Even now God is drawing you near to Him. He wants you to know Him intimately—to experience His profound love and presence deep within your inmost soul. He has truth to reveal to you—lessons His Holy Spirit will teach you only when you take time to quietly focus on Him … Don’t miss out on the overwhelming blessing of knowing God as you simply abide in His presence. There is no deeper joy, no greater energizer, no more worthy use of your time than experiencing Him.
—Charles F. Stanley, Every Day in His Presence 
“Seek first the kingdom of God”—this command, spoken by Jesus was among the first words I memorized from Scripture. (See Matt. 6:33 ESV.) I carried it within me into adolescence, then adulthood. From singleness into marriage and fatherhood. And all the while, I imagined this act of seeking as a host of disciplines, or spiritual practices—the doings of life as a modern Christian in America. Prayer, Bible study, church leadership, mission trips and service projects, even cleaning the church building—to say nothing of managing behaviors—became the substance of belonging to God’s kingdom.
In case it’s not obvious why this was problematic, I came to realize much later that while each of these things had potential to be for my sanctification, they took on an externality that bordered on (if not fully plunged into) performance. A way of living, moving, and having my being apart from God, all the while being in the company of His people. But who was I performing for?
“There is no deeper joy, no greater energizer, no more worthy use of your time than experiencing God.”
Ask years-ago-me that question and the answer, of course, would have been God. And that would have been partially true. I did know Him personally and had experienced His presence—the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit. Though in a more aware and vulnerable state, years-ago-me would have admitted those efforts were also for the benefit of the people around me—the watchful eyes of parents and peers, ministers and neighbors. The proportions would shift and morph with the seasons of life, but what it would take years to see is that the primary audience was neither God nor community but an audience of one. Self. The ego. The one who rarely, if ever, closed his eyes.
To imagine how the Lord or others perceived me, consciously or not, was often an exercise in allowing the self to look back at its own likeness—not at the real God who loved me. An idol, in other words—merely another vantage point for me to look at me—as if peering into a mirror with another one behind me, endless recapitulations of ego growing fainter and smaller. If there was an audience, it was ultimately one of infinite apparitions who looked and talked like me.
The end result of all this life-as-performance was utter exhaustion resulting in a form of contempt—if not for myself, then for the failures of Christianity as I knew it to deliver me into the abundant life I had been promised. For the ways that my strained spirituality choked my heart of grace and peace, like a fig tree deprived of rain.
I had mistaken the means for the end on a fundamental level, unaware my search for approval was a distorted thirst for the communion of unconditional love.
The Bible reading, prayer, and service to others weren’t the problem. Rather, it was that I had mistaken the means for the end on a fundamental level, unaware my search for approval was a distorted thirst for the communion of unconditional love. That the distortion could disguise itself as a substantive relationship with God for so long is a testament to the insidious nature of pride and the ways church communities sometimes reward it, prizing and praising the external over true spiritual formation.
All these years later I’ve come to understand that seeking the kingdom is no less than seeking God’s presence—the One who always abides with us, even as we fail to abide with Him—in the hidden place of the heart. The quality of life in His kingdom—this paradise, this garden of His presence—is love but it’s also peace. And what is peace in the Christian life if not a relationship with Jesus Christ?
We settle for counterfeits all too readily in modern life: time off, vacations, a quiet home far away from the problems of other people. Counterfeits can take many forms, coming in and out of our lives with the fidelity of a spring breeze. But Christ never changes—His promise to be with us to the end of the age is steadfast (Matt. 28:20).
