People are Looking for God

People are Looking for God. Matthew Three.

Yesterday at the close of a radio interview broadcast nationally out of Texas, the host gave me a couple minutes to say anything I wanted to close the segment. Anything?! Wow, what a privilege, what a responsibility to use my words to point people to God. After buying a few moments to think, with a protracted ‘Hmmm. . .’ I said something like this:

“This is what I’ve learned ~ all people--no matter their age or ethnicity

or social standing, no matter where they are in the world--need God.

And they find themselves looking to fill a hole inside that can only be

filled by God’s great love. I am not talking about religion, but the greatest love there has ever been—the love of God for every individual. The great love of God changes everything, and once we find it, launches us into the greatest adventure of our lives.”

People are looking for God. Pascal had it right: There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.1

More than 2,000 years ago, the most important person ever to point people to Jesus came on the scene—John the Baptist. People flocked to the Judean desert to hear his message, which in itself was unusual, ‘Repent!’ Isaiah had prophesied that John would be the “voice crying out in the wilderness, ‘prepare the way for the Lord; make his paths straight!’”2 [Click to read Matthew chapter three: http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=2897208223]

Why would people travel some distance out to the backcountry to hear some wild and woolly-looking, desert-dweller preach at them? They were looking for God. You see, the culture they lived in was incredibly depraved, and any who were inclined to be at all righteous, were looking for the Messiah, wanting to be ready to receive him. Of the time, “It has been rightly said, that the idea of conscience, as we understand it, was unknown to heathenism. Absolute right did not exist. Might was right. The social relations exhibited, if possible, even deeper corruption. The sanctity of marriage had ceased, and there was almost an entire cessation of marriage. Abortion, and the exposure and murder of newly-born children, were common and tolerated; unnatural vices, which even the greatest philosophers practiced, if not advocated, attained proportions which defy description.”4

They were looking for God . . . God did not disappoint. ‘When the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law’.5 Matthew wrote, “Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan River to be baptized by him.”6 Indeed Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River by John, not because he needed cleansing from sin, but rather to identify with us. What a scene--all three persons of the Trinity fully represented in one event, just like at the dawn of Creation. The Father speaks, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”7, and the Spirit anoints the Son.

Don’t miss the point: when people earnestly look for God, they find him. Since man was conceived of in the heart of God, he has made himself available to all, saying:

“Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me,

and I will listen to you.

And you will seek Me and find Me,

When you search for me with all your heart.”8

Isn’t that just like God? People are looking for God, but first, he looked for them.

Christine

PastorWoman.com

1 – Blaise Pascal, French mathmetician and philosopher

2 - Isaiah 40.3

3 - Oremus Bible

4 – Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Alfred Edersheim

5 – Galatians 4.4, NASB

6 - Matthew 3.13

7 – Matthew 3.16-17, paraphrased

8 - Jeremiah 29.12-13