When the grandson of a Rabbi walked dejectedly into their home, and burst into tears in his room, his grandfather was adamant – he wanted to know why.
My friend cheated, grandpa and it’s not fair for a friend to cheat, the boy blurted out!
But what did your friend do, the Rabbi wanted to know.
We were playing hide-and-seek, but I hid so well that he could not find me. He stopped playing, he did not look for me anymore. Do you understand, grandpa? I hid and he did not look for me. It’s not fair!” the boy explained, trying in vain to stop crying.
The Rabbi folded his grandson into his arms and began to caress the boy’s head while murmuring:
God too, my son – God too! God hides and human beings do not seek Him. Do you understand? God hides and humans do not even bother to look for Him!”[1]
When I read this anecdote the first time, I was profoundly stirred and while I understood it in my spirit, I lacked words to describe it – even to myself. How to explain that an omnipresent God, sustaining and governing all of his creation, at the same time hides from us? How to explain that His promise that He is with us always, even until the end of the age is ever true and tested – for this hiding of God is something else.
This call to seek Him is a stirring to leave the misty flats behind, an invitation to climb beyond the average and mundane Christianese we use and even abuse at times. In The Pursuit of God, Tozer writes; Christ may be ‘received’ without creating any special love for Him in the soul of the receiver. The man is ‘saved’, but he is not hungry nor thirsty after God. In fact, he is specifically taught to be satisfied and is encouraged to be content with little.”[2] Yet, when we become born again, it is but the start of an epic adventure; day one of the most intimate and rewarding of relationships possible to man.
Thus, this Holy Spirit prompting to seek God is the conscious, intentional, and purposeful pursuit of God as a Person. It is a hunger to draw so close that we can see His face as the Hebrew is translated or enter into His presence as the Greek meaning leans towards. It is to have the light of God’s countenance, to hear his still small voice, and experience his lingering loving-kindness upon us.
This searching for God is a principle with a promise, often repeated in the word, that those who go hard after God will be found by Him.[3] This is not a general seeking, but one that involves the heart and mind. It is not something mystical and metaphorical, but an intensely practical affair for we all have obstacles to beat and challenges to overcome if we want to succeed this year.
HERE ARE SOME ACTION STEPS TO SEEKING GOD
First of all, we need to Abandon a few things: self, pride, passivity, and all spiritually dulling activities, for only
then we will have space to Embrace what is really important: The Creator and his words, the creation, and fellow creatures.
So, what are the BENEFITS TO SEEKING GOD, you may wonder…
Naturally, there are many more benefits than these listed and while I am all for encouraging believers, I do realize that God has given humans free choice. We always have the option to stick to what is familiar or what culture dictates. In other words, we can continue to run hard, remain scattered and distracted, embrace clutter, refrain from evaluating our lives, fail to laugh at ourselves, refuse change, and therefore carry on thinking of God as invisible and far away.[8]
It is in times like these that I am reminded of Daniel, a young man trapped in Babylon and pressurized to conform to the ways of a worldly court. Unimpressed by its temporal lure and determined not to lose his identity or integrity, he resolved not to touch any of it! Resolute not to defile himself, his love and zeal for God emboldened him and his three friends and thus he found grace and favour in the most unlikely of persons – the commander of the Babylonian officials in the court of the King of Babylon!
I realize more and more that unless we too are resolute to step away from all that seeks to hold us captive and complicate our lives, we will struggle to follow hard after God — upwards to the high and holy place, where He resides. Yet Isaiah does not neglect to remind us in the same breath, but also with the contrite and lowly of spirit in order to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.[9] Yes, in God’s upside-down kingdom, the way up, is down. Unless we understand this profound yet simple mystery, we will struggle to seek Him. Just like the young boy’s friend in our opening story, we too will soon stop looking for God!
It is my prayer that we will take time here at the beginning of the year to test and evaluate our spiritual condition, as Paul encourages the Corinthians to do. Only then will we be able to discern what God is calling us to be and to do in the new year.
[1] https://www.family-times.net/illustration
[2] A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, pg. 16
[3] Jeremiah 29:13
[4] Psalm 69:32, 1 Chronicles 16: 10,11
[5] 1 Chronicles 16: 10,11
[6] Proverbs 2: 3 – 6
[7] Lamentations 3: 25
[8] Paula D’Arcy, Sacred Threshold: Crossing the Inner Barrier to a Deeper Love
[9] Isaiah 57:15b
