Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Pursuit

I was talking with a friend recently and she posed an interesting question to me.  She asked if, looking back, I could see God pursuing me all of my life.  My initial thought was, “No.”  But before the word was even formed on my lips, I knew it was not the truth.  The friend I was talking to had become a Christian later in life so I could guess at the kind of pursuit she looked back and saw, but I fully gave my heart and life to Christ when I was three years old.  I assumed I didn’t have a magnificent story to look back on and tell of moments He orchestrated for me to notice Him and know that He is real.  But in that split second before I answered my friend’s question, I realized the answer is, yes.  Yes, I look back on my life and realize that God has been pursuing me the whole time.  God’s pursuit of me is different than His pursuit of my friend.  God pursued my friend in a way that is similar to a man pursuing the woman he wants to marry.  I said that I saw His pursuit of me through most of my life more like the way a husband would pursue his wife after they’re married.

Christianity isn’t about the moment of conversion, when you say that you believe Jesus is the Son of God who died to take away your sins and you ask for forgiveness.  Just like marriage isn’t only about the moment a man and woman say “I do.”  That is just the beginning.  God’s pursuit is evident throughout all of our lives no matter when we come to Christ.  Sometimes it is made up of loud and extravagant events like a man trying to get a woman to notice that he is alive and at other times it is subtle, steady and consistent like a husband reminding his wife of who he is.  No matter which stage of Christian life you are at, God is pursuing you.  There are simply different types of pursuit for different times in our lives and different types of people, but the same remarkable God is pursuing each of us.  It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of how.  How has God pursued you in the past?  And how is He pursuing you now?

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