In Touch Ministries

Dr. Charles Stanley: Many believers have this problem in their life. They start off like a rocket. They just explode and praise God, hallelujah, amen, and all of a sudden they hit a resistance and down they go. They say, "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.

Guest (Male): Does the description you just heard fit you? You were soaring with God, but now you're just straining to stay in the air. Welcome to In Touch, the teaching ministry of Dr. Charles Stanley. If you're a believer who struggles to maintain Christlike attitudes and actions, today's program can help you find the encouragement you need to refocus your attention on the pursuit of God. Let's listen in to Dr. Stanley's message.

Dr. Charles Stanley: People today are pursuing many things. They're pursuing pleasure, and you can look around you 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, position, and prosperity. It is amazing what men will give their time, their heart, 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 is 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 it doesn't satisfy them, then they switch their pursuit to something else. 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.

I believe that a genuine, honest, spirit-filled Christian has within him or her an inborn hunger and pursuit after God. 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, and an initiative within you that would motivate you to pursue God.

You either fed that hunger, you either nourished that initiative, or you allowed 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.

I want to ask you something. Is God what in your life counts the most? Where does your strongest interest lie? Where do your most intense desires really move your heart? Is it God or is it something earthly?

The Psalmist David knew what it meant to long for God in his heart. He said as he watched those deer, "As the hart panteth after water brooks, so pants, beats, my soul after God." I want him above everything else. I wonder what it is in your life tonight that is in competition with your intense desire to know God above everything else.

I want to talk about three things, so get your pencil out. What is involved in pursuing after God? First of all, the first is a prerequisite for knowing God. That is, before you'll ever learn who God is, you will have to pursue him.

You say, "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. Now it 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. I don't know how much you know about God, but I'll tell you what I've 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.

If you're going to pursue him, you've got to hunger after him. He says as that deer pants after the water brook. So I want to ask you, do you have a deep, yearning desire to know who he is and what he's like? I know a lot of things about him, but I don't know enough about him.

Hungering and thirsting after God, pursuing him. 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 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. You say, "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 of his resurrection power." Can you tell me anything anymore exciting in life than a personal, warm, intimate experience and having God unveil himself to you and knowing the intimacy of the creator of everything in this world? There isn't anything on earth compared to that.

But 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 in your personal experience and you begin to get closer to him? You say, "How close is close?" Sometimes you think, "I've got him. Praise the Lord, we have this tremendous, tremendous intimate experience." Next thing you know, he's completely out of sight. 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 and 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 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. 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. The reason it hurts is because of the experiences involved in our desiring to know God. 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, 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 tossed it into the sea if I could just have one thing: the intimate 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. What we are saying is that 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? He takes us up on it. There are 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 into pitch-black darkness and we cannot find our 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." God doesn't say a thing.

You say, "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." 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.

We come to the edge and we say, "No, Lord, I just can't do that." No, if you and I are going to discover what he's like, we've got to be willing to suffer. Where there is no suffering, there won't be much discovery.

Let me give you an example of this because you quote this and I quote this and we think this is so great. Look in Second 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 Second Corinthians chapter 12, verse 8: "For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me." He said to me a word from God: "My grace is sufficient for thee." Then he said, "Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in mine 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 we said, "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 are weak, we become strong and 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 is personal conflict. When you fall in love with Jesus Christ and he becomes the obsession of your soul, you're going to run into conflict. There are some folks who don't like him. They hate him. They're indifferent to him. They don't mind you loving him and worshipping him, 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. 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.

Many believers have this problem in their life. They start off like a rocket. They just explode and praise God, hallelujah, amen, and all of a sudden they hit a resistance and down they go. They say, "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.

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. Because what they have done is they've switched roles, and now they're tracking after this and tracking after that and tracking after the other. After a while they suddenly wake up and it dawns on them: "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. I believe when you're in love with God, that's what you want.

The reason the man will persevere is all wrapped up in one thing: it is the value he places on the object of his pursuit. 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. It's interesting to me how sometimes Christians can fall off the pathway in their pursuit after God so quickly and so easily.

