Hello Mark, what happened in your life that was so profound that helped you start your trail on finding, and seeking the Lord Jesus Christ? Thank you for your comment.
'Pursuing' Christ, perhaps a better word than 'seeking'. I had already found him, or been found by him, as they say.
Maybe it's the years upon years of frustration, of thinking I just lacked one more key to consistent obedience. I held on to a few verses, promises, and prayed in tears for understanding, (and for obedience, purity, of course). God was kind enough to allow me --- I don't know what to call it --I hesitate to say, "a vision"-- maybe a dream --- concerning the absolute horror of sin and its devastating influence on the whole universe. The awful twisting of fact; I am left trying to describe it with words like, "The space-time continuum would have ruptured had not God held things together until the end." A brother calls it "cosmic treason", and he is right.
Anyway, up till then I thought I had a pretty good handle on how bad sin was --I had no idea-- and even after that, I realize I still don't. God doesn't seem to hold that against us, as it was his plan all along.
I'm not going to say that that straightened my path. But it did make me sit back and think a little more about the greatness and goodness and absolute perfect point of view that God has, and the awful hubris of the human race.
More than all that, though it stemmed from both the "dream" and the agonizing desire for Godliness --right now! Godliness, haha-- that God does things according to his own time (even when to do so adds to his own already inconceivable pain), and for his own purposes, and I understand nothing by comparison. Years and years, I cried out to him while reading Scripture, until it slowly dawned on me that
God is doing this for his own sake, and I can count on such passages as promise that he will complete what he has begun and so on, because it does not depend on me, whether he will accomplish it, indeed, that it doesn't even depend on whether I ever attain the godliness I so desire.
Contrary to what I was told this mindset would result in, it drives me all the harder to pursue Christ, to love him, to hate sin, to look (at least to have the habit of trying to look) at things from God's point of view, and not mine.
And last, but not least, it has changed what satisfies me. My desire is no longer to make it to my reward, nor my confidence in eternal security, but my absolute pleasure, my satisfaction, is in knowing he is completely satisfied with the plan he has spoken into existence. I find myself still amazed he even lets me watch him work! My hope is in seeing him as he is, to see his face.
This account leaves out an awful lot, particularly about the pain I feel at the wimp of a God that people so often teach in Churches, and the joy at talking about him and his mercy and goodness and brilliance. I hope that answers your question.
