In this episode, we delve into the intrinsic human pursuit of contentment and how these often reflect earthly desires that fail to fulfill our spiritual needs. Through the lens of faith, we explore the innate drive implanted within born-again Christians to seek divine connection—a journey that goes beyond mere participation in religious rituals to truly knowing God. Along the way, we investigate the ultimate question of where our deepest interests lie and what competes with our zeal for God.
Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, January 19th. If you feel inconsistent in your walk with God, this message is for you. Discover how to realign your heart, renew your focus, and live with purpose in your pursuit of God.
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Now people today are pursuing many things. They’re pursuing pleasure. And you can look around and see how much money people are willing to spend in order to get a little temporal pleasure. They’re pursuing the gratification of their sexual desires. People are pursuing sports. There are people who are pursuing… All kinds of prominence and position and prosperity and you name it. It is amazing what men will give their time and their heart and their energy and the expression of their abilities and their talents. They will give everything within them in order to accomplish some things. The pursuit of their mind, the pursuit of their soul, the pursuit of their very being expended on temporal things that are neither fulfilling and oftentimes not enjoyable and certainly do not bring contentment. Because people pursue a thing until they finally discover that it doesn’t satisfy them. Then they switch their pursuit to something else. And that’s why people will pursue everything imaginable. They’re looking for happiness. They’re looking for peace. They’re looking for joy. They’re still searching and still pursuing and still longing for something in their heart to bring contentment and fulfillment. But I believe that a genuine, honest, Spirit-filled Christian has within him and her an inborn, that is when the Holy Spirit brought about the new birth, an inborn hunger and pursuit after God. Now watch this. When you were born again by the Spirit of God, God placed within your heart instantaneously and immediately A desire for himself. A hunger for him. An initiative within you that would motivate you to pursue God. Now watch this. You either fed that hunger. You either nourished that initiative or you allow it to die. The reason churches are empty is because the people… may be hungry for a sense of satisfaction to salve their conscience by going to church once on Sunday, but they don’t necessarily have any hunger for God. Now I want to ask you something. As you weigh what in your life counts the most, where your strongest interests lie, And where your most intense desires really move your heart? Is it God or is it something earthly? You see, the psalmist, David, knew what it meant to long for God in his heart. He says, and he watched those deer. As the heart panted after Waterbrook, so pants beats my soul after God. I’m on him above everything else. And I wonder, what is it in your life tonight that is in competition with your intense desire to know God above everything else? Well, I want to talk about three things, so get your pencil out. Because the first thing I want to talk about is what is involved in pursuing after God. All right, there’s several things here. First of all, they all start with P. And one of these days when you pull out your notes, you won’t have to know but about a few letters in the alphabet. P, R, E, and maybe two or three more, and you’ll have everything I’ve ever preached, number one. The first is a prerequisite for… but knowing God. A prerequisite, that is, before you’ll ever learn who God is, you will have to pursue Him. You say, well now, wait a minute. Doesn’t God reveal himself to man? He does. But remember what he said in Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness. They are the ones who shall be filled. God placed within your heart a hunger when you were saved. He opened a whole new world of spirituality to your life. Either you nourish that and pursue God and make him Lord of your life. Or you let that begin to dwindle and you cease to feed that hunger. And now really doesn’t make a whole lot of difference whether you know much about him or not. But a prerequisite to knowing God is to pursue him. Now… I don’t know how much you know about God, but I’ll tell you what I discovered. The more I know about him, the less I think I really understand about him, though I’m excited all over myself at what I’m discovering about him. But now, first of all, if you’re going to pursue him, you’ve got to hunger after him. He says, as that deer pants after water broke. So I want to ask you, do you have a deep yearning desire to know who he is and what he’s like? Oh, I know a lot of things about him, but I don’t know enough about him. hungering and thirsting after God, pursuing Him. Now to pursue a thing means that you reach out after it, that you attempt to track it down, that you stay with it, that you follow hard after that thing until you overtake it and possess it. Would you consider your daily life one that is pursuing God, following after God? It is a prerequisite to knowing God. Secondly, When you begin to pursue God, what you’re going to discover, number two, is that the divine pruning process is going to begin in your life. Number two is pruning. When you begin to pursue God, you’re going to see that God is going to begin to prune you and say, well, now, wait a minute. I’m not too sure I want to follow