Psalms 107:
9: “For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things”
Exodus 33:
18: “Then Moses said, ‘Now show me your glory.’
Psalms 42:
1: As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.
Philippians 3:
8 Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord:
Jeremiah 29:
You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
God desires us wholly for Himself. He longs to reveal Himself fully in and through us and to dwell with us. However, we are not ready, nor can we prepare ourselves for it by our own strength. So, by His Spirit, He begins in us the journey that leads us to encountering Him—creating a hunger and thirst for His presence.
It then requires our constant cooperation and yielding till He can lead us to the place where our hearts can become a place of His visitation and then a proper home (a prepared place) to host Him in His glory!
To put it another way, hunger for the divine in a person can only originate from the divine; a work of the Holy Spirit. When that hunger is allowed to grow and reach its fulness, it leads that person into an encounter with God. Continuing desperation and thirst are then vital to host Him and to grow in that knowledge of Him; our eternal redeemer.
It is a law of the Spirit, in the Spirit; God fills the hungry with Himself! Throughout scripture we see this scriptural pattern, God’s Spirit is always poured in the deserts, on completely dry ground; symbolic of people who are desperately thirsty.
Now, it seems that only a select few people seem to be greatly impacted by God to seek Him and then encounter Him in powerful ways. However, the contrary is true. God woos everyone to Himself. As a saint of old said “Every bush is burning not everyone stops to see it”. Modifying it a bit, everyone sees a burning bush but only a few stop to see it.
He constantly pursues us to create room within us—appetites and desires—for Himself. This may come through the gentlest nudge, the softest whisper, or a passing thought in the most ordinary moments.
At times, it may also come through His powerful work, as the Spirit seeks to impart into us a measure of His own longing to be with us.
Sadly, most of us either ignore what He begins in us, fail to follow through, or lose the hunger He awakens along the way. This deeply grieves Him. Only a few continue to cooperate with His work until it brings the needed transformation and leads them to the place of encounter with the One who is the God of all restoration, cleansing, and renewal.
As I am typing this, I must pause to say that His Spirit is deeply grieved by this, and I am overwhelmed by what He feels!!
God will not fill us to overflowing or reveal Himself fully unless our hearts are entirely His and wholly turned toward Him. So, He patiently works in us to bring us to that place.
It is a place where we desire Him above all else, as Moses longed to see God’s glory. He wanted neither the promised land nor an angel—nothing at all—if God Himself was not with him.
It is a hunger too deep for words, like David’s, whose longing for God far surpassed every other desire and led him to seek Him day and night.
It is an all-consuming desire, like Paul’s, that makes everything else seem insignificant because the longing to know Christ far outweighs all else in life.
Many of us do not know this place because we have not let His Spirit lead us there. We have settled for too little, or we have not allowed Him to remove all the hindrances within us that keep us from reaching that place.
For those of us who have encountered Him, the question is whether we have continued further in that journey—growing in our knowledge of Him, becoming more captivated by Him each day, and longing for more of Him than ever before.
Dearly beloved, the more we know Him, the more we are known by Him and transformed within. This draws us into a fresh pursuit of Him and opens new pathways in us to be walked yielded to His Spirit that leads us into greater depths and heights in the knowledge of God and into His mysteries that otherwise remain hidden. It is a blessed divine cycle!
My prayer is that in this cycle, as His bride, we would find the blessed place where He shares His glory as mentioned in John 17. For it is here—in abiding in Him, and He in and with us—that the glory we long to see in these end times is revealed. It is a place where we are so lost in Him that we are aware only of Him and His blessed presence within us, around us, and everywhere.
The glory to be revealed in the end is hidden in Him and disclosed only to those who answer His call and pursue Him wholeheartedly until they find that place in Him.
John 17
22 I have given them the glory You gave Me, so that they may be one as We are one— 23 I in them and You in Me—that they may be perfectly united, so that the world may know that You sent Me and have loved them just as You have loved Me.
( TO BE CONTINUED)
