Pastor of the Well Worship Center, he's going to come preach God's Word to us today. Make him feel welcome if you would today. If you have your Bibles with you this morning, would you turn to the book of Jeremiah 29. As you're turning there, I just want to take a quick moment to just say thank you to this church, to Brother Jeremy and his family. It has been encouraging to me already to be here. The accommodations at the hotel and the little snack basket that we were given have just been very encouraging, and you guys do a terrific job. I have the opportunity to travel and see many different various churches. And the way that you guys keep your place up is great. It makes a difference. It's clean. It's organized. It's nice. You can tell that you care about what God has given you. And you can trust that as you're faithful in little things, God will give you more to be faithful for. And I just appreciate this church. I appreciate Brother Derek and his ministry and his message this morning. I pray that God will help us. As we look at Jeremiah chapter 29, verses 11 through 13, we're going to change gears a little bit this morning. Jeremiah chapter 29 verses 11 through 13. If you would, would you please stand as we honor the reading of the Word of God this morning. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end. Then shall ye call upon Me, and ye shall go and pray unto Me, and I will hearken unto you. And ye shall seek Me and find Me, when ye shall search for Me with all of your heart. Let us pray. Father, we love You this morning. We're grateful for all that You're doing. We're grateful, Father, for Your Spirit that's been moving amongst us. Father, we ask God that as we come to Your Word that You would circumcise the ears of our hearts that we might be able to hear You this morning. God, may we believe that You are a rewarder of those who diligently seek You. May we believe that You do desire to speak to us this morning. God, I pray You'd help me to speak clearly, what You'd have me to say, nothing more, nothing less. Move. Once again, we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. I was going to share my heart with you this morning. Some of the things that God leads me to preach are often simple. The difficult thing about preaching simple things is that we already think we know what's being said, and we tend to tune it out. And so I just pray that God would help us not to do that this morning. Don't miss what God has to say because it's simple. Our text tells us God thinks of you. It's an amazing thought. God thinks about you. He does. He thinks about us. He thinks about me. It says that not only does He think about us, but that He longs to be found by us. His desire. God's not actually hiding. God's not making it difficult for us to find Him. He desires to be found, and the promise is that we will find Him. When? When we seek Him with all of our heart. We see He desires to bless us with peace. And yet, if you read chapter, verse 14, if you read verse 14, you find they're still in captivity. We tend to live in a culture of Christianity where we know what to say, and we know that God wants us to have peace, and we know what God offers, but when we really get to where we're living, we don't really have peace. We spend our life preaching about things that often we don't even possess ourselves. It's one of the things that makes preaching difficult. I feel led to preach about something this morning I don't even do a very good job of. There has to come a time, though, when we believe what God says and we do something about it. Brother Derek preached a little bit about the cloud, the glory of God and that our churches have to have it and that we need that glory to rest upon the church. And that's absolutely what we need. And this morning, I'm simply going to share with you three things that will lead to that glory. I want to talk to you about finding God. It's really that simple. All that we really need is God. He is the prize. The very first time we ever see the concept of reward is in Genesis chapter 15 with Abraham when he tithed a tenth of everything he had to Melchizedek and then God speaks to him and says to him, Abraham, I am your exceedingly great reward. God is the reward. But all too often we're looking for everything but God. We're looking for the hands of God, the blessings of God, God to do this, God to bring more people, God to anoint me as I preach, God to meet this certain need, God to do this. We're asking God to do everything and we're looking for God to do everything. We are exhausting ourselves trying to do anything and everything but simply have God. We have our religious activities. We might read our Bibles. We might do our devotions. We might make our sermons. We might pray a little. But we don't have a whole lot of influence. Many know doctrines, but they don't know anything about really finding God. Most of the people in the pew know more about who won the finals last night, and what's going on in the social world around us, and who is in this position, and who's in that position, and what's going on in our government. And they don't even know the struggles of their closest friends. Why? I've always been the why person. It's not enough to know. It's not enough to know we need the glory. I need to know why don't we have it then? Where is it? How do