Conia [00:00:01]:
I am so excited to be with you guys today. We have some fun things to talk about. And what I am going to talk about today is the concept of seeking. And we talked about this in Thursday school, if you were with us the very first Thursday school.
Conia [00:00:45]:
And so this is going to be a little bit of a recap there, but I wanted to dive deeper into this word seek. And we’ve got lots of scripture that says seek, but we don’t have. In our own vernacular. We don’t use that word seek very often. And I think that the word seek in our common use is really what kind of threw me off from being able to experience the best of what God has for us in that sec. Seeking. Okay, so here’s what I mean. We have all these scriptures, and we’re gonna.
Conia [00:01:22]:
We’re gonna go through them a little bit. Seeking, you’ll find. Seek the kingdom, seek ye first and all these things. Well, the only word time I really use the word seek is in hide and seek. So that was kind of my reference for seek. It was a subconscious reference. If I thought about the word seek, I could have probably given you great definitions on it, but in just the commonness of the word, really, the word seek to me was only related to that kind of child’s game of hide and seek. And in hide and seek, the seeker is really kind of lost.
Conia [00:02:04]:
I mean, you have no idea where your friends are hiding because you know, you. You’ve closed your eyes, and if you didn’t peek and you didn’t cheat and you counted to 100, and then, you know, if you didn’t skip and count by fives, and then, you know, you look up and everyone is gone. They’re all gone. And now it’s your job to find them. And they’re doing their best to hide from you. And so you have to seek. And so you don’t know if they’re in the dryer or if they’re in the closet or they’re under the bed or, you know, they went out the back door. You just don’t have any ideas.
Conia [00:02:48]:
You have no clues. And so it’s your job to seek, and it’s their job to stay hidden. So you cannot find that for which you seek. But God’s version of the word seeking seek does not relate to my version of the word seek. God’s version of the word seek is really more of seek and ye shall find. It’s really about keeping our eyes focused directly on him. And as I was studying this out and thinking about it, what led me to it was God was saying, kania, I’m not playing a game with you. I don’t play children’s games.
Conia [00:03:38]:
I am here. And if you will simply seek me, if you will keep your eyes on me, if you will go for the things that I am wanting you to go for, you’re going to find me. It’s not a question. It’s not a, oh, I give up, and olly olly oxen free. And it’s none of that. It is, you will find me, and it will be evident to you where he is. And when I think about that, I think of kind of a long road, and God’s right there. And if I just go after him, if I seek after him, and if I keep my eyes right there on him, I will find him.
Conia [00:04:29]:
And he says, all these things will be added unto you. And seek ye first the kingdom of God says Matthew 6:33. And so we want to make sure that we’re seeking first the kingdom. And so, you know, those of us who have a tendency to get a little distracted, you know, with every shiny object and every squirrel that goes by, we’re not seeking him. We’re easily distracted. But as we go down the road toward him, all these things are right there in the pathway. We’re going to trip over them. They’re so obvious.
Conia [00:05:10]:
And I really, really want you to think about that. When you think about seek and ye shall find, God says, just because you cannot see it with your eyes right now doesn’t mean that as you seek him, he won’t reveal it. At any given moment, when he knows that he has your attention, he can reveal things to you. And he gave me a really good example of this when one of my daughters was in her late teens, and I just. I didn’t stay up and wait for my children. I’m not that mom. I guess I just trusted that they were safe and. And they were diligent.
Conia [00:05:53]:
Maybe. Maybe I was not. Maybe I should have waited, but I didn’t. Anyway, this particular night, I was awake and. And my daughter comes in the house and. And she’s kind of talking to me about nothing, you know, just kind of yammering about the the minute details of what they did that night. And so I’m sleepy, and it’s late, and. And I sat there and I was listening, and I listened.
Conia [00:06:18]:
And I listened some more, and I was fighting off a little bit of sleep because she was just kind of chatting. And I was just this close to getting ready to go. I think I’m gonna go to bed now. It’s late for mama. And about 45 minutes in, she starts telling me about a serious issue with a friend of hers that a friend of hers having that she’s concerned about. And it’s kind of weighing on her pretty heavily. And she really wanted some advice on how to best be a good friend in the situation. But she didn’t enter with that.
