God Loves… Himself

“To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too easily satisfied religionists, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.” –A. W. Tozer

There has been a great push for evangelism for many years within Christendom. Evangelism is necessary and good, but the push has watered down the message of the Gospel and then has left souls thinking that evangelism is all that there is. We push and push to get people to be saved, and then we go on to get them involved in evangelistic efforts. So evangelism becomes what drives the church. However, this has assisted in developing a false Gospel and watering doctrine down. It has also developed a type of Christianity that focuses on one event rather than pursuing the knowledge of God. People have replaced knowing God with some form of evangelism. Rather than seeing evangelism as loving God and then pursuing God even more, evangelism is seen as virtually the whole of obedience.

The Church must be teaching people what it means to find God and still pursue Him. We have got to return to the doctrines and practices of the Psalms. We must pursue God as a deer in the desert longs for the water brooks (Psa 42). We have to learn Psalm 63 as the normal practice of the soul. The more of God that we have should push us to earnestly desire Him even more. We have to seek God earnestly while our souls thirst for Him and our flesh yearns for Him (v. 1). We must learn experientially to see His power and glory and to realize and taste that His lovingkindness is better than life (v. 3). We have to pursue God so that our souls are satisfied as with the richest of foods. (v. 5). God must become our fountain of life (Psa 36:9) and the river of our delights (Psa 36:8). We are not teaching people the truth of God until we do. We have to teach people that salvation is the beginning of walking with God and that they have a lot of growing and maturing to do.

The Church must return to the theology and practice of Paul. We can recall the conversion of Paul in Acts 9 when he saw the bright light and fell to the ground. We might think that Paul was modern because after three days he then set out and began a life that consisted of taking the Gospel to all the known world. However, we must remember what drove Paul. Indeed he went on mission trips and proclaimed the Gospel to people that had never heard it. But he also took trips to strengthen and encourage the churches. Let us look at Paul’s heart and what drove him in the following text:

“But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ.8 More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ; 9 and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, 10 that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; 11 in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.12 Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. (Phillipians 3:7-12).

Here is a man that had a heart for God. He wanted to know God through Christ and he was ready to suffer for that. He knew that all things were nothing but a loss compared with “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Do we really believe that he was willing to count all things a loss compared to knowing about Christ? No, we must remember John 17:3 where John said that eternal life is to know God and Jesus Christ. Eternal life is not a static something in the soul that only comes to life when the soul dies. Eternal life is the person of Christ dwelling in the soul. “And we know that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding so that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life” (I John 5:20). Knowing God and Jesus Christ is eternal life. If a person has the waters of life in his of her soul, then that person is thirsty for more of the water of life. Having Christ, who is eternal life, leads a person and drives a person to know Him more and more. Those with life burn for more. Those who have been evangelized apart from true life become religious and evangelize to prove that they have life. We must return to a true message of Christ as eternal life for believer and unbeliever alike. May all of our souls burn with desire to know Him more.

This entry was posted on November 6, 2006 at 9:00 am and is filed under God-Centeredness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.