we obtain it? We're too busy to pray. Too busy to seek God with all of our heart. See, that's the promise. It's not if you seek God with 70% of your heart that you'll find Him. It's not that if you seek God with half of your heart that you'll find Him. It's only that if you seek God with all of your heart that you'll find Him. That's the promise. And if we stop short of that, we stop short of God. We have to get tired of it. This morning in prayer I made sure to be very conscious that today I use the word we. I'm going to share with you three attributes of the man who finds God this morning, if God will help me. Number one, the man who finds God searches with hunger. We must grow weary of the powerlessness. We must get exhausted. You will find that it's when you're exhausted that you really get hungry. But we must grow sincerely tired of it. And it's easy as a pastor to not grow tired of the powerlessness as long as we give the illusion of power. As long as we give the illusion of church growth and the illusion of authority, and it's easy to give the illusion of power. Power is not yelling loud. Power is not great music. Power is not multitudes of people. Supernatural power is that which transforms hearts. We have to get to the place where we're tired of it. We have to get tired of walking into hospitals and praying for people and not seeing them healed. We're not. We're not tired of it. We're not tired of the powerlessness. We're not exhausted with it. I asked my pastor friends and people of ministry today, what would have happened if the disciples and Jesus prayed for folks at hospitals like we do? Never any real intention whatsoever of seeing anybody healed when we walked in. That wasn't the plan. We're just discharging a duty to give the false illusion that we care. No belief that God's going to move whatsoever. We just know someone's feelings are going to be hurt if we don't show up and pray. So we show up and we say the words and we pray the pastoral prayer and we pray for God to give peace in our time of suffering, but never once do we really pray by faith and come to God and believe that God's going to heal. And we leave and we do this. I can't tell you why. All I can tell you is there came a time I just got tired of it. Couldn't justify it anymore. Until we get tired of something, we won't really search with hunger. And the man who finds God, we must be people who search with hunger. We can have our religious services about God. We can preach sermons about God. We can teach lessons about God. We can sing songs about God. We can talk about God. We can study about God. And yet, never once be in the presence of God. And here's the danger of it. When we hear about God, and when we preach about God, and we teach about God, but people don't experience God, they become cold. But one simple meeting with God can set your heart on fire. It must become our all-consuming passion, very simply, to know God. I'm telling you, when we know God and we meet God and we find God, God will give direction. God will tell you how to use the media of the day and everything else and the tools that we have. God will show you how to use those things. God will give vision because it's in the place of God, meeting with God, where we get vision. But understand, the motive has to be right. God, I'm not simply going because I need vision for a sermon. God, I'm not going to you because I need you to help me with this area in my church. God, I am done with that and I want to seek you with all of my heart. for no other reason than I want to know You. And I challenge you to ask yourself sincerely of the percentage of the time you spend in prayer, of the percentage of the time that you spend seeking God, how much of it is for no other reason than to know Him? Our God waits to be wanted. And He's told us the path. He says, You'll find Me. When you search with Me with all of your heart, you'll find Me when I become the all-consuming passion of your heart and you long for nothing more but to know Me. You must become hungry to the point of death. You must see that outside of knowing God there is no real life. There is no real power. We must find Him or die. We must eat the bread of life and drink from the living water, or we must die. But we aren't hungry. We're filled with junk. We're satisfying our souls with everything else. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. for the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven and giveth life unto the world. Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread. And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life. He that cometh to me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. He that cometh to me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. Yet we are hungry and thirsty. Because we're not going to the only source that can satisfy. It is so simple. It's God that we need. It's that simple. We must get hungry before we'll ever seek God with all of our hearts. Can we sincerely cry out as did the psalmist, my soul thirsteth for God, for the living God. Number two, first he searches with hunger. Number two, he searches with seriousness. People don't seek God with all their hearts anymore because they don't think it's that important. I tried to teach this concept last year to the teenagers of our church at youth camp. And