374. You Shall Live
Amos 5:4 For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live. V. 6 Seek the Lord, and ye shall live.
There are many promises about living, being alive, abundant life, eternal life, and God’s very life within. You shall live! So much of this life is not life, because too much of our lives are filled with sin, which always brings death. In this life we are shrouded with sin and death, which hides and takes away from the full life God wants us to enjoy. Instead of just taking the promise of life for granted, we need to appreciate everything that real living means. It means living forever without end, without pain, suffering, troubles and death. But it also means living now with true joy and inner peace. Sin and Satan cannot touch the joy and peace of believing in Jesus, although they will deceive us into thinking that God is not all good and that He is holding something back. (This is part of the temptation to Adam and Eve.)
There is a condition to this promise of living: Seek Me. If you seek the Lord, then you will live. But it is not conditional in that our seeking causes us to live. The unconditional truth is that the Lord God is seeking us. He looks for us, as for the lost sheep; He arranges things so that we might look to God for every need; His relentless search does not stop until He finds us. We stray and get into scrapes, not caused by God but caused by sin, and then He finds us, picks us up, cleans us off, and restores us to wholeness.
The encouragement to seek the Lord is not doing something, but the emphasis is on avoiding the negative. The negative is seeking good from something or someone else other than the One Good God. The negative is trusting in self, my own abilities and my own good works. The negative is neglecting or ignoring God in all my ways. Turn that around let the Searching Shepherd seek you. Then you will live. God is life; God gives life; and the good life comes only from God. Thank the living God for life.