From an Earlier Post: In Pursuit of God

In Pursuit of God.

God really cannot be pursued in the sense of catching someone.  He has already caught me.  Nevertheless, the primary occupation I have is to make room for that pursuit… to desire… to want Him so much that I am willing to allow Him to break down the barriers in me that keep me from experience Him, in His glory, more deeply.  He is the Great Experience.  He is the Life.  He is the Beginning and the End.  Life itself, in fullness, begins with HIM.  In the beginning GOD.  My eyes must always wander away from myself and onto HIM if I am to experience anything beyond the confines of empty self.  Self is always empty unless it begins with the Giver of Life.

So I pursue God.  This means I make room for Him first.  I turn toward Him.  I turn away from the attachments and pursuits that come most readily to heart and mind: the pursuit of providing for the day, the pursuit of serving others that wait for my service in the day, the pursuit of some comforts that will make the day easier, the pursuit of my purpose, however God-inspired, that offers me the sense of significance that I both need and crave (often too much).

So, the pursuit of God becomes primary because He is life itself. Then comes the pursuit of containing God in my soul-- a soul that has mostly learned how to dissipate itself and the presence of God as readily as water falling through my clasped fingers.

The soul is mostly trained by sin.  Sin is the blindness that keeps me from seeing what already is: that I am united to God in an organic and abiding way.  This is why He does not need to be pursued.  God and His kingdom are already fully and completely within me.  All of His glory, His beauty, His love, His presence dwell deeply and completely within me.  Yet sin blinds me to this reality.  Thus it separates me from it.  Sin, at the most interior level, misses the mark and causes me to experience myself quite apart from the Divine that I have been fully united to through Christ.  Christ is in me.  The Spirit of God dwells in me.  The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ fills me. Yet sin blinds me to this causing me to experience life as a spiritual pauper, without any sense of my reality in God.  Thus the spiritual prince lives the live of the poorest beggar.  This is the first action of sin--blinding my interior eyes to the reality of Christ in me thus, in effect, separating me from Him in experience though He has united Himself fully to me in reality.

So, the pursuit of God becomes the breaking down of the barriers created by sin: the attachments to the things of this world (as substitutes for the God within who is missing), the guilts, the self-incriminations, the inner lies, the false humilities, the well-trained "little faith" mindsets, the lethargy toward His word because of the misguided spiritual practices that have made it a duty rather than a life-releaser…

Nevertheless, I am unable to break down the barriers of sin and pursue God.  It's all a grace that He must give.  I can do little more than want Him… to move my heart toward Him in the slightest way so that the wind of His reality catches the small sail that I may have which then moves me deeper into that wind.

As soon as I think I have made this pursuit a priority, I find myself swept along by the "many" things of Martha that not only sweep up my day but my weeks, months, and even years to come.  Suddenly I realize that my pursuit of God is no longer at the very center of my life, nor has it been for sometime.  Nor do I feel capable of putting it back into its proper place.  In His mysterious way, only God seems to be able to cause me to come to another "end of myself" experience where I once again renew my primary pursuit as primary… at least for a season.

Hopefully, by His grace, in each of these cycles I learn just a little more of what it means to sustain that pursuit and to sustain my soul-- a process that seems to require that I develop both boundaries and faith in order to walk out the priorities that I say that I have-- to remain committed to the cultivation of a life with God as the only life worth living-- to remain committed to that vocation no matter what other circumstances in life assail me.