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Pastor · Sunday Schedule · FBC
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2001
From the Pastor
A DESIRE FOR GOD
What does it mean to seek God for God's own sake?
Just God alone and nothing else.
Beyond what God can give us or do for us is there the desire in us just for God and God alone?
I wonder how far buried down within us might be this pure desire and if we found it what would we do with it, how might we act upon it? Seeking God for God's own sake.
I sometimes have this image of God as being very lonely. Everybody wants to speak with God, but nobody simply wants to be with God.
If it wasn't for what we feel God could do for us would any of us truly seek after God? Is there any pure desire for God or is it all tainted by what we hope to get from God?
What might it mean to simply wait and be in the presence of God? Seeking nothing, asking nothing, simply being there with God. Emptying our thoughts and creating a space for God to dwell within us. Can we ever find that uncrowded room within our souls for God to visit?
God, I believe, wants to give of Godself to us, and everything else is less, even if it is miracles or healing. The greatest gift we can ever receive is God. The nature of God is relationship. God being God wants intimacy.
But God being God will not force it.
God waits.
God who is unlimited, waits, limits His unlimited-ness to be invited, to be received.
What might it be like to sit with God, to know in our hearts the desire for God and respond to that desire by sitting, by waiting, by listening, by offering the invitation for God to come nearer?
Could we stand it, knowing the love we'd find in those moments is the love that had always been there? Could we stand it knowing how much of our life we wasted turning away from it? Could we stand it seeing perhaps for the first time how truly blessed we have been all along?
It is a chance I hope all of us will take this summer, the chance of hearing in our own soul, the desire for God.
To me, just to desire is to know. Just to long for God is to begin to be present with God. It begins to become something like a heartbeat, leading us beat by beat, closer and closer. We seek the moments pause in busy days, reading scripture feels less unfamiliar and the need for worship to entertain because less important than simply our need to be there.
God for God's own sake. What a revolutionary idea, that we would seek to know God for God's own sake, because God is God and for no other reason. It is, however, an idea as old as the Bible. And God who would be known, and that we might know God's willingness, God's desire, God's passion to be known, comes to us in Jesus Christ.
God, help us to hear our desire
for you. Amen.
Dr. David W. Andersen
          
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