I need you to need Me, I'd love you to love Me, I beg you to Beg me!
OK, maybe God doesn't exactly need me to need Him... but I do. And He wants me to. He begs me to beg Him.
Jump on over to Judges 10. I know you're probably not really going to read it, so I'll summarize. God's people have been promised an inheritance, sold into slavery, miraculously delivered from slavery, led to their inheritance, and told to go in and kick out the enemy and take what's theirs. So what do they do? They go in and try to make friends with the enemy. Anybody who's seen the movie Mean Girls (or lived through middle school) should know how that always turns out. So the whole book of Judges is about the people of Israel going through a cycle of seeking God, turning aside, crawling back, then raising kids who don't know God and so perpetuate the cycle for a painful twenty-one chapters. Generation after generation learning the same hard lesson -- that God wants them to be His. Now, Judges 10.
This chapter gets to me every time. The Israelites start serving other gods, so the real God lets them go. He sells them into the hands of their enemies. And once again, they cry out to Him, but He refuses and lets them be away for awhile. They continue to beg for deliverance. And right there, in the middle of this sin-cycle book, is a beautiful statement of redemption: "He could bear the misery of Israel no longer." (v. 16)
He wants them. They need Him. They beg Him. They love Him.
God wants us to belong to Him, yes, and He wants to redeem us and deliver us. But He doesn't want it just once! The Israelites didn't get brought out of Egypt and magically become the pure, faithful bride. They failed, and quite miserably, and quite often. I fail quite miserably and quite often. God didn't keep delivering Israel because they were perfect, and He doesn't want me because I'm perfect. I'm horribly flawed and ashamed. He wants me for Himself. He wants to be known, to be needed and loved and sought after and begged. Why? Because He is God. I've spent a lot of time trying to think of a way to explain why we should want to know God, and I can't come up with any other reason but to say that He is God and He wants me to know Him, and that fact alone blows my mind.
So what does this look like? How do I avoid the "being sold into the hands of [insert enemy]" part and skip straight to the "knowing God" part? I don't think it's the magic prayer or the magic water or the magic verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-prayer-chorus potion.
I'm talking about Psalm 119 and getting up early so I can talk to my God before Monday tries to punch me in the face, arming myself with something to throw back in self-defense.
It's Matthew 6 and seeking the Kingdom first -- seeking God's purpose in being nice to a girl who gets on my nerves and flirts with my crush, because that's the righteous thing to do and maybe she needs it. Maybe I need it, too.
It's Phillippians 4 and telling God exactly what I'm anxious about, and then not even being able to understand why suddenly I'm not anxious anymore. It's watching Him take care of what I was anxious about, because I stopped making the enemy my god and instead started giving it to my God.
I want to know God, and I can't be getting to know God when I'm anxious about (read: obsessing over) something else. I can't be getting to know God when I'm not spending time with Him because I have to read for class and make coffee. Or when I'm marinating in self-pity, which amounts to self-saturation, which is the opposite of getting to know God. Do you get my point?
That song has been stuck in my head for weeks now, and I think He's trying to tell me something.
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