SEARCHING
FOR GOD
See also: Longing for God
Whosoever walks toward God one cubit, God runs toward him twain.
Author unknown
Desire only God, and you heart will be satisfied.
Augustine of Hippo
If the pleasures of love can attract a man to a woman, if hunger and loneliness can make a man travel miles in search of food and shelter, how much more will the desire for truth and holiness make a man seek God.
Augustine of Hippo
We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread,
And long to feast upon Thee still:
We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead
And thirst our souls from Thee to fill.
St Bernard
The kingdom of heaven is not for the well-meaning but for the desperate.
James Denney
If we seek God for our own good and profit, we are not seeking God.
Johannes Eckhart
It is God’s will that we have three things in our seeking:
1. The first is that we seek earnestly and diligently, without sloth, and, as it may be through His grace, without unreasonable heaviness and vain sorrow.
2. The second is, that we abide Him steadfastly for His love, without murmuring and striving against Him, to our life’s end: for it shall last but awhile.
3. The third is that we trust in Him mightily of full assured faith. For it is His will that we know that He shall appear suddenly and blissfully to all that love Him.
Julian of Norwich
Seeking with faith, hope and love pleases our Lord and finding him pleases the soul, filling it full of joy. And so I learnt that as long as God allows us to struggle on this earth, seeking is as good as seeing.
Julian of Norwich
Human beings need not despair and go on an eternal search for the Eternal, for the Eternal has come to the temporal.
Steve Kumar
There’s a God we want and there’s a God who is and they are not the same God. The turning point comes when we stop seeking the God we want and start seeking the God who is.
Patrick Morley
There are three kinds of people in the world; those who have sought God and found Him and now serve Him, those who are seeking Him but have not yet found Him, and those who neither seek Him nor find Him. The first are reasonable and happy, the second reasonable and unhappy, and the third unreasonable and unhappy.
Blaise Pascal
Religion is so great a thing that it is right that those who will not take the trouble to seek it if it be obscure, should be deprived of it.
Blaise Pascal
Seek the true faith, by all manner of means, but do not spend a whole life in finding it, lest you be like a workman who wastes the whole day in looking for his tools.
C.H. Spurgeon
When I was coming to Christ, I thought I was doing it all myself, and though I sought the Lord earnestly, I had no idea the Lord was seeking me. The thought struck me, “How did you come to be a Christian?” I sought the Lord. “But how did you come to seek the Lord?” The truth flashed across my mind in a moment – I should not have sought Him unless there had come some previous influence in my mind to make me seek Him.
C.H. Spurgeon
If you seek your Lord Jesus in all things you will truly find Him, but if you seek yourself you will find yourself, and that will be to your own great loss.
Thomas à Kempis
He who seeks any other thing in religion than God alone and the salvation of his soul will find nothing there but trouble and sorrow.
Thomas à Kempis
Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and bring Him nearer to our own image.
A.W. Tozer
We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit.
A.W. Tozer
So long as we imagine it is we who have to look for God, we must often lose heart. But it is the other way about – He is looking for us.
Simon Tugwell
He who begins by seeking God within himself may end by confusing himself with God.
B.B. Warfield
Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until a man has found God, and been found by God, he begins at no beginning and works to no end.
H.G. Wells