1.
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".
2.
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.
3.
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! Keep searching, keep seeking. This site
is here to help you!