You and I are in little (our sins excepted) what God is in large.  Being made in His image we have within us the capacity to know Him.  In our sins we lack only the power.  The moment the Spirit has quickened us to life in regeneration our whole being senses its kinship to God and leaps up in joyous recognition.  That is the heavenly birth without which we cannot see the Kingdom of God.  It is, however, not an end but an inception, for now begins the glorious pursuit, the heart’s happy exploration of the infinite riches of the Godhead.  That is where we begin, I say, but where we stop no man has yet discovered, for there is in the awful and mysterious depths of the Triune God neither limit nor end.

 

Shoreless Ocean, who can sound Thee?

Thine own eternity is round Thee,

Majesty divine!

 

            To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.  St. Bernard stated this holy paradox in a musical quatrain that will be instantly understood by every worshipping soul:

 

We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread,

And long to feast upon Thee still:

We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead

And thirst our souls from Thee to fill.

 

Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God.  They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking.            Moses used the fact that he knew God as an argument for knowing Him better.  “Now, therefore, I pray thee, if I have found grace in thy sight, show me now thy way, that I may know thee, that I may find grace in thy sight.”  And from there he rose to make the daring request, “I beseech thee, show me thy glory.”  God was frankly pleased by this display of ardour, and the next day called Moses into the mount, and there in solemn procession made all His glory pass before him.

           David’s life was a torrent of spiritual desire, and his psalms ring with the cry of the seeker and the glad shout oft he finder. Paul confessed the mainspring of his life to be his burning desire after Christ.  “That I may know Him,” was the goal of his heart, and to this he sacrificed everything. “Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but refuse, that I may win Christ” (Philippians 3:8).

            Hymnody is sweet with the longing after God, the God whom, while the singer seeks, he knows he has already found.  “His track I see and I’ll pursue,” sang our fathers only a short generation ago, but that song is heard no more in the great congregation.  How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers.  Everything is made to center upon the initial act of “accepting” Christ (a term, incidentally, which is not found in the Bible) and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls.  We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him we need no more seek Him.  This is set before us as the last