Monday, March 6, 2017

Getting to Know God



So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord.
His going forth is as certain as the dawn;
And He will come to us like the rain,
Like the spring rain watering the earth.
Hosea 6:3 NASB

There will be times in your spiritual life when you feel far from God. A once intimate and vibrant relationship may give way to a distant and dry relationship with the Lord in which you hardly know Him, or at least it feels that way. This relational drift may have been years in the making without you even realizing when or how it happened. Or it could be more sudden and tied up with particular failures in your life. Either way, the distance you may feel as a Christian is not because God is angry with you, Jesus has already absorbed that on your behalf. And it's not because God is unwilling to draw near to you, rather the opposite is true. God is willing to draw near to us and embrace us. As a father to a prodigal son, and as a shepherd to a wandering sheep, God will pursue us and meet us in our weakness just as surely as the sun will rise at dawn and the rain will come in spring. 

It is because of God's gracious character and reliable nature that we are encouraged to seek God and know Him, no matter how distant we may feel from Him. And yes we are called to pursue God with all our heart, but it is He who first pursued us and welcomed us into His arms. This is why Jesus came, lived and died: to bring us to God. 

Today you are probably not as close to God as you'd like to be. You may have drifted a little or a lot, but His call to you is the same: keep pursuing, don't lose heart, for He will come.