Articles
Our Deepest Need, Our Greatest Reward
"But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6).
GOD REWARDS THOSE WHO DILIGENTLY SEEK HIM. In order to come to God, we must believe this great truth. Confidently acting on our faith and passionately pursuing Him, we will find the God whom we were created to enjoy. He has promised that we will not only find Him, but we will find in Him all that our hearts truly desire. In times of comfort no less than in times of pain, we must always seek God. We must seek Him with diligence and determination — as well as love — trusting that at the end of our search He Himself, and He alone, will be our reward.
Two things are needed. We must see that our deepest need is for God, and then we must seek the fulfillment of that need in God only. The first of these is perhaps the hardest to do. On the surface, we seem to desire so many more visible and more immediate things that it’s hard to understand how deeply we need God. But deeper than all our other wants is this ultimate desire: our longing for God. We long for Him because we were created for Him, and when we honestly and humbly recognize the importance of this need, then we are ready to seek God. We must devote ourselves wholeheartedly to finding Him, our most fervent hope being to come into His presence and enjoy His fellowship.
We tend not to seek God when our lives are comfortable. If our temporal needs are met, we imagine that we can take care of ourselves and we forget about God. For this reason, God lets us suffer some deprivation. The needs that go unmet may differ from person to person, but each of us will have our heart broken in some ways. We will be taught to do without some of the things we deeply need, in order to learn that what we were created to enjoy is not fully available in this world.
Only God can perfectly satisfy our hunger and our thirst, and He is always leading us in the direction of satisfaction in Him. He is teaching us, if we have the hearts to learn, that He is the only thing we can’t do without.
“Above all am I convinced of the need, irrevocable and inescapable, of every human heart, for God. No matter how we try to escape, to lose ourselves in restless seeking, we cannot separate ourselves from our divine source. There is no substitute for God” (A. J. Cronin).
