Pursuing

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Recently I have had the necessity to travel back and forth frequently between a business project in another state, a 5.5 hour drive. When I make these trips I am usually alone. The pattern for these trips is an early morning departure as well as listening to Christian music the first half of the trip and then I switch to some oldies and sing along with them trying to match my voice to the singers. That second portion of musical listening is very amusing to me and it would be to you too if you heard me sing. Anyway, that’s the method - but the method is not what I am writing about. 

In the first session of my drive listening to Christian music, I have run across a few songs that I skip because I start to wonder about the truth of what is being sung, about the doctrinal truth of what was written in the lyrics or chorus. I decided some months back I was going to write something about this topic, and here it is. And I would like to preface this topic by a disclosure - I am not a curmudgeon, I really am not. I understand that God reaches who He wants to reach and He doesn’t need me to arrange the furniture for Him. I do know that. I am not trying to be like some Christians I have heard, totally discounting Alcoholics Anonymous because the “higher power” aspect of it turns them completely against AA…as if God can’t lead a truly searching heart of an individual from an impersonal higher power focus to the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ. He can and He does. So I am not throwing the baby out with the bathwater regarding the culture of modern Christianity, but I do have a concern, that we are distorting the reality on the internet and in churches of what it means to follow Jesus Christ as the Lord of our lives. As consumers of these songs and internet images and soundbites, are we going mindlessly along with it?

There is an extremely popular song right now called The Goodness of God. It’s a Bethel Music song released in 2019. The melody is beautiful. The song begins by exclaiming a love for God and declaring many of God’s attributes. I can agree with the words to most of that song yet at the end, as it repeats over and over that God is running after us, I began to wonder - does He? Isn’t it true that when we are the thing being pursued then the effort expended is on the pursuer?  And so I thought I would pursue some scripture to support whatever side I came up on in this effort to gain clarity regarding whether God is really running after us. I was just singing along with it one day and at the end while I sang “it’s running after me” over and over again I stopped and thought, “Is it?” “Is He?”

When I think of someone running after something or someone I immediately think of caring for a toddler. Then I think of someone who is after another with more interest in the relationship than who is being pursued and I have a problem with both concepts in regards to God. Don’t you think it makes the pursuer needy of something? In the case of the toddler, the caregiver is of the understanding that the toddler will hurt themselves as the ability to care for themselves has not developed. In the case of the person interested in the other for a deeper relationship, it puts the pursued in the category of the uninterested, but is that really the dynamic between us as human beings and the creator of …everything. When we give our lives to Christ, do we remain a toddler? An indifferent adolescent? 

“The next day again John was standing with two of his disciples, and he looked at Jesus as he walked by and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!”. The two disciples heard him say this and they followed Jesus. Jesus turned and saw them following and said to them, “What are you seeking?”   John 1:35-38a

In Proverbs 8:11 it reads, “I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently find me.” If diligent seeking is needed to find wisdom, how much more is it needed to find God?

In Jeremiah 29, God is speaking to His people and telling them what His plans are for them when they are coming out of captivity IF they seek Him. (Jeremiah 29:10-14)

In Matthew 6, Jesus is speaking about not being anxious about the issues of life (Matthew 6:25-34) but He ends this exhortation telling His followers to seek first the kingdom of God.

I know this song is meant to convey that God always is. He is the great I AM. And when we turn to Him we can rely on the fact that He is there. Jesus did come to seek the lost (Luke 19:10) But I am resistant to, with open arms, welcome the portrayal of what it means to be a Christian and/or who God supposedly is that is portrayed by popular Western culture. Justin Bieber claims to be a Christian but his mannerisms are identical to a gangster culture. Kanye West used his massive wealth to produce church services some years back but endorsed his wives showing their bodies flagrantly over the internet. Jelly Roll and his wife have very spicy vocabularies but because he sings a song about redemption it’s all ok - but it’s not. Yet just a few days ago more than 40 Christians were murdered praying in a church in the western part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and it’s in the news, but it’s not eclipsing the popular culture news. 

Back in September of 2022 I got very fed up with myself. I was fed up with my responses to things that were less than ideal. I began to make time in the mornings with God as a routine. That is closing in on two years ago now and I have kept that routine. My time in the morning consists of bible study, prayer, and journaling. I am starting to see the results of the effort in ways that are hard to explain to others and I don’t really need to explain except to say this, that what we give our attention to fills us up. It is what influences our perspective. Accepting these Christian influencers blindly just because they speak out commonly accepted Christian culture buzz words is a dangerous business. As we climb towards the conclusion of time, beware.

Jeremiah the prophet prophesied concerning the Babylonian captivity and he prophesied it would be a 70 year captivity. He told the people to accept it and dwell in the land, essentially telling them that life would go on, not exactly as they had hoped, but to cooperate and they would live. In Jeremiah 27 the LORD is also telling the people, through Jeremiah, to not listen to the prophets, diviners, dreamers, fortune-tellers and sorcerers who were telling the people they would not serve the king of Babylon.

During the history of the world, and the history of the church, the circumstances of government and culture change, yet God’s will and purpose remain steadfast. That purpose as declared in Revelation is a new heaven and a new earth. At the conclusion of time. the Bride, the Church, meets her bridegroom, Jesus. My prayer is that we all, like Jeremiah, hear the voice of the LORD, and not the voice of another.