We need to “buy up” every day that is left on the shelf. The entire length of a long human lifetime is too little to give to One who has loved us as our God has. But if the days left are all we can give, by His grace He will accept this as our all.
Eventually, we will discover the truth (on the judgment day, if not before) — but in the short term, the devil can make black look white and white, black. He can lead us to believe that a broken cistern is better than the fountain of living water.
We need to see knowing God as the reason for things like prayer and the study of the Scriptures. Even the deeds by which we render service to God and to our neighbors should be seen as bodily activities through which we come to know God more deeply.
If we seek God, what we are really seeking is to know enough of His greatness to respond to it with honor. By our sin, we have dishonored God terribly. What we should be seeking now is to regain the ability to honor Him properly.
If we verbalize the fact of God’s love but don’t really believe it, or if we fail to follow through and respond as we should to God’s love, then our devotion to God will falter. The only thing that can keep us going is gratitude for grace.
God is truly worshiped when someone actually gives full attention to God with feelings of awe, love, devotion, respect, and wonder. Such a moment is genuine worship. It is idolatrous to think and feel this way about anything other than God.
“You will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart,” God said through Jeremiah. This means it is a matter of choice on our part whether we find God or not. And the choice we must make is to seek Him diligently.
If we fail to keep ourselves open to God’s message and to listen with a real intent to obey, we will lose the ability to recognize the truth even when it is clearly and convincingly presented to us. “Therefore,” said Jesus, “take heed how you hear.”
If we’re not willing to be warned, we risk losing the very things that could contribute to true peace and comfort. So the willingness to be “disturbed” is one of the main differences between those who make spiritual progress and those who do not.
Our Creator has given us our lives, but He has also given us the gift of language and spoken to us! We don’t have to have a technical understanding of biblical inspiration in order to be awed by the concept of having such documents in our possession.
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