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There is only one thing I fear besides God and that is, the fear of becoming complacent. I have a deep hunger to know God more and more and I have prayed constantly for God to fill me with more of Himself and less of me.
This quest has led me to research the men and women in the bible who had a similar quest and were looking for more of God until He found them.
My heroes are people like Moses, David, Enoch and Elijah. I had a desire to be described as a friend of God just like they were.
Not for one minute did I want to think that I had arrived or that I was good enough as I was, instead I was not going to stop until:
* My face glowed with His presence like Moses did. He got to see God, talk with Him and walk humbly with Him
* Enoch who walked in the cool of the day with God and then just walked off one day and did not return
* Abraham who faithfully followed and in response got to share God’s heart for the people of the world
So I asked myself this question, what does it mean to pursue God?
To pursue God means to blindly trust Him, have complete faith in Him and to be in total obedience to Him.
How did I reach this conclusion? I looked at the lives of people who were God chasers in the bible and looked at the characteristics they displayed. Then I started looking at their lives and asking how did they come to this place of trust and faith and obedience and this is what I found.
Step 1
John 6: 22-40
Understand why we follow Jesus. Is it because we are looking for eternal life or because He has done a miracle for us or supplied a need. Did He solve a problem we were having? Have we heard about what He can do?
Do we truly believe that He is the Son of God, the way to eternal life? If so, have we met the primary condition of asking Him to forgive your sins? David, after messing up
with Bathsheba, prays this pray of forgiveness in Psalm 51. What stands out for me most in David’s approach is that he makes no excuses for his behaviour, he does not blame his circumstance, does not say but she was tempting me. He takes responsibility for his part in the sinful act and recognises that he has sinned against God not man.
Step 2
Wrestling with God. Genesis 32: 22-32 Jacob had spent all his life doing things his way. He knew that there had been a prophecy that he would be greater than his older twin, but rather than wait on God’s timing he did many things in his own strength to make this happened, even steal his brothers birth-right. So here he was coming full circle from a life of trying it his way to the point where he was face to face with an angel of the Lord. The angel allows him to struggle and eventually cripples his hip to get his attention. From that day on when his name was changed to Israel Jacob lived a different life. Israel could not forget the encounter he had with god because he had a permanent limp to remind him.
We are much the same. We want to do things our way. We must wrestle with God’s way until we realise that we cannot do this in our own strength but need to rely on Him. We need to beseech God constantly until He makes us into the people He created and purposed us to be. Sometimes, God has to take us to a place of crushing and brokenness before we will change our behaviour and like Jacob we are left with the scars to remember when we wrestled with God
Step 3
Daniel 9:19
Daniel had been studying God’s word and recognised that the word and God’s character or standard is very different from that of the world, of our nation. He was overwhelmed by that difference and went to God in prayer. Daniel’s heart was brought in line with God’s when he studied the word. He became filled with compassion and remorse for his people and did not see himself as better than them but mourned as part of them When we are filled with compassion for the state of our world, country and church, we cannot help but go to our knees in desperation as Daniel did with urgency.
We should be studying the word for transformation and not for information. Study in a way that challenges us and opens our eyes to God’s requirements for the church and society. When we read the word, we can use many models to help us understand what is transforming in a particular scripture. This model is called SPECS:
SIN- Is there any sin highlighted in the scripture that is present in my life?
PROMISE- Is there a promise from God in this scripture?
EXAMPLE- What is example is being set around God’s standard in this word?
COMMAND- Is there a command I should be obeying in the word?
SHARE- Is this word something I can share with others?
Step 4
As we learn more about God’s character we become more of a worshipper. We start to worship God not just on a Sunday morning while singing songs but in every sphere of our lives, wanting to offer up more of ourselves to Him, wanting to know Him more, wanting to invite Him into our work place, our homes etc…We become seekers of His presence. We worship Him in our speech, in our thoughts, in what we watch or read.
Step 5
This brings about a need and desperate desire to take God at His word, to pursue Him until he turns around and catches us, to experience Him in all things. We become desperate to see the miracles Jesus performed because we know without a doubt that the same God who raised Lazarus from the dead can do it again, today. We hunger to see the blind eyes opened and the lame walk.
These steps that we take will bring us to a place of what John White is in his book, “Daring to draw nearer” calls spiritual surgery. Spiritual surgery is the act of God cleaning out, cutting out those things in our lives that are not pleasing to Him. It means that it does not end there but we go through this constant cycle of steps 1-5, we find things that can be changed in us, we grow and see God remove those things that are not pleasing and we become more and more like the person He created us to be. Each trial we face, each obstacle acts as surgery to bring us closer to the person God wants us to be. We get to learn things about ourselves and make alternate choices, we grow our faith in God.
Hebrew 11:6 and James 4:8 says it well.
So what does it look like when we grow closer to God?
* We start to see things from God’s point of view and not a human point of view (Mark 8:33)
* We give up our selfish ambitions, take up our cross and follow Jesus (Mark 8:34)
* We give the life and plan we had for ourselves away in place for God’s life and plan (Mark 8:35)
* We understand the importance of our souls and the souls of others (Mark 8: 37)