I really, really liked tonight. While this study hasn’t been the straight textual study that we thought it would be, I really like the central message that Matt Chandler is drawing from the text.

He started off today by talking about Matthew 7:21–23, which says

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’”

That is a scary text. Really scary. We could be doing all sorts of Christian things. They were driving out demons, prophesying and performing miracles. And yet, He tells them that He never knew them.

Yet again, it all comes back to relationship. We can be religious, but if all we’re doing is going to church because our friends are going to church, if all we’re doing is treating church like our hobby, we don’t really know Him at all. We can be super religious, but not saved. We can do all kinds of things to profess the name of Christ, but if we’re not seeking after Him ourselves, it’s all for naught.

Matt talked a lot tonight about yearning for God, really wanting more and more of Him. He talked a lot about really pursuing God and why we pursue Him.

We pursue Him, first and foremost, to know Him. That’s it. The end goal is knowing Him.

We pursue Him to work out our salvation and our justification. We’re not saved and then we just go about the rest of our lives. We’re told to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. The only way to do that is to seek Jesus.

We pursue Him because we are so very broken. We’re not saved and then all of our imperfections, all of our sins disappear. The things we struggling with before we came to know Christ are will probably be things we struggle with, to a degree at least, even after knowing Him. We’re never going to be able to clean ourselves up enough. We’re never going to be good enough. One sin is enough to keep us from being able to be in God’s presence. We desperately need Jesus—He is the only one who can present us before God as blameless.

We pursue Him because He made us His own. He has pursued us and we are His. When Matt said that on the DVD last night and as I just reread it again today, it stops me in my tracks. He pursued us. Jesus came to this earth, willingly allowed men He created and sustained to kill Him on a cross, because that is the only way that we could be saved. He knew we could not do it on our own.

God pursued us, to the point of giving up His life for us. He moved near to us so that we would have a chance to spend eternity in Heaven with Him. That alone is reason enough to pursue Him with our whole hearts, all of our lives. I feel so undeserving, but so, so grateful for a God who loves us like that.