in order to do so, on the way in, on the night that I was speaking, I took a bunch of change, hundreds of coins, and I threw them all over the ground where the students would have to walk past them to get into the sanctuary from where they were staying at their dorms. And I went to every single one of the dorms and I said, listen, I've got an object lesson tonight. I've got a bunch of coins that I was going to use for the object lesson that have been dropped somewhere between here and the sanctuary. And if you can find them, I need them. They're all over the place, hundreds of them. I told that to every one of the students. And then I took a $50 bill, and I crumpled it up, and I put it in my pocket, and I went out into the wilderness, into the woods and prayed. And I intentionally took a crumpled $50 bill, and I crumpled it up tight, and I stuck it underneath of a bush like this. And I left it there. And I went and I told two boys that as I was praying a $50 bill that was in my pocket, I found this way to the ground somewhere, and I needed help finding it. And all that I told them, this is what I told them, it's that direction, about a hundred yards. I walked from here to there. I knelt and prayed somewhere out there. And I'm telling you, it's going to be hard to find. It's crumpled up. Those boys searched for almost three hours and found that $50 bill, because they thought this preacher had lost a $50 bill. That night, that service, I asked if there was one student who had found any of the coins. There was not one. I said, every single one of you walked past those coins, all you really had to do was search. But because they were coins, they weren't that important. And there were two boys, who spent three hours in the woods with nothing more than directions to somewhere between now and 100 yards out in that general direction through those trees, there's a crumpled $50 bill. And they searched till they found it. You see, finding something often comes down to the level of intensity with which we search. And when I talk about finding God, I'm not talking about getting answered prayers. I'm talking about finding God. How many of us search for God as for the coin? God, I'm going to go on my day, and I'm going to walk, and I'll look around. If you want to reveal yourself to me, great. And God says, I will not be found that way. That's right. Amen. God says, until I become the all-consuming passion of your heart and you search for me with seriousness, you will not find me. But when you do search with all of your heart, you will find me there. We have to get to the place where we sincerely desire to see God, to know God, to experience God, and we search with seriousness. It was said of Ezra that he set his heart to seek the law of God. There is a decision to be made. Seeking the face of God, the devil will bring a series of interruptions into your life to distract and divide your heart. We have to be disciplined in ministry. There is always work. There is always work. And if you're going to wait to seek God with all of your heart until you get the work done, you will never seek God any of the days of your life. There is a decision to be made that, God, I must have You above all else. And until I have You, and until I have sought You, and until I have found You, it all must wait. For some people this is awkward. There were several years as a Christian who was on fire for God, who had a successful ministry, who God used when I would get up and preach, that I led lots of people to the Lord. There were several years that that happened in my life before I grabbed a hold of what I'm talking about and recognized I haven't really sought God with all my heart. I see God do stuff. But I don't see God. I didn't know what that looked like. God, you want me to know you. And I'm going to tell you something. It's a little awkward if you've never really just set out to seek God. Praying and asking God to do stuff is one thing. I remember the very first time I ever made up my mind, I'm going to seek God with seriousness. And I thought, I don't know what to do. I'm going to quit talking all the time when I pray. I'm going to recognize this is meant to be a two-way conversation, not a one-way conversation. But I didn't know what to do. Nobody had taught me. And you're going to think this is funny, but I didn't know what to do. So I decided that when I began to pray, I was going to go to a quiet place where there was nobody but me there, and it was out in the woods. And I've got a few places in the woods behind my house that I started doing this. And the very first time I sat down, I said, God, I just don't know what to do. I know I can't stay here for like hours. I don't know how long I'm supposed to stay. And so I'm just going to set a timer. And I set a timer at five minutes. and set my heart to at least for five minutes to start, I was gonna sit there in quietness, and if God wanted to show himself to me, he could. Nothing happened. So I left. I began to do that almost every day. And then I moved it to 15 minutes. I can't tell you how many months I sat there in silence. thinking to myself, this is dumb. But I don't know how else to seek with all my heart until I have a better plan. This is my plan and I'm sticking to it. God knows whether you're searching with all of your heart or if you're just trying