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 in more than saying he's God? How much value do you place on him?

Some people say he's the most important thing in my life, and it's very evident that he is. Some people say he's the most important thing in my life, and it's very evident that he could not possibly be.

When you and I pursue God, we're going to have to learn that perseverance means 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."

Only the Lord knows that sometimes when he just takes me down in the valley and just wears me out—and he knows how to do that—I just think, "Lord, 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.

Our problem is we stop pursuing when the pain becomes intense. We want God to give us a break. Don't ever forget this. When you are hurting the worst, right beyond the worst pain is the best glimpse of God you'll ever get. The cowards will never see him. It takes people whose hunger for God exceeds their sensitivity to their own feelings.

We are talking about God. You can't get God out of heaven into your life except through Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit. 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. 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.

Guest (Male): We were encouraged today on In Touch to remember that God hasn't gone anywhere. Believe that his love for you is unwavering and that he can help you push through your disappointment and pain to see him for who he truly is. We'll continue Dr. Stanley's message on the pursuit of God tomorrow.

If you want to explore a few more tools that will help you get to know God, you can do that right now at intouch.org. To hear this message one more time, be sure to look for the link to today on radio. And visit our online bookstore to order a copy of Dr. Stanley's complete message, The Pursuit of God. Our web address again is intouch.org. Call or text to 1-800-IN-TOUCH. If you prefer, you can write to us at In Touch, Post Office Box 7900, Atlanta, Georgia 30357.

If you don't feel capable to do what God is called you to do, it doesn't mean he gave you the wrong task. Today's Moment with Charles Stanley is coming up.

Let your time and your schedule and everything about you revolve around this: that you and I are to develop and continue to develop this ongoing, intimate, wonderful, exciting, satisfying, indescribable, incomparable relationship with a personal God.

Dr. Stanley devoted his entire life to helping us get closer to Jesus as we all want to do. You can learn how at charlesstanleyinstitute.org.

We're not the first to seek a life of purpose. The Bible tells of many who followed a specific path step by step with courage, with surrender for a deeper purpose, a stronger passion, a lasting peace. Introducing your path to purpose, passion, and peace, a new 90-day devotional inspired by the timeless teaching of Dr. Charles Stanley. Available now at intouch.org/store.

You're listening to In Touch. Do you feel ill-equipped to do what God wants you to do? A Moment with Charles Stanley looks at the Christian's common experience.

When you serve the Lord, the Lord leads you into circumstances and situations that you just think, "Lord, I can't do it." I can remember the first time I just finished seminary and I'd been in my first church only three months and I was going to start teaching in a Bible Institute. Everybody there was a pastor. My subjects were evangelism at 8:00 in the morning, homiletics, which is sermon preparation at 9:00, and 10:00, sermon delivery. Everybody there was a pastor. Here was green me, and I mean green, right out of seminary, hadn't pastored a church but three months.

I knew those fellows were going to say, "Who does he think he is telling us how to do what most of us have been doing about half his as long as he's been living?" But I learned something about God, and I knew they were going to say that because I put myself in their place and I'd have said the same thing about me.

I'm here to tell you those three months I spent more, probably fearfully getting ready to face about 165 preachers that knew a whole lot more about a lot of things than I did. But I learned something. I learned that God could take green me on my knees, filled with the spirit with what he taught me, and he could turn them upside down, inside out, and that in two weeks they thought I was the greatest guy in the world. God did that. I didn't know much, I didn't have much to offer, but God will take you and you'll learn something about God in serving him for which there is no other way to learn it.

To learn more about serving God, stop by intouch.org. The Bible says to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus. Has this program helped you with that? We'd like to know how. Tomorrow on In Touch, it's hard to deny that the things we make time for are the things that matter to us. We'll hear more about how to pursue God Tuesday on In Touch, the teaching ministry of Dr. Charles Stanley. This program is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia, and remains on this station through the grace of God and your faithful prayers and gifts.