Conia [00:06:55]:
She didn’t come in and say, hey, I got this problem, got this issue. She came in and she was talking to me, and only once she was sure that I was paying attention. Only once she knew she could get me focused on her did she bring up the really important things. And I think often when we go to God and we’re like, hey, checking in, saying, hey, see you later. Gotta go. And go. God’s like, okay, have a great day. And he’s like, I’ve got so many other things that I could share with you if you’ll just focus on me and give me more of your time and more of your attention than the flyby, the check, the box.
Conia [00:07:43]:
We’re really meant to walk with God. I talk often about Enoch because he’s got this much in the Bible, but it’s so important. He walked with God and he was not. He so sought God in his every single moment that not only was he seeking him first thing in the morning and last thing at night and a little bit during the day, he actually walked with God. And he walked with God so much that he became not even really human at that point. And God’s like, you’re so close. Come on over. He’s the only one that we have record of, right? Wouldn’t it be great to be walking so close with God that he just said, you know what? Skip that whole death thing and just come on into heaven.
Conia [00:08:43]:
You’re already here. It’s on earth as it is in heaven. But you can’t experience that if you’re not close to it, if you’re not seeking it. You look into the Greek. And the Greek word for seek is a little different from what we normally think of the word seek. It’s zeteo, and I may not be pronouncing that correctly. But Z e T e o Z teo. It means to diligently seek or crave.
Conia [00:09:26]:
Crave. Think about that word crave. I usually think about it in regard to chocolate, but in this case, it is craving something of such substance, something that’s so rich and so wonderful that you just cannot get enough of it. And it means to require or pursue with focused attention. We are to require God or to pursue him with our focused attention. Now then, if all you have time for is that five minutes, don’t be persecuted that you. I’m trying to tell you, oh, you’ve got to go, you’ve got to seek God and you got to sit with him all day long. You’re not going to change instantly.
Conia [00:10:10]:
Your appetites aren’t going to change instantly. Usually when, you know, you start a better eating plan, right? It’s like green things. Yay. You know, it’s not as tasty as the sweet sugary stuff, but we’ve developed such an appetite for the sweet, sugary stuff that that’s what we want. But when we go after those healthy things, those vitamin rich things, those filled with goodness things, all of a sudden we begin to crave them and we lose our appetite for the sweet things, for the carby things, for the pizza. We were on a trip recently with some friends and it was cruise. And there’s just food all the time, all the time, all the time. And you can get ice cream all the time and you can get oatmeal raisin cookies all the time.
Conia [00:11:16]:
And so it’s freely, it’s right there, it’s out there. So you start to eat that and you start to lose your appetite for the salad. I mean, there was a salad bar too. It was right there too. But none of us really kind of hankered for the salad bar. We were hankering for the oatmeal raisin cookies. But after a while, we started really feeling kind of sluggish, kind of tired, and. And we all kind of identified that maybe the, the junk that we’d been eating all week was starting to take its toll on our bodies.
Conia [00:11:53]:
And we hearkened back to the good stuff and we kind of all made commitments. So you know what? I’m gonna go back home and I’m gonna clean all this mess out and I’m gonna. We have a green detox soup that we like a lot, and I’m gonna go back to a little more rich, good, enriching food. And so even though that carby sugary was freely available and we, we Partook. We realized that it was not feeding us in the way that we really wanted to be fed. And we knew that if we went back to the stuff that was really good for us that we would feel better. And it’s the same with the things of the earth. You know, all the outside stuff feels really good for a minute or two, and it feels really good in the moment, but the long term of it doesn’t feed near as well.
Conia [00:12:58]:
And when you go back to the good things and you start to crave the good things that you’ve had before and you remember, oh yeah, I feel so much better when I come back to God. I’ve got so much more to equip me to go and do the work when I go back to God. So every now and then we’re going to veer off. And so you’re not going to start out really wanting all the things of God. But once you taste them and once you get a taste for them, when you go back to the things of the world, they just don’t satisfy like you thought they did. It wasn’t as great of a treat as you thought it was going to be. And you go back to the things of God and you clear out the mental system and you clear out the spiritual system and you figure out that this pure, the powerful, the positive is really what we’re designed to operate in. Then you want more of it.
Conia [00:13:59]:
But you’ve got to start somewhere. And you can’t feel bad that you’re not walking with God all the time. Like Enoch, remember, there was just, there’s only been one, just the one. He’s our example. He’s what we would, we would like to keep focus on and become eventually. But it took. He had a lot more years. He lived a lot longer than you and I do.
