How to Seek God's Will

How to Seek God's Will

Jacob Schwartz

The Necessity of Seeking God’s Will

So before talking about what seeking God’s will looks like it is important to justify seeking his will and its necessity so that we can approach it with a genuine desire as opposed to doing it simply because we know that we “should”. We all know that we are supposed to seek out God's will and we know that it is good for us, but more than that, we need to believe that his will for us for pain or pleasure is the only thing that is good. James 1 17 reads “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”

The Requirement of Seeking

God oftentimes calls us to do things that are hard and will be painful but the pious mind is singularly convinced that in all things God is for what is good for him and what He is not for will only bring destruction. John Calvin writes that, “ If this be so, it now assuredly follows that your life is wickedly corrupt unless it be disposed to his service, seeing that his will ought for us to be the law by which we live. Again, you cannot behold him clearly unless you acknowledge him to be the fountainhead and source of every good. From this too would arise the desire to cleave to him and trust in him, but for the fact that man’s depravity seduces his mind from rightly seeking him.” So the part of us that wants to take control of our life back from God is the same part of man that entices us to sin and death. Therefore, to truly and properly worship God as he desires to be worshiped necessitates seeking and delighting in his will, not one's own. Psalm 16 reads“. Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.” As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight. The sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply; their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out or take their names on my lips. The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance. I bless the Lord who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me. I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure. For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption. You make known to me the path of life; in your presence, there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” From this, it is clear that it is impossible to make “good” decisions without God and the only “good” decisions a Christian can make are the ones that God has made for them.

In accordance with this is the idea that the thing the Scripture says to seek more than anything else is wisdom and as Solomon says in Proverbs 1:7 “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but true fear of the Lord necessarily leads to the love of his kingdom. Matthew 6:33 instructs “. . . seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” To seek God and his righteousness as commanded here is to seek out wisdom. These two concepts are inherently tied together because any real “wisdom” stems from the fullness of truth that is Christ and if we seek Christ's Will then we will grow in wisdom. Calvin writes that “Since we must recognize that all truth and sound doctrine proceed from God, I shall in all simplicity dare fearlessly to protest what I think of this work; I shall recognize that it is God’s more than mine. And, in truth, any praise for it must be rendered to him.” So throughout the Christian's desire to grow in wisdom and understanding, it is essential to recognize that any truth they uncover was an aspect of God before they saw it and in spite of them seeing it. In addition “For the pious mind realizes that the punishment of the impious and wicked and the reward of life eternal for the righteous equally pertain to God’s glory. Besides, this mind restrains itself from sinning, not out of dread of punishment alone; but, because it loves and reveres God as Father, it worships and adores him as Lord. Even if there were no hell, it would still shudder at offending him alone.” In view of this the faithful are absolutely commanded to seek Wisdom and understanding in our lives not just so that it can improve our life (though it absolutely will) but primarily so that we can be better prepared to worship God as he longs to be worshiped.

The Goodness of Seeking Gods Will

Now, being thoroughly aware of the absolute necessity of our seeking God's will, we must look at why we delight in his will for us. Now a lot of the time it is clear to see how God directs us in our day-to-day life for the good. I shall lay out an outline for beauty that by seeing his Goodness through beauty you may begin to see his goodness through other things (such as love, wonder, music, etc.) in your everyday observation of the world. Beauty(not the kind that makes women and men beautiful but rather the artistic kind) is something that is plainly obvious to the observer as being good. The feelings of satisfaction from the pursuit of beauty are so important to the human psyche that they made their way into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The goodness inherent to beauty is so woven into us that we can’t not pursue it. Some may say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and while they are right to the degree that not everyone has the same perception of beauty, they are wrong in that beauty exists independent of perception. Scarce is there a man who is not dumbfounded when looking upon the beauty of the Milky Way and northern lights for the first time, yet after repeated exposure, he may lose sight of that beauty, now that beauty he first saw is still there --independent of his observation of it— but he has lost his ability to see the beauty in his own eyes. Looking at creation and all of its inherent and undeniable beauty it is clear that God is a God who desires beauty for man. We are not left in a destitute and ugly world being forced to make beauty from nothingness, instead, we are given a beautiful world and encouraged to expand upon God's creativity with our own and work willingly with him in the creation of beauty. Now in his grace and love for us, he has given us this beautiful world, one could even say that this world he made is “good” and while he made it to reflect his own Glory back to him, he also created us with the ability to recognize and appreciate that beauty. We are not robots incapable of seeing beauty, when we look at art we don’t just see a bad picture we see the beauty of emotion in physical form. When we see forests we don’t just see wood and lumber, we see the beauty of the landscape God has made for us. There is no denying that God desires us to experience his Goodness through beauty on a regular basis.

The Doubts of the Flesh

Were we able to clearly see God’s goodness all of the time there would be no issue of seeking his will, yet there is. The reason being that some of the time it does not feel like God is always good, bad things happen to good people and God permits evil to exist in the world, death abounds, and not goodness can be found wherever one looks, Ecclesiastes 4 1-3 “Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.” So bad things are going to happen and it will seem like there is no justice and God has turned a blind eye to this awfulness often at the expense of the Christian and it will feel like he, as a matter of fact, is not for them. Struggling with these ideas has caused many people to turn from the faith but the faithful believe contrary to this. Calvin says, “Likewise we must firmly believe that God ceases not to regard us, even though he appears to be doing so. Yet such assurance is of faith and not of the flesh, that is to say, it is not natural to us.” To be frank, these thoughts are Sinful, they are denying God the praise and Glory that is rightfully his. Viewing these thoughts as Sin; however, allows access to the forgiveness for sin offered through Christ. While these thoughts originate from the flesh and are Sin, to deny even thinking of them is plain unrepentant sin. Just as ignoring any other sin is problematic, so is ignoring or downplaying these sinful thoughts. Luckily there is a God out there who loves to forgive us of our sins and offers us a respite in times of struggle. Psalm 91 1-3 “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.” For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence.” By acknowledging these Sinful thoughts and turning to God with any frustrations and malcontent he can forgive and relieve the soul from the weight that is sin. Before someone can seek God's will first they must approach him unveiled and genuinely desiring to know his will. Calvin says, “It is not enough to yield assent to the divine word unless that is accompanied with true and pure affection, so that our hearts are not double or divided.” Yet still, dealing with these thoughts can be intrusive, to trust God and his plan when it does not seem to be good in any way is difficult. Often time a perspective shift like that of Jobs is needed to soothe the soul. John Piper writes, “When God looks at a painful or wicked event through His narrow lens, He sees the tragedy of the sin for what it is in itself, and He is angered and grieved: “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord God” (Ezekiel 18:32). But when God looks at a painful or wicked event through His wide-angle lens, He sees the tragedy of the sin in relation to everything leading up to it and everything flowing out from it. He sees it in relation to all the connections and effects that form a pattern, or mosaic, stretching into eternity. This mosaic in all its parts—good and evil—brings Him delight”. To clarify God does not need to shift his own perspective of events, he is more than capable of perceiving through both lenses simultaneously, this is just an explanation for our own limited perspective. This perspective shift is contrary to our nature and perspective of life but to see the truth we must shift our thinking. Romans 8 6-7 reads “For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.” To aid in focusing on the spirit the idea that God permits no evil to exist in this world that he cannot draw good out of tends to be quite comforting to meditate on.

Having addressed the inherent doubts and sins of the flesh in our seeking of the will of God we can now begin to look to see what his genuine plan for us looks like. Scripture tells us that Jer 29 11 “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” Matthew 7 7-11 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” Psalms 84 11 “For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.” Jeremiah 31 14 “I will feast the soul of the priests with abundance, and my people shall be satisfied with my goodness, declares the Lord.” Now, this is not the prosperity gospel, God's will for us is not all sunshine and rainbows, but it is all good. This is what James means when he writes James 1 2-4 “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” Paul shares a similar sentiment in Col 1 24 “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church,” that what is good and what is pleasant are not the same. That what is good for us and the church are often times suffering, that the mosaic of God's goodness and greatness in the believer's life necessitates the use of dark tiles, yet even in that darkness it is what is “good” for us. As such it is up to us to rejoice in the suffering we are enduring and to rejoice in all their hardships. The joy and peace of God is something that is never withheld from us, instead the Christian oftentimes simply fails to submit themselves to the mercy of God and foolishly struggles to be happy on their own apart from the peace of God. It is only by finding the totality of Happiness in Christ and the comparative insignificance of every other thing on earth that we can begin to see what Paul means when he says Philippians 3 8 “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” It is only by recognizing the supreme value of Christ and the Greatness of knowing him that we can recognize what God is promising us when he tells us that we will be given all good things.

