Day 4 - Single-mindedness

Jeremiah tells us of God's ultimate calling to everyone, over and above all our searching for direction back and forth in this life. He writes:-

"I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the LORD. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart." (Jeremiah 24:7)

". . . for they will return to me with all their heart?" This is God making a direct call to you to be single-minded: to have a single-minded hankering after him.

Any lesser and more worldly aim will be a shortfall; the preference to be good, the striving to measure up to some ambition you might have set for yourself or the correction of some shortcoming you may have been shown in your own way of life.

It may well be that you find these things to be temporarily necessary, but they will turn to dust and ashes ending in a grim dryness unless, behind them all, is this matter he asks of you - a continuous searching for a real knowledge of him, for a constant sense of his reality, a confidence and a trust in his friendship - a delight and a joy in the very person of God himself.

This is all a question of holding things in proper perspective. In a round-the-world single-handed sailing race a man once became stranded on his overturned yacht in the middle of the southern ocean, a thousand miles from the nearest land. His whole concentration lay not on where he might get his next set of clean and dry clothes from, or how he might prepare his next meal, but on organising his own rescue from a threatening and watery grave. It was that situation that held his entire attention.

God requires the same single-mindedness from you, that you should long for his nearness and a tighter relationship with him. You should learn to hunger and ache for this objective alone, till your prayers for it become much more than a form of speaking. They will become a straining and a stretching out of your whole being towards him.