Conia [00:14:23]:
Go back to the Old Testament, look it up. Many, many, many years longer than you and I are going to live. And so he had a lot of time. I think it was something close to 300. I’ll have to look that up for you. He had a lot more time to walk, to learn to walk with God, and he had a lot less in the distraction department. You got to think about Old Testament, right? There’s just not the bombardment of distractions that we have today. And so all this stuff that in many ways helps us can also distract us.
Conia [00:14:58]:
So we have to be super diligent about making sure that we set aside that time and we know what is actually truly important. Seeking God first. Seek ye first the kingdom of God not seek ye first. The 24 Hour News Network of any kind. All of that is really going to distract you from what God has for you and it will pull you from focusing on him. The enemy is going to use things or even some seemingly good. Oh, you should be informed. You should know what’s going on.
Conia [00:15:37]:
You should have compassion for the world. Yes, if God tells you to. But you’re responsible for your small corner. You and your small corner and I and mine is where we let our light shine. You cannot light the entire world by yourself, but you can light up very brightly the world that God has given to you. And if God hasn’t given it to you and specifically said, this is what I need you doing, then it’s a distraction to what he’s called you to. It’s kind of like, you know, I think about the video games. I thought about video games in Seek Seek kind of felt like Minecraft to me.
Conia [00:16:26]:
I’ve never played it for very long because I got really frustrated and I didn’t like it because you never know where you’re supposed to find things and what tools you’re supposed to use. And if you go this way, what happens? And then there’s water and then there’s. It was just, it was very, very confusing to me and I didn’t like it because there was all these distractions and you didn’t know where the secret hidey holes were and you didn’t know what was going to pop out at you and try to come get you. Well, with God, if you keep your eyes focused on him, what’s going to come get you is his goodness. If you get distracted, right? If you let all these distractions come in, if you let your eyes veer toward that distraction, now you’ve taken your eyes off of him and you’re not going to get where you’re trying to go. Tom Zigler gave a speech one time and he was talking about focus and some woman in the crowd said it’s like nascar. And he’s like, okay. And she says you gotta look where you’re going and where you want to go and not where you don’t want to go.
Conia [00:17:33]:
Because if you look at the wall in nascar, you’re gonna hit the wall. And well, I identified with that. I’ve driven with some people that, you know, you’re driving down the road and you’re on the two lane mountain road and they go, oh, look at that tree. And you’re like, wait a minute, come back. Well, that’s what happens. To us. We veer off the road. We get distracted by these outside things that are really none of our concern.
Conia [00:18:00]:
And we’re not focused on the things of God and what he’s called us to, because we’re not seeking Him. When we do that, when we get veered off, and sometimes it’s like, oh, I just need this distraction. Oh, I just need to veg. And. And y’, all, I get that. I get that. I like to. I like to veg.
Conia [00:18:21]:
I do. I like to have distractions. I like great movies. But I really have to concentrate on making sure that I’m not missing what God has for me, because I am distracted by things that aren’t of God. Don’t be distracted by the things that aren’t of God. We looked at the Hebrew a little bit. It emphasizes seeking with care and consistency. You are what you consistently do.
Conia [00:19:04]:
And here again, I don’t want to have any of you go, oh, well, I consistently do all these wrong things, so I’m just a lost cause. No one’s a lost cause. And you’re not. And when you whet your appetite with the things of God, then you will crave more and more the things of God. But it takes some diligent concern. I’m told that runners know how to do this, that they. That they start running and they don’t like it. And then eventually they get like this runner’s high.
Conia [00:19:35]:
And I’ve never run long enough to get a runner’s high, so I can’t speak from experience on that, but I’ve been told that they crave it. I’ve got a client. She runs all the time. She’s very consistent about getting her run in because it is her time to seek God, and it’s her time to clear her mind. And it makes her body do the things that she wants her body to do. And she can also eat what she wants to eat. Eat. I knew one marathon runner, and I asked him, why do you do that? He goes, so I can eat whatever I want.
Conia [00:20:09]:
More power to you. That does work, by the way. When we were on the cruise and we were eating all those things, we were also walking and doing lots of flights of stairs. So counteracted. It’s good. So if you’re gonna put the junk in, you got to make sure you’re going to counteract it with the good. So balance. Balance it out.
