Pursuing God

The title of this post are the actual words I put into google this morning while searching. I cannot describe for you the longings of my heart any more than I could draw for you the Eifle Tower. My skills just aren't that adept.
The best description I can give you of myself right now is 'unsettled'. Every now and then there comes a period where I'll struggle against God. My actions are no more sophisticated than those of my foster child screaming and stomping his feet. I adamantly begin clamoring for Gods attention and will be entirely unsatisfied until I get it. That is where I've found myself the last several days, and how I ended up googling 'pursuing God'.

"The Christian Lifestyle" This link takes you to one of the results I ended up at this morning. The entire page is long, but -- to me -- well worth reading. Here are just a few snippets that I found some meat in.

"Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded."James 4:8

...However we must ever keep in mind that "we pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit" (A. W. Tozer). "The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but the outworking of that impulse is our following hard after Him. All the time we are pursuing Him we are already in His hand" (A. W. T.).
Psalm 84:2 says, "My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the LORD: my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God." Our pursuit of God is created by our hunger for righteousness. For those that drink deeply from the well of righteousness there is a longing for God that produces a healthy heart relationship with the Lord. Our heart is not painfully unsatisfied, but rather has found the source by which nothing else could supply its needs.

It is a great privilege for Christians in that they may "draw near" unto God as accepted worshippers. It is both an act of the mind and heart whereby the soul is under the sweet influence of the Spirit and it irresistibly turns to God in Christ as its only center and rest (A. W. T.). "There is, therefore, no condition of heart more to be sought after than this desire to draw nigh to God, since his law or requirement is that we furnish this evidence of a genuine longing for the special blessings He desires to give us. This being true, we must agree that the highest state is one of hunger and thirst, intense desire for more life, more holiness, more power, closer communion with God, more of the divine likeness in the soul" (J.J. Blackburn). Psalm 63:1-4 says, "1 O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is; 2 To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary. 3 Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee. 4 Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in thy name." Here the Psalmist indicates that he is not able to do without God. His greatest desire is to seek out the hungering and thirsting that he has for the mere pleasure of looking upon Christ. It is with the whole of the soul that he seeks God; it is his wish to seek God in such a manner as a merchant would seek that which is most precious to his trade and profit. Such should be our desire to draw nigh unto God. With our every effort we should seek that close and intimate relationship that would fulfill the desires of our soul. We should seek to gaze upon that which is holy, to run headlong with blind desire into the arms of our loving Father.

...God then is the strength of our soul; He is our sufficiency; we then believe that we are not self-sufficient in the changing of the heart; we cannot on our own come to a self-resolution; we cannot institute the change without the power of God. He works in us both to will and to do, and that of His good pleasure. In our pursuit of God we grow close to Him, we become more holy, and in the process, our definition, understanding, and application of the divine law so conditions the soul that we operate according to a "pure conscience."