September 18

“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all of your heart.”  —JEREMIAH 29:13

The deepest need of the human heart is to connect with God; to personally come to know Him and Jesus Christ who He sent into this world to save us. We can know things about God in creation, but that won’t save us. We can know about Him through family, friends and church, but that won’t save us. We can know our Bibles from front to back, but that won’t save us either. 

What saves us is humbling ourselves and acknowledging there is something wrong with us; something we can’t fix, but Jesus can. We realize our needs expose something much deeper, and we’ve actually been coping on a superficial level, dealing with only the symptoms instead of getting to the hard core issue of our very real need to believe in Jesus Christ. 

No one stumbles onto Jesus casually. It needs to be with right motives, genuinely recognizing our need, and coming to Jesus ourselves. No one can do that for us. In seeking Him, we are already connecting with God in that it is His Spirit who draws us to Him. 

At first, our faith may be like a mustard seed; it’s small, uncertain, awkward, and with probably as much doubt as there is belief. Still, it searches and pursues, but sometimes we can get faith and fault a little mixed up. We have faith enough to seek Jesus, and fault enough to prescribe how He should work, so we begin to expect certain things. If we dictate how Christ should work in our lives we’re sure to be disappointed. Jesus is original every time; no routines and never predictable. 

In Luke 19:10, Jesus said, “I have come to seek and to save that which was lost.”  If we are seeking Him, we can be sure He is seeking us, and it won’t take long to connect. That little mustard seed will start to grow and flourish as we enter into a committed personal relationship with Him. He came into the world, not only to save us, but so that we may be indwelt by His Spirit, and have life to the full by believing in Him.

Oswald Chambers wrote, “The last aching abyss of the human heart is filled to overflowing with the love of God. After He comes in and you trust Him, all you see is Jesus, Jesus only, Jesus ever. When you know what God has done for you, the power and the tyranny of sin is gone and the radiant, unspeakable emancipation of the indwelling Christ has come.”

PRAYER: Dear Heavenly Father, thank You for sending your Son who has not only saved me, but by His indwelling Spirit, has given me a way to personally experience You. 

TO REFLECT UPON: Am I growing in my relationship with Jesus and getting to know Him better?