Welcome to [music] the InTouch podcast with Charles Stanley for Tuesday, January 20th. Anything [music] of value takes time and effort, and the pursuit of God is no exception. [music] Let’s discover more as you listen to today’s podcast. >> Well, I want to talk about three things. First thing I want to talk about is what is involved what is involved in pursuing after God.

All right, there’s several things here. The first is a prerequisite for knowing God. A prerequisite that is before you will ever learn who God is, you will have to pursue him. You say, “Well, now wait a minute. Doesn’t God reveal himself to man?” He does. But remember what he said in Matthew in the sermon on the mount, “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness.

They are the ones who shall be filled.” God placed within your heart a hunger when you were saved. He opened a whole new world of spirituality to your life. Either you nourish that and pursue God and make him Lord of your life or you let that begin to dwindle and you cease to to feed that hunger and now really doesn’t make a whole lot of difference whether you know much about him or not.

But a prerequisite to knowing God is to pursue him. when you begin to pursue God, what you’re going to discover. Number two is that the divine pruning process is going to begin in your life. Number two is pruning. So what does he do? He begins to expose those little shoots and growths in your life that he wants to cut off.

So as you pursue God and seek after him to be like him and to know him, what you and I realize before long is we must be willing to shed those experiences, those habits, those attitudes, those activities in our life that once we begin to move in and he confronts us with himself, we don’t really want anything in our life that would displease him.

So what happens? He begins the pruning process which involves confession and repentance and an honest, intimate and intricate evaluation of oneself. Because listen, a man who is pursuing God is hard after him, following after him because he wants to be like him. He wants his life reflected in his life. A man does not pursue God who’s not hungry after him.