"Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please me now your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people." And he said, "My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest." And he said to him, "If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?"
And the LORD said to Moses, "This very thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name." Moses said, "Please show me your glory." Exodus 33:13-18
"A God chaser is someone whose hunger exceeds his grasp.
They are not interested in camping out on some dusty truth known to everyone. They are after the fresh presence of the Almighty. Sometimes their pursuit raises the eyebrows of the existing church, but usually they lead the church from a place of dryness back into the place of His presence. If you are a God chaser, you won’t be happy to simply follow God’s tracks. You will follow them until you apprehend His presence.
They are not content just to study God’s trail, His truths; they want to know Him. They want to know where He is and what He is doing right now. They don’t just want to study from the mouldy pages of what God has done. They are anxious to see what God is doing.
“I’m not asking you how much you know about Me. I want to ask you, ‘Do you really know Me? Do you really want Me?’”
It is simply not enough to know about God. We have churches filled with people who can win Bible trivia contests but who don’t know Him.
People are sick of the church because the church has been somewhat less than what the Book advertised. But they are also hungry for God.
Hunger means you are dissatisfied with the way it has been because it has forced you to live without Him and His fullness.
I am not happy. Why? Because I know what can happen. I know there is far more than anything we have seen or hoped for yet, and it has become a holy obsession. I want God. I want more of Him.
How long has it been since your shadow healed somebody? How long has it been since your mere presence in a room caused people to say, “I’ve got to get right with God!”?" The God Chasers, Timmy Tenney
"Faith is not some weak and pitiful emotion, but is strong and vigorous confidence built on the fact that God is holy love. And even though you cannot see Him right now and cannot understand what He is doing, you know Him. Disaster occurs in your life when you lack the mental composure that comes from establishing yourself on the eternal truth that God is holy love. Faith is the supreme effort of your life— throwing yourself with abandon and total confidence upon God." My Utmost for His Highest, May 8th
"Everything is made to centre upon the initial act of 'accepting Christ' (a term, incidentally, which is not found in the Bible) and we are not thereafter expected to crave any further revelation of God to our souls."
"There are some who will not be content with shallow logic. They will admit the force of the argument and then turn away with tears to some lonely place and pray, 'O God, show me thy glory!' They want to taste, to touch with their hearts, to see with their inner eyes the wonder that is God."
"The evil habit of seeking 'God-and' effectively prevents us from finding God in full revelation."
"Ignoble contentment takes the place of burning zeal. We are satisfied to rest in our judicial posessions and, for the most part, we bother ourselves very little about the abscence of personal experience."
"God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful, that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature."
"The answer usually given, simply that we are `cold,' will not explain all the facts. There is something more serious than coldness of heart, something that may be back of that coldness and be the cause of its existence. What is it? What but the presence of a veil in out hearts? a veil not taken away as the first veil was, but which remains there still shutting out the light and hiding the face of God from us. It is the veil of our fleshly fallen nature living on, unjudged within us, uncrucified and unrepudiated. It is the close- woven veil of the self-life which we have never truly acknowledged, of which we have been secretly ashamed, and which for these reasons we have never brought to the judgment of the cross. It is not too mysterious, this opaque veil, nor is it hard to identify. We have but to look in our own hearts and we shall see it there, sewn and patched and repaired it may be, but there nevertheless, an enemy to our lives and an effective block to our spiritual progress.
This veil is not a beautiful thing and it is not a thing about which we commonly care to talk, but I am addressing the thirsting souls who are determined to follow God, and I know they will not turn back because the way leads temporarily through the blackened hills. The urge of God within them will assure their continuing the pursuit. They will face the facts however unpleasant and endure the cross for the joy set before them. So I am bold to mane the threads out of which this inner veil is woven. It is woven of the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit. They are not something we do, they are something we are, and therein lies both their subtlety and their power.
To be specific, the self-sins are these: self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of others like them. They dwell too deep within us and are too much a part of our natures to come to our attention till the light of God is focused upon them. The grosser manifestations of these sins, egotism, exhibitionism, self-promotion, are strangely tolerated in Christian leaders even in circles of impeccable orthodoxy. They are so much in evidence as actually, form any people, to become identified with the gospel. I trust it is not a cynical observation to say that they appear these days to be a requisite for popularity in some sections of the Church visible. Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice."
"We should never forget how quite unworthy we were to be rewarded of God and honoured of men, and remember that naught in this world is worhty to be desired save only His mercy" Kristin Lavransdatter, Mistress of Husaby, Singrid Undset
"You have said, Seek My face [inquire for and require My presence as your vital need]. My heart says to You, Your face (Your presence), Lord, will I seek, inquire for, and require [of necessity and on the authority of Your Word]." Psalm 27:8
"Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and have found your own faith undermined- as I hope- I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through."
"We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true - that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow." God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens
