Looking for Jesus when He can't be found.

There is time as in the hour of the day and there is time as in the opportunity. In John 7, Jesus is at the Feast of Tabernacles. He is speaking in the temple courts. The Great Divide is growing between those who believe in Jesus and those who do not.  The opportunity for faith is theirs; they have in that moment the opportunity.  But Jesus tells them, “You will seek me and not find me and where I am you cannot come.”  While in their presence Jesus was speaking to these people of the time when he would return to the Father.  They would seek Him, but because they rejected the truth that he was from the Father, and he had returned to the Father, they would never find Him.  The opportunity would be lost. 

We are so familiar with the words of Jesus, “Seek and you will find.”  We hold these words like a no limit credit card that places Jesus at our bidding.  How do we reconcile this promise with this other saying of Jesus that we can come to the point that we will seek him but we will not find Him?  “Seek and you will find.”  “You will seek and not find.”  The time or opportunity is there and then the time or opportunity is lost.  We become flippant about sin in our life. We do not take seriously the grave warnings of scripture about righteousness. We treat both Holiness and un-holiness as matters of little consequence. We fail to seek the Lord when He can be found. As a consequence we spiral into greater depth and darkness, and into an absence from God.  It is only when we finally hit rock bottom we start seeking Jesus.  But we may not really be looking for Jesus, but only for a genie. So wrapped up is our self and our sinful life (shall we use the word Flesh) we don't want to have Him as Master and Lord. We only want Him to be a bail bondsman to get us out of the fix we are in and then we wonder why we can't find Jesus. Every dalliance with sin, every dabbling with evil is a potential one-way street to this hopeless destination.  Any individual act of sin is like an on-ramp to a highway to hell.  There are exits where we can turn around, but the longer we drive the less frequent the exits, the longer between exits.  We can even get to the point that there are no exit ramps at all.

So where is the place where we must be to seek the Lord in order to find Him? That place is the cross, His cross and our cross. It is the place where we will recognize the truly monstrous evil of our sin!  It is a place where we have a change of mind and will to turn from sin and self, and to die to these.  In a word it is the place of repentance. We can’t see Jesus without repentance.  We can search till the stars burn out and we will not find Him.  We must renounce ourselves i.e. the flesh, the world's system, and the devil and in Repentance we find Jesus.  May we never forget that before there is the blessing of finding Christ there is the repentance moved by the Cross. 

“Holy Spirit, convict me, bring your holy judgment on me, show me where I hold anything without repentance, show me where I must turn from evil. Grant to me, Lord, a true and heartfelt repentance.”