Desperately Seeking Jesus

Every Christian has within them a desire to be closer to Jesus. To one degree or another, each of us has a need to feel His presence. We want to experience that feeling of having our spirit come alive when we sense that He is near. From the moment that we took our first steps of faith, that desire has been a part of us, although admittedly to varying degrees. 

Desire is an interesting word. It is one of those emotions that has a range of intensities. Everything from a desire for a candy bar to desiring to live the rest of our life with that one special person. We use phrases like; “I would like…”, “I really want…”, “I need…” and “I can’t live without…” to express the intensity of our desire. The question we need to ask ourselves today is, what descriptor would we use when describing our desire to be closer to Jesus? 

Each of us would certainly say that the examples used above would apply to our desire to be closer to our Lord. Yet there is a word that takes our desire to an even higher level. That word is “desperately”. What does it mean to desperately need something, or someone? Take a moment and think about what we would do if our desire for someone was truly desperate. 

We read the familiar story of someone who desperately needed to be closer to Jesus in Mark 5:24-34. It says, “A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped, and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.”

“At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’” But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came, and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

There is no doubt that the woman desperately needed to be close to Jesus. Her desire was so intense that it drove her to go far beyond her comfort zone. Her need reached the point of desperation. We read how her actions and her desire brought her to the point of being able to touch Jesus. Because of her desperate desire, she was able to draw on His grace without Him intentionally giving it. Amazing!

Invest some quiet time today to be alone with Jesus. Talk with Him. Let Him know why we need Him so much, why we desire to be closer to Him. Pray that the Holy Spirit will continually guide us so that every step we take, every word that we speak and every action that we engage in will draw us closer to our Savior. 

I pray that each of us has a desperate desire to be closer to Jesus. That we lean on the Holy Spirit to give us understanding of what we need to do to move closer to our Lord. I pray that our desire builds into desperation, so much so, that we will push past every fear, every doubt, and do whatever we need to do to experience His presence, His closeness, His grace.