Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: October 14th

THE SEARCH THAT ALWAYS FINDS

And ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall search for Me with all your heart. - Jeremiah 29:13

Anything is possible rather than that a whole-hearted search after God should be a vain search. For there are, in that case, two seekers - God is seeking for us more truly than we are seeking for Him. And if the mother is seeking her child, and the child its mother, it will be a very wide desert where they will not meet. "The Father seeketh such to worship Him." That is - the Divine activity is going about the world, searching for the heart that turns to Him, and it cannot but be that they that seek Him shall find Him. Open the windows, and you cannot keep out the sunshine; open your lungs, and you cannot keep out the air. "In Him we live and move and have our being "; and if our desires turn, however blindly, to Him, and are accompanied with the appropriate action, heaven and earth are more likely to rush to ruin than such a searching to be frustrated of its aim.

Is there anything else in the world of which you can say, "Seek, and ye shall find "? We, with white hairs on our heads, have we found anything else in which the chase was sure to result in the capture; in which capture was sure to yield all that the hunter had wished? There is only one direction for a man’s desires and aims in which disappointment is an impossibility. In all other regions the most that can be promised is, "Seek, and perhaps you will find "; and when you have found, perhaps you will find that the prize was not worth the finding. Or it is, "Seek, and possibly you may find; and after you have found and kept for a little while, you may lose." Though it may be

" Better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all,"

a treasure that slips out of our fingers is not the best treasure that we can search for. But here the assurance is, " Seek, and ye shall find; and shall never lose. Find, and you shall always possess."

What would you think of a company of gold-seekers, hunting about in some exhausted claim for hypothetical grains- ragged, starving - and all the while in the next gully were lying lumps of gold for the picking up? And that figure fairly represents what people do and suffer who seek for good and do not seek for God. That turning of mind, will, and affection towards God must be ours if we are to be among those wise and happy seekers who are sure to find that which- or rather Him whom - they seek, and to rest in Him whom they find. The famous saying which prefers the search after to the possession of truth is more proud than wise; but the comparison which it institutes is so far true that there is a joy in the aspiration after and the efforts towards truth only less joyous than that which attends its attainment. But truth divorced from God is finite and may pall, become familiar and lose its radiance, like a gathered flower; and hence the preference for the search is intelligible, though one-sided. But God does not pall, and the more we find Him the more we delight in Him. The highest bliss is to find Him, the next highest is to seek Him; and, since seeking and finding Him are never wholly separate, these kindred joys blend their lights in the experience of all His children.