Part 6: Always Pursuing Series

The Always God

Week 6 - Always Pursuing

Good morning. I’d like you to turn in your Bibles to Genesis 3. This is going to be the first passage we are going to look at together, but we are going to be hitting a lot of different passages, so we will have them up on the screen, and they are also available in the YouVersion outline for today. That way you won’t feel like you’re competing in Bible drill trying to look up all these verses.

We are continuing this week in The Always God series. I hope you have enjoyed studying how God is moving all the time. How He hasn’t changed over time, and how we can still experience him every single day in a very real way.

I wasn’t expecting this when I started this series, but its been amazing how often this series has tied in with a Bible study I did years called Experiencing God. Experiencing God is based on seven realities we find in God’s word:

Number 1, God is always at work around you, and Number 3, God invites you to join Him in his work: We talked about this when we talked about how God is always working.

Number 4, God speaks by the Holy spirit through Bible, prayer, circumstances, and the church to reveal Himself, His purposes, and his ways. We talked about this when we talked about how God is always speaking.

Number 5, God’s invitation to join Him results in a crisis of belief that requires faith and action to resolve. [Number 6] In order to join God in his work, we have to make major adjustments in our life. We talked about this when we talked about some conditions in our hearts that keep us from hearing God, and keep God from hearing us.

So today I want to circle back to the second realty of Experiencing God. And before we do that, I want to make a commitment to you to lead an Experiencing God study group at the beginning of next year. It’s going to be an intense, twelve week study. It will require a lot out of you. But beloved, I truly believe that God is going to show you amazing things about Himself and His relationship with you if you put the work in on this study. So be watching for when that is going to begin.

Here’s the second reality: God pursues a continuing love relationship with you that is real and personal.

One of my all time favorite movies is The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. Tommy Lee Jones plays Detective Gerard of the US Marshalls, and he is hunting down Dr. Richard Kimball (Harrison Ford), a heart surgeon who is wrongfully accused of killing his wife. After he is convicted, Dr. Kimball escapes custody.

And for the rest of the movie, Gerard relentlessly pursues Kimball. Watch this short scene to give you an idea of how focused he is on capturing Harrison Ford:

[Scene]

Ok, I know this is kind of a weird image to use to describe God, but here’s what I want you to think about as we talk about a God who always pursues: There’s no giving up…no quitting…it’s not over until what is pursued is chased down!

It’s this kind of bold, aggressive, never-giving up pursuit that we read about and discover in God’s Word.

Because as committed as Tommy Lee Jones is to finding Harrison Ford and bringing him to justice, God is infinitely more committed to finding you.

But there’s a huge difference between God’s pursuit of you and Gerard’s pursuit of Kimball. And we will come back to that at the end of the sermon.

Let me pray for us, and then we will dive in to God’s Word.

Pray…

God pursues what is lost.

Now, most of us know what it means to be lost or to lose something of value to us. I read this week that the average American spends 2.5 days each year looking for lost items and “collectively costs U.S. households $2.7 billion dollars a year in replacement costs.”

And the Bible clearly teaches that God seeks and pursues the lost. In God’s word, we see that the search and rescue mission really began the moment we became lost. Remember in that clip we watched from The Fugitive, the search began just ninety minutes after the escape. And we see that in God’s Word. Look at Genesis 3.

You know the story. God created Adam and Eve to have a personal relationship with Him. He gave them one rule: Don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I want you to depend on me for your understanding of good and evil. Don’t try to figure it out for yourself. I’ve seen the future. I’ve seen all the way to 2021 what a mess people are going to make when they decide for themselves what’s right and wrong. Just trust Me on this one.