I have a desire, an inner yearning, to know Christ. This desire is an intense strong passionate desire to know Him and love Him with everything that I am and everything that I have. This desire has recently been intensified.
I think I can finally relate with David when he wrote in Psalm 42 “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.
It is easy to relax in our Christian life – to get lazy, complacent, even weary. Sometimes God allows things in your life to shake you up and get you back on track.
Hebrews 11:6 says “anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” We have the responsibility to do the seeking.
God has pursued me since the beginning of time. It is my turn to pursue Him and not halfway but completely and passionately.
Romans 5:8 “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Ephesians 1:4-6 “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will - to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.”
He is worth pursuing. He is the ultimate treasure. He is the “pearl of great price”. (Matthew 13:45-46) He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. I am pursuing Jesus because He is perfect and I am far from that standard. I’m like the young apprentice who is sitting at the feet of the master. Yearning to learn all I can from the One who knows it all. Not to pursue Christ in this way is to say I don’t trust His power, His strength, His wisdom, His strength.
He created me to pursue Him. It is in pursuing Jesus that I get to know Him. Knowing Christ is a value that surpasses everything else. I was created to love the Lord with my whole heart, mind, soul, and body. I was made to enjoy intimate fellowship with Him forever.
Psalm 27:4 “One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.”
Pursuing anything/anyone else is worthless.
Acts 4:12 “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”
Philippians 3:7-9 “But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.”
I thought I was doing fine. I was having my devotional and prayer time. I was teaching Sunday school and singing in the choir. I was intellectually learning some things about God and I was writing this blog. What God revealed to me was that I had a pride in my spiritual activities and I wasn’t truly hungering and thirsting for Him. I wasn’t passionate about knowing and loving Him better every day. Isaiah 64:6 talks about all of our righteous acts are like filthy rags. There is nothing we can do in our own strength that is pleasing to Him.
I encourage you, do a spiritual inventory of your life. Are you truly seeking and loving God with all your heart, mind, and soul? Do you wake up in the morning and the first thing you think about is talking to God? Does your mind stay on Him all day long? It is in that staying that you find peace and rest. Do you continually rejoice in the Lord? Do you give thanks in all things? Are you content in all circumstances? Do you really live like you trust God with everything?
(Side note – it doesn’t say to rejoice in everything. It says to rejoice in the Lord. Circumstances can stink and you can still be content and rejoice in the Lord – rejoice in His love, faithfulness, power, etc.)
Forget what is in your past and determine today to seek God. As imperfect as we are, it is God who is at work in us to will and to work according to His good pleasure. (Philippians 2:13)
As we are approaching the Easter season let me remind you that Jesus loved us so much that He willingly allowed himself to be crucified on the cross for our sin and then He rose again. Why would He do that … because He loves us that much. How else should we respond to that kind of love other than pursuing Him with everything we have?
A.W. Tozer said it this way in his book “The Pursuit of God”.
“How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers. Everything is made to center upon the initial act of 'accepting' Christ . . . and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls. We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him, we need no more seek Him.”
"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"
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