Closing Prayer

“Father God I ask that you forgive me for my weak desires, that instead of seeking satisfaction in knowing You and Your Son I have become preoccupied with cheap pleasantness offered by this world. I have confused the goodness you have imbued in this world with the goodness of your presence and I’m sorry. I ask that you show me mercy and forgive me of this sin. Father God, I am asking that you restore my heart and purify it, that you would remove any idols I have placed above you, including and especially placing my own will above yours. You alone know what is good for me, and it is in you alone that I trust my complete satisfaction. I am willing to accept whatever suffering you have for me so that I may be better able to know and worship your Son who took the fullness of the suffering and humiliation I deserve. I am thankful that you have chosen me to know you and I am thankful that you want me to know you better. Lord, I ask that you prepare my heart for your instruction and that I would be responsive to the prompting of the Holy Spirit. I ask all these things in the name of my savior, my Lord, and my God, your Son Jesus Christ Amen.”

What Seeking Looks Like

Seeking obedience to God’s will is perhaps the most important and difficult thing about Christian living. It is established that man cannot choose to follow God’s will for him apart from God’s direct intervention, yet still, God has granted man free will and requires willing cooperation in our obedience. God is the ultimate gentleman in that he will not force himself upon anyone who does not absolutely desire him. Luckily the Holy Spirit dwells within all the Faithful and empowers them at all times to choose God, the only issue is the believer's ability to force his sinful flesh to submit to God. The faithful’s ability to be obedient to God's will through the Holy Spirit is a direct reflection of their relationship with God. To be obedient to the will of the Father is the same as to be obedient to the prompting of the Spirit as God will never contradict himself. As such obedience to one aspect of the Godhead is obedience to all aspects of the Godhead. It follows that obedience to and awareness of God's will can be cultivated by the deliberate pursuit of all three aspects of the Trinity.

The Commonalities of Pursuing God

Now there are some elements universal to all aspects of the trinity. All are perfect and good and want praise and thanks for the goodness they’ve done in our life. All are pure and holy and righteous. And perhaps most compellingly all desire to be known. God’s desire to be known is evidenced across all of the story of the Bible. Chip Ingram in The Real God writes that “The moment the gospel helps us realize who we are and what we have done, what follows has often been called a powerful drawing toward God that brings us to repentance and Salvation. That drawing, seen from God’s side, is his desire to be known by you and me.” Now his desire to be known is something that comes according to his timing. The extent to which the Father, the Son, and The Holy Spirit want to be known is beyond human comprehension, but the degree to which they reveal themselves to the believer are up to them. To try and rush their timing or delve to a deeper level of relationship than they have called the believer is the height of arrogance. Calvin writes that, “From this it follows that their stupidity is not excusable, since it is caused not only by vain curiosity but by an inordinate desire to know more than is fitting, joined with a false confidence.” If God doesn’t truly reveal an aspect of himself to a believer then any supposing of the believer done is fashioning God into who the believer thinks God should be as opposed to who God says he is. Exodus 33:18-20 gives a clear example of this “Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” And [God] said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” Even Moses was not permitted to see the fullness of the glory of God, if he were to try and know more of God than God was willing to show then he would have been destroyed. In the pursuit of God, let us be content with the depth that God has revealed himself while yet still yearning to know him more. Succinctly, God must set the depth and intimacy of the relationship yet the believer should always desire a deeper understanding and knowledge of who God is. While all attributes of God are common and shared between them, certain attributes are more typically associated with one aspect of the Godhead than the others. For example, majesty though common to all is most typically associated with Father God. Now that is not to say that the other aspects have less of an attribute or are less God, after all in John 14:8-9 “Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” and John 8 54 says“Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’” The different aspects of God all point to one another, yet they are distinct and deserve praise for distinct things. Now an idea that is common to all the aspects but that is explored and demonstrated with the Father is intentionality. God must be pursed intentionally and patiently with deliberate listening being the center of the prayer not something that's tacked on at the end. Wisdom comes down to not telling God how things ought to be done but listening submissively to his direction.

