Hebrews 11: 6

Johnny Douglas

Above all I am convinced of the inescapable need of every human heart, for God. No matter how we try to escape, to lose ourselves in restless seeking, wandering elsewhere, surfing always & avoiding the gaze of God we cannot separate ourselves from our divine source. There is no substitute for God.
Hebrews 11: 6 reckons that 'without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.'

God rewards those who diligently seek Him. In order to come to God, we must believe this great truth. Confidently acting in faith and passionately pursuing Him, we will find the God who we were created to enjoy. God promises that He will, can & wants to be known by you & everyone else!!

He has promised that we will not only find Him, but find in Him all that our hearts truly desire. In times that are tough no less than in times of real good, we must always seek God. We must seek Him with diligence and determination, as well as love, trusting that at the end of our search He Himself, and He alone, will be our reward. The God shaped hole that U2's Bono talks about gets more than sorted - it gets satisfied with the heaps of extravagance that only God can give,.... It's getting to grips with the exceedingly, yes the massively more than we could ask or imagine,....! And yet so often we barely wet our feet in the shallow end!

Two things are needed. We must see that our deepest need is for God, and we must then seek the fulfilment of that need in God only. The first of these is perhaps the hardest to do. On the surface, we seem to desire so many more visible and more immediate things that it's hard to understand how deeply we need God. But deeper than all our other wants is this ultimate desire: our longing for God. We long for Him because we were created for Him, and when we honestly and humbly recognize the importance of this need, we are then ready to seek God. We must devote ourselves wholeheartedly to finding Him, our most energetic hope being to come into His presence and enjoy His fellowship.

The Message puts it this way,..''It's impossible to please God apart from faith. And why? Because anyone who wants to approach God must believe both that he exists and that he cares enough to respond to those who seek him..'
Our God is so accessible, so interactive and so longing to engage with you,... so lets get hungry, real & pursuing Him with everything that's within us,.

We tend not to seek God when our lives are as easy as they can sometimes be. If our needs & wants are met, we imagine that we can take care of ourselves and we dismiss or forget about God. For this reason, God lets us suffer some deprivation. The needs that go unmet may differ from person to person, but each of us will have our hearts broken in some ways. We will be taught to do without some of the things we deeply need, in order to learn that what we were created to enjoy is not meant to be fully available in this world.. We're wired for eternity but for now we're stranded in time. Only God can perfectly satisfy our hunger and our thirst, and He is always leading us in the direction of satisfaction in Him. He is teaching us, if we have the hearts to learn, that He is the only thing we can't do without. What a gift, what a blessing,.... Our God longs to give more than we can ever fully receive,....!!?

Hear Frank Laubach's words in the opening page of his 1937 journal: "God, I want to give you every minute of this year. I shall try to keep You in mind every moment of my waking hours. I shall try to let You be the speaker and direct every word. I shall try to let You direct my acts. I shall try to learn your language."
· Why not make 2004 the year you know God most?!!
· Maximise each day with growth in your walk with God,. going further & higher!!?
· Spoil yourself daily with the reward of fresh encounters with Jesus?!