the three passages. Read it twice.
I want to want Thee. Three small syllables. Read them again. That is the prayer of the woman whose heart has cooled. Tozer is doing something quiet and pastoral here. He is naming the exact place the cooled-hearted believer is standing in — the place where the desire itself has thinned, and even the wanting has gone quiet, and the only honest prayer left is the prayer for the wanting back. I want to want Thee. You cannot start with full desire. You can start with the wanting to want.
For the modern Christian woman who has been ashamed of her lack of desire, this single line of Tozer’s is the door back. The shame says I should not have to ask to want Him; the wanting should be there already. Tozer says, on behalf of every saint who has ever cooled in the long middle of a long walk, that the wanting itself is His to give. You can ask Him for the wanting. The asking I want to want Thee is itself the first ember of a fire returning. The praying it is, in Tozer’s reading, the praying of the burning heart in its earliest small stage.
I long to be filled with longing. Read it slowly. The grammar is recursive on purpose. You are not yet longing. You are longing to long. The asking is one level removed from the desired state — and Tozer is telling you that this one-level-removed asking is itself the right beginning. The Spirit honours it. The asking is heard. The longing, when it returns, returns not because you produced it but because He gave it, in answer to the small honest asking for it.
Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. That is the line worth keeping near the page. The new work is His work. The mercy is His mercy. The love is what He produces within you. Your part is the small honest asking that He would begin the new work. The work itself is His. The developing of a heart for God is the slow daily asking that He would do, in mercy, what only He can do — and the patient waiting, in the chair, while He does it.
How do you develop a heart for God when the wanting has cooled? You ask for the wanting back. You sit in the chair. You let Him begin the new work. That is the praying. That is the practice. The warmth, when it returns, will be His to bring.
The third passage: the soul’s paradox of love
“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. Say to my soul, ‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.’ Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
This is the most pastoral of the three. Read it slowly.
Tozer ends the prayer with a line from the Song of Songs — Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. The borrowing is intentional and important. Tozer is naming what the cooled-hearted woman is actually being invited into — not a return to a vague earlier intensity but the slow rising-and-following of a beloved who is being called by name. My love, my fair one. The voice doing the calling is not stern. It is not disappointed. It is the voice of a Beloved who is gently inviting His own to come up out of the misty lowland.
The misty lowland where I have wandered so long. That phrase will land in any woman who has been in the cooled stretch for years. The misty lowland is where the warmth has been faint, where the felt presence has been thin, where the days have been faithful but quiet. Tozer is not shaming you for being there. He is naming that He sees you there — and that the invitation, even now, is to rise and come away. The rising is the small daily showing-up. The grace to rise is His to give. The following is the slow walking, day by day, out of the lowland into the warmer country.
Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee. Even the rising is His grace. You do not rise on your own strength. You ask for the grace to rise, and the grace is given, and you rise — and the rising is itself the developing of the heart for God that you have been asking for. The asking is the rising. The rising is the developing. The developing is His work in you, answering the small daily asking that He would do it.
How do you develop a heart for God? Tozer’s full answer, taken across these three passages: become one of the children of the burning heart by taking up the still pursuing of the One you have already found. Ask Him, honestly, for the wanting back. Let Him begin a new work of love in you. Ask for the grace to rise from the misty lowland. And then — slowly, daily, in the chair — rise. The warmth will return on His schedule. Your part is the daily quiet rising. His part is the burning itself.
What developing a heart for God will actually feel like over a year
The cooling will not vanish in a week. By the third month of the daily small showing-up, the wanting to want will have surfaced as a more honest prayer than you used to allow yourself to pray. By the sixth month, the chest under your hand will have softened by a small degree. By the ninth month, the words of a worship line will have moved something in you again — not loudly, not dramatically, but unmistakably. By the end of the year, the still-pursuing will have become part of the rhythm of your week, and the burning, in its quieter older-believer form, will have begun to warm the embers back toward a fire.
The fire of the older believer is not the same as the fire of the new convert. Tozer knew this. The older fire is quieter, steadier, less prone to flare. It does not produce the same tears. It produces, instead, a long, slow, weight-bearing love that holds across decades and that does not depend on Sunday emotion to confirm itself. That is the heart for God you are developing. Not a return to what you had at twenty. A new and more durable burning that the cooling itself, in a way, was the soil for.
(For the wider context this sits inside, how to develop a quiet time with God walks the foundational daily practice in Brother Lawrence’s gentler grammar. And how to pray morning and evening carries the two-bookends-of-the-day shape into a practical pair of rhythms.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the hand on the chest, in the chair, while the new work of love begins.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Tozer’s slow vocabulary — the children of the burning heart, I want to want Thee, the misty lowland — into a daily companion built for the woman whose heart, after long years, is ready to be slowly re-kindled.
