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"Is there a Seeker in the House?

 

A preliminary page about the nature of 'seeking'

 

Why are you here?

If you are reading this page it is presumably because you wonder about the Christian faith and you wonder about what it means to be a Christian. 

There is a sense in which this page is to help you prepare to be a seeker.

You see this is the strange thing about the Christian faith, people come to it because they seek and God draws.  You possibly thought you were here by accident.  

Well maybe, but just maybe it was that God drew you here because He wants to help you - that's an interesting thought isn't it!

Well anyway, from your point of view you're seeking, you're wondering (in a small measure at least) about this "Christian faith thing".

 

The Nature of these Pages

The pages you will find on this Web site have a lot of writing on them and they are not fancy and sophisticated.    You're not going to come here unless it was by chance and now you're wondering -  or you were drawn here!

In other words, you're here with a purpose.  You're a man or woman with a mission!  You want to find out.

Because of that, we've sought to provide you with simple and straight forward, (hopefully) easily read pages about various aspects of the Christian faith.  

To navigate the pages, keep going back to the main contents page of the Resource section.  Thereafter choose an area to investigate and then a page to read.

 

The Nature of Seeking

a) Seeking Whole Heartedly?

Now we come to the real purpose of this page. You need to understand that if you are seeking, you will only find if you come REALLY seeking.

Early on in the Bible, in Deuteronomy 4:29 we find God telling His people that they would find Him if they week seek Him with all their heart and with all their soul. Also the same is in  Jeremiah 29:13.

In Matthew 7:7 Jesus Christ exhorts us to seek and go on seeking (that is the tense of the verb there).

The call, therefore, is to be totally whole-hearted in seeking God.

 

b) Seeking in Response to Something in you

Now you have something within you that yearns to grasp more than mere material reality.

As the writer in Ecclesiastes wrote, in Eccles 3:11, God has set eternity in the hearts of men. In other words, He made you in such a way that there's a bit of you that reaches out for eternity, that reaches out for Him.

He's put it there and from time to time it's like it calls to you.  That's why you so often find people discussing and debating "Is there meaning to life?" 

What a question for a bunch of molecules to ask!  Fancy a great philosopher like Bertrand Russell spending so much of his life pondering great philosophical questions, if he's just a bunch of atoms formed by time plus chance.  Why ponder such things, they're meaningless if that's all you are!

But something in you says you're more than that.  Something in you says that there is a reality to the concept of the word "meaning".  You want to find meaning in life.  That's because God has set eternity in you and now you're responding to that.

 

c) Distractors

Why has it taken so long to come seeking?  Well one reason is that the awareness grows within us, and so perhaps there has been something gnawing away within you until eventually when the opportunity came, you came looking.

But another reason for our slowness to seek God, is that whenever we feel comfortable we sit back and do nothing. 

Affluence is good and is God-given, but it can also make us sleepy when it comes to seeking. 

"I'm all right now, I'll go looking sometime later," is the response of the comfortable person.  It takes the knocks of life to wake us up to the fact that "something is missing in my life."

Busy-ness is something else that distracts us. "I'm too busy to spend time searching."

So we just let the pressures of life squeeze us and time passes and then more time, and before we know where we are the years will have passed and we come to midlife and start wondering what we have achieved.  

And then it dawns on us - very little!  Something was missing and we squandered the years without realising it.

 

d) But how serious?

That is the crucial question then.  Something has brought you to the place of questioning.  Something has brought you here.  So how serious will you be in your searching?

Will you join the ranks of those people who give a casual look and say, "Oh there was nothing, it was pointless"?  If you're going to be half-hearted you might as well give up now.  Go on, shut down the site, go back to mundane things, you'll be wasting your time here!

But if there is something in you that is stirring, that is saying, "Yes, I MUST go for this," then don't be put off.   Resolve today that you are going to keep on and keep on until you get the answers to the questions that are going round inside of you.   Don't' be distracted.   Don't let anyone or anything put you off!

A true seeker will keep on until you find what you're looking for, and don't accept any substitutes!

 

Around the Site

If you're going to have a look around this site, the two main areas you probably want to go for are this present one, "What it means to be a Christian", and "The Trustworthiness of the Bible" which will give you confidence in the Bible itself, which is the Christian's manual.

If you are someone who struggles with the whole question of evil, then the area called "The Problem of Evil" may be an early stopping place for you.

Whichever it is, we hope that you will be able to find answers on this site to the questions you have within you.

                  

 

If you want to ask anything further about these things, contact Tony Thomas, the senior leader of Rochford Community Church, who is only too willing to talk these things through with you:

                                               tony.thomas@rochfordcc.co.uk

 

To see the full range of resources on this site CLICK HERE