January 10, 2010

Can We Be Confident?

 

“And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13).

We have God’s assurance that we will find God, but only if we seek God with all our hearts. There is no guarantee given that the indifferent or the double‑minded will find God. We must do more than dabble in religion, and God must be more than simply one of the “interesting” things on our agenda. We must pursue God with a purity of heart and a passion that will not be denied. What God seeks is to be the Lord over all our thoughts, and if we seek anything less than that, then it is not God whom we seek. But even so, we need to be strengthened by the confidence that when we seek God truly, we will in fact find God.

There is a text in Isaiah where God says that God desires to be found by those who seek God: “For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens, who is God, who formed the earth and made it, who has established it, who did not create it in vain, who formed it to be inhabited: ‘I am the Lord, and there is no other. I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth; I did not say to the seed of Jacob, “Seek Me in vain”; I, the Lord, speak righteousness, I declare things that are right’” (Isaiah 45:18,19). Just as God did not create the earth and then leave it uninhabited, God did not command God’s people to seek God and then hide God’s self from them!

When Paul was given an opportunity to speak in Athens, he said that God designed the world so that people would be moved to seek God: “in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27). We may “grope” for God, as it were, but in truth “He is not far from each one of us.”

Our seeking for God need not be unsuccessful.

The lackadaisical may complain that they sought God but never found God. Yet no one has ever been disappointed who sought God wholeheartedly and with an honest desire to obey God once God was found. “You will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart,” said God through Jeremiah. This means that it is a matter of choice on our part whether we find God or not. And the choice that we must make is to seek God diligently. If we're diligent, then we can also be confident.

 

“They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright” (Robert Burns).