after him if he’s going to prune me. Listen. Paul said, I’ve counted everything as nothing. If I could just know Jesus Christ in the reality, listen, of his resurrection power. Can you tell me anything any more exciting in life than a personal, warm, intimate experience and having God unveil himself to you and know the intimacy of the creator of everything in this world? Listen, there isn’t anything in earth compared to that. But I want to tell you something. Once you begin to follow hard after God, the reason the pruning process starts is this. The longer you follow him and the closer you get to him, the more you see of yourself that you think, man, if I were to catch up with him, I’d be embarrassed. Is it not true that when you begin to close the gap on you and God and your personal experience and you begin to get closer to Him and you say, how close is close? Sometimes you think, I got it. Praise the Lord. We have this tremendous, tremendous intimate experience. The next thing you know, He’s completely out of sight. Now, I’m just talking in terms of our emotions, how we feel. He’s always there. But is it not true that the closer you move in on God… your warm intimate personal experience the more you see of yourself that you want him to change so that what he is you can be like because listen a man who is pursuing god is hard after him following after him because he wants to be like him he wants his life reflected in his life A man does not pursue God who’s not hungry after Him. A man will not chase after God. A man will not follow hard after God who does not want what God has to offer. And all of us who’ve even begun the pursuit know that what He has to offer oftentimes pushes out what we already have. The third word I want you to put down is painful. Because when you begin to pursue God, it’s going to hurt a little bit. Now the reason it hurts is because… Of the experiences involved in our desiring to know God. Now I want you to get this down because some of you may decide to run the other way. When you tell him, Lord, I want to know you. Paul said, I want to know him in the power of his resurrection. He said, I was a Hebrew among Hebrews. He said, a keeper of the law. He listed all of these things about him that most Jews in his day would have prized and cherished. He said, I put all that in a bundle and toss it into the sea if I could just have one thing. The intimate relationship. knowledge and experience on a personal basis of Jesus Christ living in and through my life he said that’s the most important thing in my life now I’ll tell you something about Paul he did just that he pursued God and it was very very painful now watch what we’re saying is to pursue you see you can’t ever capture God and put him in a capsule but to pursue God means that you and I are moving in his direction That we want to know who he is personally. We want to be able to delve into the other side of him that we’ve never seen. We want to see God like he is. But you see, a man who genuinely loves him will never be satisfied. He will always be hungering and thirsting to know more about an infinite God. So what does God do? Takes us up on it. Now listen. There’s some things you and I will never know about him unless we are willing to bleed. Where does God lead us when we pursue after him? Sometimes he leads us in the pitch black darkness and we cannot find that way out. We say, God, where are you? Why don’t you do something? Why are you allowing these things to happen to me? Why don’t you give me some explanation? Lord, speak to my heart. And God doesn’t say a thing. He said, Lord, you know, I want to know you. He says, sure. That’s why I’ve got you in the darkness. Because there are some things you learn about God in the darkness you will never learn in the light. And you know what happens to many believers? When they get to the edge of the darkness, they decide they don’t really want to know that much about Jesus. You see, we come to the edge and we say, Lord, I just can’t do that. No. No. If you and I are going to discover what he’s like, we’ve got to be willing to suffer. And where there is no suffering, there won’t be much discovery. And let me give you a little verse. Let me give an example of this because you quote this and I quote this and we think this is so great. Look in 2 Corinthians chapter 12. There is no way under God’s heaven for Paul to have discovered what God was like had he not gone through this experience. Some great difficulty in his life in 2 Corinthians 12, verse 8. For this thing I besought the Lord three times that he might depart from me. He said to me, listen. a word from God, my grace is sufficient for thee. Then he said, most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in my infirmities that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities, reproaches, necessities, persecutions, distresses for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then am I strong. If the apostle Paul could be called here tonight and say, Paul, Would you say that the persecutions, the distresses, the times that death knocked at your door, stoned and left for dead, jailed, imprisoned, bleeding, dying, would you say that all that was worth what you discovered about him? He’d say without a question, indeed it was. What did he learn about God through those periods of prayer that must have been dark periods? Praying for God to take this thing out of his life. What did he learn? He learned something that no man ever learns when everything is going right. That in the greatest point of weakness, God’s supernatural strength moves into the life of the believer. When we’re weak, we become strong and