It is a sore trial to the soul, which knows anything of itself, to come close up to God; He is light and
truth, all love and purity, the soul dark, selfish, and polluted with sin. (Thomas Adam, Private Thoughts
on Religion)“The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)
It is entering deeply into the experience of the soul to write words like Adam wrote above. Oh how the deceitful heart wants to think that it wants God when in fact it is fleeing from Him. How hard it is for the soul to come to a deep awareness of how much it wants to flee from God and not see how selfish and wicked it really is. The soul may complain to God about how cold it is and how far God seems to be from it, but the real issue may be that the soul does not want to be close to God because it will have to give up all to have Him. The closer one gets to God the closer one is to the light and the closer one is to the light the more the dark, selfish, polluted soul is seen.
Even after the soul is regenerated the soul still has far too much pride and self-love or it to simply die to self with ease day after day. The soul is in a battle with itself, sin, and the devil. The regenerate soul loves God, but it still has that horrid self-love that it hates and yet is so easy to obey and follow. While God is pure and holy Truth, the soul is still uncomfortable the closer it gets to the light. While God is perfect love, the soul is not and in the light of the perfect and holy love of God the soul sees how little love it has and how deformed it is with such a great amount of non-love.
The holiness of God is His beauty and He shines forth in a blazing holiness, but the soul which is so polluted with sin does not always see the beauty of God’s holiness and shrinks from it. This is something like the children of Israel at Mount Sinai. The sight was fearful to them and they shrank back. The soul that has some taste like that in it knows the tearing sense in it as it wants to be closer to God and yet it shrinks back at the same time. The soul knows that the true theory is that the souls should long for God and seek for God with all of its heart and mind, but the sinfulness of the soul is a reality as well and it keeps the soul from seeking God as it should. The Lord brings to the mind of the soul that the pure in heart will see God, but this can also cause the seeking soul some anguish. How, it wonders, can I who am so polluted and vile ever have a pure heart? But the Lord in His great kindness teaches the soul in the inner man that it does not have to have a perfect heart in its own strength, but it must have more of Christ and its seeking Him must become more and more pure.
The Lord uses the soul’s sight of self as a way of showing the soul its sin and then through the anguish of that soul granting it a deeper repentance and a deeper love. This is something that can be thought of as cyclical in the sense that God shines light into the soul, the soul sees its darkness and vileness, and then the soul despises itself and cries out for grace to deliver it from itself. This is the time when the soul is seeking the Lord with some intensity and that is when it is seeking the Lord to be delivered from self. It is the soul seeking the holiness and love of God and finding that far more worthy, delightful, and beautiful than the hideous sin of self. Yet the soul is not perfect in its practice and so the Lord begins the cycle again.
Thus it can be seen that we are to seek the Lord with all of our being and those who love the Lord will seek Him, but at the same time the souls that seek the Lord will flee from His presence at times when they are overwhelmed by the light He is pleased to shine into their souls. Sensitive souls will even wonder if they are converted at times like that when they see so much darkness and vileness in their own hearts, but the Lord in His persevering grace will work in them so that they are granted repentance and will begin to seek Him again.
God Loves... Himself 
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