Anna wrote me recently:
What a fantastic, practical question. It might not feel like a glamorous answer, the hands-down, number-one way to pursue Christ is to study your Bible.
If you’re anything like me, there’s a big disconnect there. I want to know a living Person, and you’re telling me to pick up a book?
Yep. One day soon—if all your hope for acceptance by God lies in Christ—you will interact in person with God. Not just that, you will live with Him (Rev. 21:3). But in the meantime, God has left us a Book telling us what He’s like. That’s how He’s chosen to reveal Himself.
So in order to make sure you’re getting to know God as He actually is—and not as you want Him to be—you need to meticulously pour over this Book to learn about Him.
If that sounds too impersonal and intellectual to you, know this: just ’cause you’re using your head doesn’t mean you won’t be engaging your heart. Quite the opposite, actually.
What a Yale Study Has to Teach Us About Loving God
I learned about Paul Bloom’s “pleasure research” through this blog post by Jen Wilkin. Mr. Bloom, a Yale professor, set out to discover how we find pleasure in things, and this is what he learned: Pleasure doesn’t just automatically happen by doing something over and over; it develops as we learn more about it.
For example, the more you learn about Star Wars, the more pleasure you’ll experience from it (just ask my husband). Similarly, “If we want to feel deeply about God,” Jen Wilkin writes, “we must learn to think deeply about Him. The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.”
May I give you a recent example from my own life?
My husband and I are studying a doozy of a book called The Person of Christ by Donald Macleod. As I’ve stretched my brain and thought about the “pre-existence of Christ” (meaning that Jesus existed with God, as God, before He was born to a virgin in Bethlehem), I’ve been blown away. Check out this paragraph by Mr. Macleod to see what I mean:
How about it? Are you willing to try pursuing God through learning about Him in His Word? If so, read my post on how to study the Bibel for yourself.
What Does Pursuing God Look Like was originally posted on LiesYoungWomenBelieve.com.
Paula (Hendricks) Marsteller is a compassionate, bold Christian communicator offering you gospel hope, thought-provoking questions, and practical help along the way.
