“My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me.” – Ps. 63:8
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.
Moses used the fact that he knew God as an argument for knowing Him better. “Now, therefore, I pray thee, if I have found grace in thy sight, show me now thy way, that I may know thee, that I may find grace in thy sight”; and from there he rose to make the daring request, “I beseech thee, show me thy glory.”
God was frankly pleased by this display of ardour, and the next day called Moses into the mount, and there in solemn procession made all His glory pass before him.
David’s life was a torrent of spiritual desire, and his psalms ring with the cry of the seeker and the glad shout of the finder.
Paul confessed the mainspring of his life to be his burning desire after Christ. “That I may know Him,” was the goal of his heart, and to this he sacrificed everything.
“Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but refuse, that I may win Christ.”
How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers.
Everything is made to centre upon the initial act of “accepting” Christ (a term, incidentally, which is not found in the Bible), 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.
Thus the whole testimony of the worshiping, seeking, singing Church on that subject is crisply set aside.
In the midst of this great chill, there are some I rejoice to acknowledge, who will not be content with shallow logic. They will admit the force of the argument, and then turn away with tears to hunt some lonely place and pray, “O God, show me thy glory.”
They want to taste, to touch with their hearts, to see with their inner eyes the wonder that is God.
I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate.
The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth.
Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted.
Every age has its own characteristics. Right now we are in an age of religious complexity.
The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart.
The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all.
If we would find God amid all the religious externals we must first determine to find Him, and then proceed in the way of simplicity.
Now, as always, God reveals Himself to “babes” and hides Himself in thick darkness from the wise and the prudent.
We must simplify our approach to Him. We must strip down to essentials (and they will be found to be blessedly few). We must put away all effort to impress, and come with the guileless candor of childhood.
If we do this, without doubt God will quickly respond.
AW TOZER
KOINONIA ART 