Seek God Obediently

We are regularly urged to seek God in and through the Bible. The problem is that we have turned this "seeking" into a type of passivity that passes for reasonableness and calm. I believe in reasonableness and calm but I do not believe in seeking God in any other way than obediently. John R. W. Stott says it so well: "This is the hardest condition of all to fulfill. In seeking God we have to be prepared not only to revise our ideas but to reform our lives."

Evangelicals seem to have forgotten that the Christian gospel has a moral challenge inherent in it. Since we stress grace alone we forget that grace, if it is real grace, is never alone. If the gospel is true then those who believe it, really and truly believe it, must act upon it. The moral challenges that one finds in following Jesus are not optional, or add-on extras, for those who want to get rewards in heaven.

Stott is again provocative and helpful when he says: "So God is not a fit object for man's detached scrutiny." You cannot seek God and say, "How interesting!" No, you have to seek God in order to hear him and obey him. I think this sums up the major problem in the American church. We want to discuss God, seek God's help in crisis, etc. We would be better to seek Santa Claus.

P. Carnegie Simpson has concluded:

We had thought intellectually to examine him: we find that he is spiritually examining us. The roles are reversed between us . . . We study Aristotle and are intellectually edified thereby; we study Jesus and are, in the profoundest way, spiritually disturbed. . . . We are constrained to take some inward moral attitude of heart and will in relation to this Jesus. . . . A man may study Jesus with intellectual impartiality, he cannot do it with moral neutrality. . . . We must declare our colors. To this has our unevasive contact with Jesus brought us. We began it in the calm of the study; we are called out to the field of moral decision (The Fact of Christ, 1930).