[AI translation] This passage that I have just read from the Scriptures culminates in this call: seek the Lord. But this call is preceded by an invitation in the first verse, thus: "O all you who thirst, come to these waters". So God Himself invites us to seek Him. And who is allowed to seek Him in the hope of finding Him? On the one hand, the Word says without limitation: to everyone. On the other hand, it immediately delimits it with this expression: 'those who thirst'! Without exception, all who thirst may seek the Lord, but only those who truly thirst should seek the Lord. Whoever has no thirst in his soul, let him not seek Him, for he will not find Him. Thirst is an affliction, a strong sense of want, which drives a man to seek, to seek without fail. During the siege, when we ran out of water and were thirsty: how many dangers and risks we took rather than go, but we had to go somewhere to find water. Such is spiritual thirst. It is a sense of lack that makes the search an existential matter, a question of life.In fact, every human being is searching for God, even if he does not know it. There is a primordial and inexorable desire for God in the human soul. In our bones and in our blood is the unconscious memory of paradise lost, and therefore man's spiritual instinct to seek God is more inexorable than the most powerful bodily instinct. When a man begins to feel that he lacks something in order to be truly peaceful and happy, he is actually missing God. And when a man is hungry for earthly goods, thirsty for glory, prestige, recognition, pleasure, or anything that makes his heart peaceful and restless: then in fact God is always missing from his life, because if He is missing from somewhere, then with Him all that is necessary for contentment, peace and happiness in a human life is missing. Happy is the man who has already realized that what he lacks is not understanding of people, or money, or a job, or a better environment, or anything else, but the Lord God Himself! Happy is the man who has already become aware of this thirst in his soul, as Jesus says: happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. To these is the invitation: seek the Lord!
How are you doing? Do you have a thirst, and has that thirst driven you here this Sunday morning to seek the Lord? You know, there are other reasons for coming here, not just to seek the Lord. There are people here who are not here to seek the Lord, but to seek the priest. They have come for the priest. Those who are really thirsty, it doesn't matter who gives them the water. Those who do not care, are not really thirsty, and then they will not find the Lord! Some people come for a nice sermon, not for the Lord. But he who is really thirsty, it makes no difference in what vessel he gets his water, whether in a golden bowl or in a wooden cup. It is not enough, then, to have a benign interest, a holy curiosity, a desire for some spiritual life: but let those come, says the Word, who thirst, let them seek the Lord, for whom it is a necessity of life to find Him, for without Him they are lost, their souls are consumed, their lives are meaningless. This is the only serious search for God.
Then, besides the thirst, you must also clarify within yourself, are you really seeking the Lord? One of Satan's most dangerous games with us is when he seeks us for divine moods, lofty religious feelings, or some gift or help from God instead of God! When there is no way he can restrain the desire for God in man, he gives such a barely perceptible turn in the direction of the search. Beware of this deception of Satan: seek not lofty thoughts, Christian ideas or religious sentiments, but the Lord Himself, personally. Don't even seek His help, but Him Himself! We miss the point if we seek Him because we want to ask Him for something in great need, if we seek Him to give something: because He does not want to give something first of all, but Himself. "He who did not please His own Son, but gave Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also give us all things?" (Rom 8:32) As long as you want something from the Lord, and not Him Himself, you will not really receive Him, nor will you find Him. Whoever seeks God only to help him in his troublesome affairs is not really seeking the Lord, but only himself! He does not seek Him well, and cannot find Him who does not seek Him himself!
"Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near." In this Word there is not only a great exhortation, but also an exhortation: let every soul that truly seeks God be encouraged and exhorted by the fact that God is found, for God is near! None of us need to travel a long way to find God, because He is equally close to each of us at every moment and in every situation. Have you ever felt how close God is to you? Remember those precious moments in your life when you felt as if an invisible hand had reached down from above into the flow of your life and guided it gently, with great wisdom and love: averting some danger, rescuing you from trouble, helping you in some distress in a way that was so beyond reason that it was impossible not to notice how close the Lord is! Is your life so full of such moments when His providential love has surrounded you and saved you? All of you who are here now, I know for sure that you are close to the Lord, have many precious experiences to tell of. But let me ask you: you who are so close to the Lord: have you found Him? For there is a difference of the utmost magnitude between being close to the Lord and having found Him! Indeed, one can be very close to Him, but still not have found Him! It was so horrible when a dying woman once said to me, "I come from a priestly family, and do you know, Reverend, how hard it is to come to a living faith when you are brought up in a priestly home? There are many other aspects of that statement that are horrible, but I just want us to feel what it means to be close, to be close for a lifetime to the church, to the church, to the sacrament, to God - and yet never to meet the Lord! Even in close proximity to the Lord one can be lost forever! Just as the rich young man was so close to the kingdom of God, so close that Jesus himself said, "You are not far from the kingdom of God" (Mk 12:34), and yet he missed it! Or just as the older brother of the prodigal son was always at home, under the same roof with his father, and yet he was very far from him. Or just as Noah had so many of his contemporaries close to the ark, and yet when the flood came, there, in the immediate vicinity of the ark, perhaps clinging to the very walls of the ark, they perished in the terrible great judgment! So the Word urges, "Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near."
So the question is very important: how long is he to be found, and how long is he near? I don't know for those who have never heard of the Lord here on earth how long He will be found, whether there is any possibility for them to find Him even after this life on earth, but I know for certain that for us who live in the world of His revelation, there is not! The Scriptures indicate that there is a great "interposition", a great distance between the Lord and the soul who has not found Him in time, and that this distance is forever unbridgeable. So, in a general way, the Lord is near, He is near to you as long as you are on earth. And even here there are special occasions when He is more to be found than at other times. There are missed opportunities, so even in earthly life we never know how long He will be found. The rich young man was close to the kingdom of God not because he kept all the commandments that Jesus asked him to keep, but because Jesus was standing before him, because salvation was offered to him, because he was faced with the possibility of a great decision, because he had only to say a firm yes. It was the moment when the Lord was closest to him, when he had only one step left to take to find the Lord, but he was afraid to take that last, decisive step, he could not bring himself to take it. And so the close encounter did not turn into a happy, salvific encounter! The young man went away from there in despair.
You too, perhaps, often open your Bible or the church door with a heightened desire and seek the Lord with a truly longing soul for salvation: then again, you read your Bible in vain, you pray in vain, you listen to the preaching of the Word in vain, or you spend a week attending evangelistic lectures in vain: you do not find what you were looking for, you leave disappointed and discouraged! You may even feel how close you are to Him and yet not be able to meet Him. Why? Because you don't take the last step! What is that last step that leads to finding the Lord? Thus our Word says, "Let the wicked forsake his way, and the thoughts of the wicked man, and let him return to the Lord, and He will have mercy on him, and to our God, for He abounds in forgiveness."
It is so wonderful that when one wants to meet with God, one does not have to soar upward toward some majestic, glorious, divine world, but downward toward some very dark abyss. Never seek God above, but below, deep down! In the lowest place, in the lowest point of the world: on the cross! There is no depth of human sin that is not deeper than the cross! God is closest to you on the cross, and only there, on the cross, can he be found for you. And thither thou must descend: thou must descend so low in the humiliation of thyself that thou canst see thy own judgment in the cross of Christ! Can you look with such horror on Christ crucified that this is your punishment, that you deserve it, that God has passed it on to you? Can you pronounce the sentence of death upon yourself, for if you condemn yourself, you will not be condemned by God; if you condemn yourself, you will no longer be condemned by the Lord God. When you can marvel that it is not you on the cross, but Jesus Christ in your place, when you can marvel that you have received mercy, you who deserve the penalty of death according to your own judgment: then you have met God.
Have you found God in this way?! You can long for Him without Christ, you can experience His great help without the intercession of Jesus, you can feel the blessed nearness of His caring hand without Christ. But you can also perish unnoticed in the nearness of God, for you can only find Him who is near to you by seeking Him through Christ Jesus the Saviour - for He has come to you through Christ and is seeking you through Christ.
Amen
Date: 13 March 1949.