to excuse yourself the duty, look around for a few coins, throw it off on God's shoulders. God, if you want to show up, you can. God knows, and there was a point in me where God had to take me to that limit where, are you searching with all of your heart to the best you know how? Are you giving me all you got? And I will never forget the first time that He showed Himself true to His Word in this passage. It's almost too holy to speak of. Some of you wouldn't believe it was real. I will tell you there at that creek, God showed up, and I didn't know if I should talk or fall or cry or run. All I could do was close my eyes in fear that if I opened Him up, He might be right there in front of me. It's awkward if you've never taken time to seek the face of God. It's awkward if all of your religious duties are about doing stuff and trying to get God to do stuff and talking to God to get Him to do something instead of just stopping and saying, God, I don't want anything today. I just want You. I want to know You more. He searches with seriousness. We've got to learn to tarry before God, to get on our knees before God, to fast and pray once again with seriousness. Finally this morning, he that finds God searches with resolve. To resolve to refuse to accept powerlessness. We have to get tired of it. Through the first several years of my ministry, I would excuse. I had all the reasons in the world why God didn't work for me like what I read about in the Bible. I had all the reasons in the world for why God didn't heal like He once used to heal and there weren't going to be great revivals like there once were great. I had all the reasons. I could tell you why God wasn't. They were nothing but lame excuses to hide my powerlessness. That's what they were. There came a time in my life I had to grow up and just acknowledge. Maybe I'm still just a boy in spiritual matters. Because God hasn't changed. I'm sick of my powerlessness. I'm sick of praying and not seeing people healed. I'm sick of preaching and not seeing people saved. It's time to seek God until God does what He wants to do. We've got to have a resolve. I don't know how to say it without being misunderstood, but the goal, pastor, preacher, church member, the goal isn't building the church, it's simply knowing God. It's like it just happens automatically once we're with God. understanding of how to handle this situation. It just comes. God's the God who gives. As Proverbs 2 tells us, He gives wisdom. He gives knowledge. He gives understanding. You don't even have to dream it up. You don't even have to brainstorm it up. It just comes when you're with God. I believe it's the missing link. We have become so busy. It's almost like what I'm talking about we know. And somehow in the back of our minds, we're saying to ourselves right now, we have got to find a way to fit that in. I've got to find a way to eliminate 10% of my workload so that I can spend some more time doing this. God is crying out, no, it must become the all-consuming passion of your heart. It must come before everything else. That will bring the glory when I'm there because God is the glory. It will bring the fire when I'm there because God is the fire. If there's anything that I could encourage us to do and bring to pass, it would simply be that we seek God with all of our hearts, with resolve. Jacob wrestled with God. We get so pious. We think, God, I'm done, and I'm not going to keep praying about that thing because God heard. Elijah prayed seven times. Jesus spoke in Luke 18 of the woman that wouldn't give up and just kept asking for what? The same thing over and over and over and over again. We want to excuse ourselves the duties of seeking with all of our heart and being serious about seeking God and somehow credit ourselves with being spiritual when in all reality we've just given up. We need a hunger that will not quit. When men of God learn how to get a hold of God. Think about that. God came to earth, we know that. God came to earth to get a hold of us. But to think that a man could get a hold of God. When you search for Him with all your heart. as they prepare a song of invitation. All I can tell you this morning is that this hunger must be a hunger that will not quit. It must become the all-consuming passion that simply will not go away. We must decide that we will either find God or at least die trying. But this will not just be some hunger of many other hungers, but the hunger of the soul to find God. Oh, how weak our longing is for God. And only those who seek Him with all their heart find Him. When we hold nothing back from God, God will hold nothing back from us. I can't just read books about God's power. I can't just read testimonies of what God did in the past. I can't just read stories about God healing. I can't just read somebody else's story of somebody who knew somebody that experienced God in such a way I have to know Him myself. Father, I believe I've said everything You'd have me to say this morning. And I just pray, God, You'd help us to hear it the way You want us to hear it. God, I pray, Father, we would not get distracted with serving. God, that we would not get distracted with building. God, that we would see. We simply must find you. Father, move all across this room. Do what you're going to do. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.