Is Serving God A Sacrifice? Series

Review

“Seeking” is the effort we put forth to fulfill longing and desire for God. And for seeking to work, God, rather than something else, must be the object of the desire and seeking, and the seeking must be earnest. Such earnestness comes in large measure from emotion – both negative and positive. If one person has no feeling in his hand, but he has read an article about the damage done from burning his skin, and another person has full sensation in his hand; both will remove their hand from a hot stove but the second person will have a lot more earnestness about it than the first. If one man does some figuring and comes to the conclusion that he is be better off married so he might as well start pursuing a girl, and another man is head over heels in love; both will pursue the girl but the second one will have a lot more earnestness. Wholehearted seeking comes from emotion.

In the last lesson we focused on two ways to increase emotion:

1) Fan into flame the love you already have. Follow the psalmists’ example by making much of what is in your heart toward God.

2) Keep stoking the fire all day long. Shorten the intervals of time in-between conscious fellowship with God.

We understand that it is impossible to give God your conscious attention all day while you are concentrating on other things. There have been times when I have been delivering a pizza at Dominos, and I missed a turn because I was thinking about the passage of Scripture from that morning’s devotions. And so the people got their pizza later than they should have, and I wasn’t being a very good employee. God is not honored by that. He wants us to pay attention to the things we need to pay attention to.

However, in-between activities throughout the day – when you transition from one thing to another, you can take 20 seconds and remember your passage of Scripture you are meditating on that day, and pay attention to God for a moment, and remind yourself about whichever wonderful attribute of God you are focused on that day, and think for a moment about how your next activity can be an act of fellowship with Him; and if you do that in all your transitions, you will find that at the end of the day you will have far, far more joy and all those other results than you normally do.

How long has this interval been?

Lately whenever I turn my attention to God during the day, I think to myself, How long has it been since the last time I paid attention to God? He is paying attention to me all the time.

Ps.34:15 The eyes of the LORD are on the righteous

If it has been 4 hours since the last time I paid attention to Him, those are 4 hours of one-way attention. During those 4 hours, even if I have not had any thoughts of God at all, He has no doubt had thoughts about me more numerous than the grains of sand.

The purpose of mentioning that is not to make you feel guilty, as though God were lonely the whole time you weren’t paying attention to Him. God is never lonely – the Trinity is all the company He could possibly need.

The point of the exercise is to cause yourself to marvel at the amazing availability of the presence of God to me. Just think, How much more joy and peace and awe and comfort and love I would have right now if I had been able to intentionally commune with God 20 times over the past 4 hours instead of zero? That is not always possible – sometimes the opportunities just aren’t there. So the point is not guilt (unless you have miss-spent the last 4 hours, and you need to repent). The point is to motivate yourself as you prepare for the next 4 hours. Each time you turn your attention back to God think about how long it has been since the last time and how many thoughts God has had about you in that interval. And try to pinpoint some times in that interval that could have been used to focus on God, so that maybe this next interval can be shorter than that last one.

God did not design us for long intervals. When in my morning devotions I have had sweet communion and close fellowship with God to the point where I can actually sense the results of joy and peace, etc. in my heart, sometimes I can come to God one hour later, and the fire is out – I feel nothing from my time with Him before, and I have to start from scratch again. The problem is, now it’s the middle of the day and I only have about 45 seconds, which is not enough time to build another whole fire from scratch. It is enough time to throw another stick on an existing fire, but not enough to re-create what I did in the morning’s devotion time.