God on the Lookout.
God is looking for people. Sounds a little strange, doesn’t it? The God 
who created everything and everybody, who stands above and beyond the boundaries of time and space, is searching for people?But He IS looking for people. God put on flesh and became a person named Jesus, a man who went to extreme lengths to search for people that He could touch, heal, set free, and empower to live their lives in a brand new, transformed way: All the way to the cross… and beyond.He is still on the lookout today.The big question is why? Why is God looking for people? He is not a God who depends on the approval of people for His existence. It is clear God is utterly complete and happy, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit living in perfect communion.So why IS God searching for people?The only answer I can think of is that God has an infinite and passionate love for us. I wish I could come up with a better way of saying this, but words fail me. His love for you and me is more than any human being could ever describe, offer or imagine.Here’s an amazing piece of God’s love for us. God made a boundary out of His passionate love, one that He honors to this day. God created us with the ultimate freedom of choice to experience Him in a way that allows Him to change us and the path of our existence, but He will never force or coerce us into this, even if that means we will continue to go our own way apart from Him, all the way to our own destruction.Jesus told an outcast woman at a lonely well in Samaria that God is on the lookout for people who will worship Him in Spirit and in Truth. Her life was a spiritual train wreck: she was a four-time relational loser who belonged to a loser class of people, and was a “throw-away” woman on top of that. Her life was on a direct path to her own destruction. The truth is that Jesus SOUGHT her out, above and beyond the cultural and religious norms of her time. He spent time listening to her questions. He answered her directly and honestly. He offered her the opportunity of a lifetime to drink from the well of God’s presence. He never forced her. He simply offered.She responded and was forever changed. She was so affected by this encounter that she went back to the same people who shunned her and told them about Jesus. There is evidence these people responded and were changed by Jesus as well.That Jesus would be so specific about who God is looking for to a person who seemed outside the “acceptable” bounds of the religion of Jesus’ time seems really important to me.So God is looking for people. Not perfect people. Not empty-hearted religious people who claim to know everything about theology but whose lives betray a prideful and self-centered focus:
- But people who have been brutalized by their own choices, or someone else’s actions. God is looking for non-religious and religious people who finally realize that underneath the mask of good-looking, outward performance is a man or woman who is bankrupt of true godliness.
- And people who have come to the bottom of their own empty well and now have a soul-thirst that they know can only be filled by God.
God is looking for people who are really open to experience Him with no pre-conditions attached. The Truth is that God wants to fix the deepest part of us and make whole the broken parts that have calloused our hearts and convinced us that our way is right. God desperately desires to transform our flawed thinking that causes us to demand that He simply accept and allow us to keep going down the dead-end road we’ve been traveling.But He loves us too much to force us. We have to come to Him by our own choice and abandonment to our own ways.It takes a lot of courage to trust God and enter into that experience of Him. It takes Faith.If you need some of that courage and faith, I encourage you to ask God. He wants to save you from yourself and from that darkness that we find ourselves immersed in.The first step of worshipping God is allowing Him in.He’s at the well waiting for you.I will be singing at the Legacy Fishing Retreat Banquet and Worship Concert event In St. Michael, MN on Saturday, February 28th. For more information on the concert please check out the link below:http://www.legacyfishingretreat.com/banquetworshipexperience.html