What Pursuing God the Father Looks Like

Father God is the first among equals of the Godhead and probably the aspect of God most commonly praised. Pursuing a relationship with him is the most well-documented and defined of the three aspects of God. To see how to pursue Father God and seek his will we have the best example of all, Jesus. Jesus while he was on earth was in full accordance and living his life to worship Father God. The Lord's prayer is the very model of how we ought to pray to God, but more than just prayer Jesus showed us how to be intentionally devoted to God. Jesus also demonstrated the necessity of solemn and private prayer. Luke 5 16 says “But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray.” So when Jesus was seeking the will of the father he would withdraw from the world and intentionally and deliberately focus on communicating with Father God. Similarly, it is essential to the Christian that they spend devoted time in intentional prayer with the Father seeking His heart and will. And it is essential that the prayer is not rushed, Luke 6:12 reads “In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God.” Jesus would spend the whole night in communication with the Father on whom he depended. To try and cram prayer into one's schedule is to pay lip service to the relationship, real relationships require time and communication. The key to cultivating any relationship is giving it the time it is worth. If one were to meet up with a friend for lunch, sit down, order, immediately start talking about “how great the other person is, how thankful they are to know them, how great a friend they have been in the past, how they want their friend to help them with a project, and how they can’t wait to see them again” before getting their order and immediately leaving, not allowing the other person to get a word in edgewise that friendship would be destined to fail. Yet too many believers approach their prayers to God the same way, they show up, worship, thank him for what he has done, ask him to do more for them, and then promptly leave. Psalm 46 10 says to “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!” If a meaningful relationship with God is to be pursued, he must be given time to speak and the Believer must be in a position to listen. Tozer writes, “A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar.” The only solution to this is to patiently dwell in the presence of God, to be still, and to know him. As a law of life people spend their time on what is most important to them, when God is crammed into his 15 minutes where are the priorities of the believer? Are they focusing on God and his Will or their own?

Jesus isn’t the only great model for pursuing the Father, King David has been called a man after God's own heart(Acts 13:22), that is not to say that he had the heart of God(see Second Samuel Chapter 11), but rather the focus of his heart was pursuing Gods will. After he commits one of the great sins of the Old Testament in the killing of Uriah and God's righteous judgment is proclaimed against him David fasts in hope God might have mercy. When God does not he writes one of the great psalms, Psalm 51. Even after God has punished David, David still trusts in the goodness of God. The Psalms are the personal prayers of someone whose ultimate hope is God. Now apart from the model of faith required to pray such a prayer David models all sorts of prayer for us throughout the Psalms. A key theme throughout the Psalms is the fully honest approach to God, to come before him in all of our unrighteousness and unfaithfulness and subject ourselves to his mercy. Tozer writes that, “First of all he should put away all defense and make no attempt to excuse himself either in his own eyes or before the Lord. Whoever defends himself will have himself for his defense, and he will have no other; but let him come defenseless before the Lord and he will have for his defender no less than God Himself. Let the inquiring Christian trample under foot every slippery trick of his deceitful heart and insist upon frank and open relations with the Lord. Then he should remember that this is holy business. No careless or casual dealings will suffice. Let him come to God in full determination to be heard. Let him insist that God accept his all, that He take things out of his heart and Himself reign there in power. It may be he will need to become specific, to name things and people by their names one by one. If he will become drastic enough he can shorten the time of his travail from years to minutes and enter the good land long before his slower brethren who coddle their feelings and insist upon caution in their dealings with God.”

