An Encouragement for Seekers
Written by Dan McDonald
A few days ago I had a wonderful but
brief online conversation with someone who described his/her self as a seeker.
I thought about how seldom it is that people today regard themselves as
seekers. In many of my circles the idea of one being a seeker is used to
describe someone before they have come to a settled belief. But I think that
may well be an artificial understanding of a seeker. Perhaps we ought to think
of seeking using the idea of a tree whose branches stretch out seeking sunlight
for photosynthesis and whose roots reach down and out for the nutrients and water
of the soil. As long as a tree is living it is stretching and reaching for what
it needs. Surely in the spiritual life, it is the nature of something
spiritually alive to hunger and thirst and to seek. But I do understand that
still we will often talk of one who is seeking as the one who has not yet come
to a firm conviction regarding the one in whom they will have faith. After
having the conversation I realized that I have never blogged on the subject of
seeking. I thought that perhaps this conversation was in some ways an incentive
for me to write on seeking.
I suppose I could write on how one
should seek. I would write about reading the Scriptures, especially reading the
Gospels where one reads about Jesus. I could mention setting aside time for
prayer. I could encourage one to seek to do the things they know they should be
doing, like loving God, trying to be thankful for every blessing big or small,
learning to grow in love towards God and neighbor. Finding a church where it
seems like the preaching is teaching one about Christ and where the people seem
to love one another. All of these things seem to be things that people do when
they begin to earnestly seek after God. But mostly, what is on my heart is to
convey an encouraging word about what people find who seek after God and find
him. It seems that time and time again what people find is that when they seek
God and find God, they find a God who knows us inside and out because he has
been seeking us from before the time we began to think about seeking him.
Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising
to us. In our Western world where Christianity has had an impact for centuries
there are few phrases that encourage us to seek after God, after meaning in
life, after values, etc. than the phrase “Seek and you shall find.” But
sometimes we don’t think of what it meant that the one who spoke those words
was Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one, whom the Bible tells us came to seek and to
save, to heal, to redeem. If we take those two thoughts together that Jesus
came to seek and to save and that he has called upon us with a promise to “Seek
and you shall find” we discover a beautiful liturgical response dance in the
theme of seeking. Jesus leads off the dance, seeking and courting his future
bride. He has come to seek and to save. He dances before us and now he looks
toward us and wants to know our hearts in this matter and says “Seek and you
shall find.” That makes it our turn to dance. He has drawn near to dance on our
behalf and we will now answer back by seeking him in our dance. Perhaps this is
an overly romantic way of describing the relationship between Jesus coming into
our world to find and seek us and his then turning to us and calling upon us
therefore to seek and we will find. But the idea perhaps with a bit less
romance seems to be expressed in two people’s lives who had encounters with
Jesus. Their different stories are told in the Gospel of John.
In John chapter one, after Jesus is
baptized he begins to call disciples to follow him. A disciple was someone who
followed Jesus, studied his teachings, spent his life with Jesus, and accepted
his call to be an apprentice relearning the art of life from the Master. One of
the new disciples called by Jesus was a disciple named Philip. Philip had a
friend named Nathanael and Philip went and found Philip and told him, “We have
found Him of whom Moses in the law, and also the prophets wrote – Jesus of
Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” (John 1:46) Nathanael could tell that Philip was
elated with what he believed he had discovered but he seems a little more
skeptical. He asks “Could anything good come out of Nazareth?” There are
theories why Nathanael had such a low view of Nazareth, but perhaps the most obvious
question someone might ask about a messiah coming from Nazareth was why the
Messiah sent by God would come from such a small village where few people would
ever meet him. I came from about a mile outside a village with approximately 13
homes in the village. We would never think of someone great and important, the
one who would be the central figure of history coming from our little village
of common people. We would think that God would have set this person down in a
great city or a city with great historical importance that pointed to such a
figure. Not Manville, not Nazareth, can anything exceptionally good come from
this village?
Nathanael went with Philip to
investigate Philip’s claim. As Nathanael approached Jesus, Jesus said “Behold,
an Israelite indeed, in whom is no deceit!” Nathanael must have thought he fit
this description and he replied, “How do you know me?” That is when Nathanael
had an answer that made him feel he knew this was the one he was looking for.
Jesus said to him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree
I saw you.” Such knowledge was too wonderful for Nathanael to dismiss.
Nathanael confessed that Jesus was the one, the Messiah, the Son of God.”
Whatever it was that Nathanael was doing under the fig tree, the fact that
Jesus mentioned it was understood by Nathanael as indicating that Jesus knew him
in his inner being.
“Before
Philip called you,
When
you were under the fig tree,
I
saw you.”
A similar story is told about a very
different person in the fourth chapter of John. Jesus decided that he needed to
take the direct route from Judea to Galilee, directly through Samaria. Most
Jewish travelers avoided Samaria. But Jesus decided on this occasion to go
right through Samaria. He reaches the town where it was understood that the
well the villagers used was a well that Jacob of the Old Testament had dug.
Jesus was traveling alone, as he sent his disciples to get supplies. He came to
the well where a Samaritan woman was drawing water and Jesus asked her if he
could have some water.
The Samaritan woman was curious why
Jesus, a Jewish man was asking her for water, since Jewish men usually didn’t
converse with Samaritan women. Jesus told her that if she knew who it was
speaking to her, she would ask him for living water. He told her he offered
living water that would spring up to eternal life.” She perhaps thought of him
as some elixir salesman and said “Sir, give me this water so I won’t have to
come to this well again.” At this point Jesus said to her, “Go get your
husband.” She told him she had no husband and he told her that she was speaking
honestly for she had had five husbands, but the man she was with now was not
her husband. With this she accepted that he was a prophet.
I am not sure how comfortable she
was at this point in time. She would tell others how Jesus told all that she
had done in life. It wasn’t the way she probably wanted to think about herself.
Perhaps at this point she felt unworthy, or perhaps free not to have to pretend
she wasn’t anyone but who she was. She eventually reached a point where she
said the one thing that she seemed to know from the faith. She said, “I know
that Messiah is coming, and when he comes he will teach us all things.” It was
at that very point after he had told her about what she would call all things
in her life that he said to her in a way that gave her new hope in life – “I
who speak to you am he.”
She
said,
“I know Messiah is coming,
and he will teach us all things.”
And
He said to her,
“I
who speak to you am He.”
In both of these person’s encounters
with Jesus, they discovered that as they sought to figure out who Jesus was,
they discovered that he was the one who had known them from before the time
they had known anything about him. He was the one who had known all about them
and had been looking forward to the opportunity to converse with them and to
bring to them the abundance of life that God had always intended for us when he
planned our creation. Seek and you shall find. You shall find him who from the
moment of your creation has been seeking you. He is the one who has said to
you, “Seek and you shall find.”
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