'He was found of them.' Yes; 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,
or 'shall be found of 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.
Brethren! is there anything else in the world of which you can say,
'Seek, and ye shall find'? You, with white hairs on your heads, have
you 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 feel that the prize was not
worth the finding. Or it is, 'Seek, and _possibly_ you will find;
and after you have found and kept for a little while, you will 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.