What Pursuing God the Son Looks Like

1 Corinthians 2:2 “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Here the Apostle Paul boils down the ministry of Jesus on Earth to its simplest form in the same way Jesus boiled down the law to two points. To know Christ and to know him crucified. Sounds simple-- God became flesh and died for our sins, he was good and perfect and loved us ,so he died for us— a basic statement of belief any third grader could give you. But to know Christ and to know Him crucified is a task so overwhelming thinking about it now feels suffocating. Tozer writes that, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” Before looking outward at who Christ is, lets start by looking inward at who we are. By looking at ourselves we can begin to see the ways in which we fall short of some abstract ideal that we hold ourselves to, we can see our shame and from that shame conceive of righteousness, we can see our fears and from that fear conceive of security. In all of our lacking we can conceive of someone who lacks not, that someone is Christ. Now as we grow in closer in relation to Christ and see his perfection more and more, God will reveal our own hidden faults and shortcomings are revealed more and more glaringly. And as those shortcomings are revealed we can see more still of how both like and unlike us Christ truly is. While we are yet here on Earth we will never be able to fully apprehend exactly who Christ is but to pursue that deeper understanding of him is the highest calling of the Christian life. As such our pursuit of Christ must start with a humble submission to his supremacy to us in every way. Accepting Christ as the perfect human and the way he lived in perfect accordance with the Father and his will we have a model for what pursuing him looks like. If we desire to truly know someone we must involve ourselves in their lives, how could we say we know someone if we have never done what they do? Therefore to know Christ we must involve ourselves in his life's work, loving each other as we love ourselves and reconciling people to the Father through Christ. James 2:14-26 says

James 2:14–26 ESV

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder! Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works; and the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”—and he was called a friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. And in the same way was not also Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.

We may have this knowledge of Christ and this love for him, but if that knowledge is not drawing us into deeper love and service to one another then our faith is dead and meaningless. Now our works must flow from our faith and act as the appointed consummation of our love of Christ, but how can one love Christ and not love those who he died for also? Now in terms of reconciling people to the Father through Christ John 21:15-19 reads,

John 21:15–19 ESV

When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Feed my lambs.” He said to him a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Tend my sheep.” He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” and he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.” (This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God.) And after saying this he said to him, “Follow me.”

If we truly love Jesus as much as we claim to then who are we feeding are? Are we feeding his sheep or are we wandering about snacking on grass for ourselves? Corrie Ten Boon said, “you are either a missionary or a mission field,” and while not everyone is called to international missions we are all called to be missionaries to where God has us. 2 Corinthians 5 20 reads “Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” To know Christ we must first see him as he has revealed himself to us, then we must pursue Him by loving as He did, then pursue Him by reconciling as He did.

But that's only half of what Paul said he knew when visiting the Corinthians. He also knew Christ crucified and its this knowledge that imparts the crushing force that overwhelms expression. First Corinthians 1:18 says “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” and First Corinthians 1:22-23 says “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.” The death of Christ is at least two of the great mysteries of the faith, how could a perfect, all-sufficient, and omnipotent, omniscient and eternal God take any aspect of himself and make it lesser, make it less omniscient, less omnipotent and distinctively capable of experiencing Death without making himself any less and why would an all-sufficient God die for something he doesn’t need? To me it seems like he was not made less than because he didn’t lose any of those things in taking on his humanity, it seems to me that he was both God and Man from the beginning and the only thing that changed was his expression of himself. By “limiting himself” he wasn’t incapable of doing anything that God was capable of, instead he choose to restrain himself to more fully express his perfection. Just as a parent holding back when playing sports with children doesn’t lose any of their strength or speed so to Jesus in limiting himself to his humanity didn’t lose any of his majesty or power as God. Rather he came and finally answered the question posed by Job of how can a perfect God know what its like to be a Man. And unlike Job, Jesus never questioned God in his suffering and death.

LEAPING LEAPING LEAPING LEAPING LEAPING LEAPING LEAPING

What Pursuing the Holy Spirit Looks Like

Devoted time in the Bible, praise for him perfectly fulfilling his role and acknowledgment of him