that His grace is sufficient. How does He teach you that? Only when He gets you in the pit and carries you through the darkness. There’s going to be pain. Then the next thing I want you to notice, and that is personal conflict. Friend, when you fall in love with Jesus Christ and He becomes the obsession of your soul, you’re going to run into conflict. There’s some folks who don’t like him. They hate him. They’re indifferent to him. They don’t mind you loving him and worshiping, but keep it to yourself. On your job, when you really begin to pursue God and you want him first in your life and you want to know him above everything else, watch out. There are going to be some folks who are not going to like it. The devil will see to it. So there’s going to be conflict in your life. The next thing I want you to notice is perseverance. Perseverance. When a man pursues God, if he’s really going to learn who God is, and God’s going to become the obsession of his soul, he’s going to have to learn the principle of perseverance. That is, he keeps on going. You see, many believers have this problem in their life. They take off, I mean, they start off like a rocket. They just explode and praise God, hallelujah, amen, and all of a sudden they hit a little resistance and down they go. They say, well, you know, I don’t know. I started out right, but I don’t know what happened. I’ll tell you what happened. They forgot that to pursue God takes persistence. Now, sometimes God’s people get down in the dumps in their heart. One of the reasons is they’ve taken their eyes off God. And they’re not tracking after Jesus Christ. What they have done, they’ve switched roles. And now they’re tracking after this and tracking after that and tracking after the other. And after a while, they suddenly wake up and dawns on them that… Where am I headed? What’s happening to my life? They’ve lost sight of the goal. We need the same intense desire in our heart. We want God in our life in the fullness of His power and the reality of His love and everything He is. We want everything He is within us expressing all of that through us and all of that to us. But I believe when you’re in love with God, that’s what you want. Now watch this. The reason a man will persevere is all wrapped up in one thing. It is the value he places on the object of his pursuit. Brother, if the object of your pursuit is of great value, you’ll sweat blood and tears and pay the price to get it. If it is not, you will not. And it’s interesting to me how sometimes Christians can fall off the pathway in their pursuit after God so quickly and so easily. Now listen, is He God? The Creator, the forgiver of our sins, preparing heaven for us. Just think of what your mind can fathom just for a moment. He’s God. Praise God. There is no explanation for that. How do you describe Him any more than say He’s God? How much value do you place on Him? Now some people say He’s the most important thing in my life and it’s very evident that He is. Some people say it’s the most important thing in my life and it’s very evident that he could not possibly be. You see, when you and I pursue God, we’re going to have to learn that perseverance means, man, you just stay with it when it’s hot, stay with it when it’s cold, stay with it when it’s difficult, stay with it when it’s easy. In other words, what you want is God. You don’t give up and quit. You just keep on. There are going to be times when you get discouraged, times you want to throw up your hands, and times you want to say, God, rapture me now. And you know, it is amazing to me, and only the Lord knows. Sometimes when he just takes me down to the valley and just wears me out, and he knows how to do that. I just think, Lord, that you know what’s best for me better than I know. And so I’ll just keep on moving, keeping my eye on the goal. Listen. Our problem is we stop pursuing when the pain becomes intense. We want God to give us a break. Now, let me tell you something. Don’t ever forget this. Friend, when you are hurting the worst, right beyond the worst pain is the best glimpse of God you will ever get. The cowards will never see him. It takes people whose hunger for God exceeds their sensitivity to their own feelings. We’re talking about God. Listen, you can’t get God out of heaven into your life except through Jesus Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit. And even with him, if you’re going to discover who God is, If you’re going to have him working in your life and moving in your life and exposing himself and revealing himself, you’ve got to be willing to suffer. There are going to be times when you get worn out and God says, keep on going. Listen, it is when all of your energy is gone that you discover something about God, that he is the greatest energy station to be found anywhere.
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Thank you for listening to The Pursuit of God. For more inspirational messages like this one, visit our 24-7 online station. And if you’d like to know more about Charles Stanley or InTouch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of InTouch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.
In this episode, we delve into the intrinsic human pursuit of contentment and how these often reflect earthly desires that fail to fulfill our spiritual needs. Through the lens of faith, we explore the innate drive implanted within born-again Christians to seek divine connection—a journey that goes beyond mere participation in religious rituals to truly knowing God. Along the way, we investigate the ultimate question of where our deepest interests lie and what competes with our zeal for God.