Conia [00:20:32]:
But you start to crave the things of God. The more you put God in front of your eyes, the more you put him in your ears. The more you’re going to want him, the deeper you’re going to want to go, because there’s no bottom to the depths of Scripture. And we were challenged recently with someone who said he was challenged to read the Bible through three times a year, once every four months. And he said it changed. And this man had been preaching for many, many years, and he said it absolutely changed his life. And he’s gotten to where he just craves it more and more because there’s more and more of God in it. God becomes more and more real to us the more we focus him.
Conia [00:21:24]:
There’s an old, old movie out there. It’s a Kevin Costner movie, I think it’s called no Way Out. In the movie, they find underneath a bed in this room a Polaroid that was not accurately developed. It was exposed badly, so you couldn’t see what was on the Polaroid. And so this is back, way, way, way back in the day, and when technology and vision, visual technology and that sort of thing was just kind of coming on to the scene. And so they had taken this Polaroid and they put it in this machine that would go through pixel by pixel and define each pixel more, make it more defined, because it was all blurry. And so it kind of built the tension of the movie because this was taking in that time. We could do it now in moments, but in that time it was taking hours and days.
Conia [00:22:26]:
And so it was kind of the marker of the movie that, you know, the closer they got to the culprit, the more defined the image became. And it just. It left me with this impression of when we keep going over things and you could see it, the scanner would go by and it would refine and it would go by and it would refine, and it would go by and it would refine, and it would go by and it would refine. And so it was throughout the whole movie, you know, they kept coming back to the camera and the screen and what the image looked like now. And it would get a little bit clearer, and it would get a little bit clearer, and it would get a little bit clearer. And you knew. You knew the whole time we were going to find out who was in that picture, and it was going to be the culprits of the whole thing. And that is what God is like for us.
Conia [00:23:14]:
You open up his word, and at first it’s kind of blurry, and you’re like, there’s a lot of words in here I don’t understand. And there’s a lot of stuff in Here that I don’t get. And there’s, like. There’s, like, a lot of blood and there’s a lot of war, and there’s a lot. But you keep reading, and you keep reading and you keep reading. And every time you read it again, God reveals himself just a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. And the thing about God is, is there’s no end to the clarity. Just when you think you’ve got it, oh, I see that.
Conia [00:23:57]:
I see that. It gets a little bit clearer, and it gets a little bit clearer, and it gets a little bit clearer and. And there’s more definition, and the colors become more vibrant, and it becomes more exciting, and you see more and more of what’s out there. And, you know, it’s kind of like people who have never seen before or who have never heard before, and they suddenly get glasses or they suddenly get hearing aids, and it’s an entire new world. God’s world is entirely new the time. So the more you seek him, the more you’re going to find how great he is and what he has for you. It’s going to become. I always say, God is more and he is better all the time.
Conia [00:24:48]:
David talks about God. He’s praying, and he says, God, I just. I want to know you fully. I want to know you. I want to know you fully. God, I want to know everything about you. And God told him in his spirit, he says, you’ll never know me fully. He’s like, what does that even mean? And God says, david, what am I? And David thought about it for a minute, and he got what God was saying.
Conia [00:25:17]:
God’s infinite. And he’s constantly expanding. He has not quit expanding. He keeps going. And if you do some study on the universe and the galaxies and the. The trillions of stars that are out there, you just. You start to begin to get an inkling of the scope of God. And so opening up His Word that was meant for us here in the earth.
Conia [00:25:47]:
The beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Every time you open it up, you get to see a little bit more of him. You become more and more refined. Every time you read His Word, you become more and more defined, and you become brighter. You become fuller of color. You become more and more of who God created you to be. When you go through His Word and get closer to him, they talk about the refiners, the silver refiners. And when you’re.
Conia [00:26:34]:
When you’re Trying to refine silver. I mean, you dig it out of the ground. There’s a lot of dirt in there. There’s a lot of stuff. It’s a lot of gook. It doesn’t come out sterling. It comes out kind of dirty and gross. And you got to melt it.
Conia [00:26:49]:
You got to melt it. And as you melt that silver over super high heat, and it can’t be too high. It has to be just the right amount of heat so that it doesn’t actually make the silver brittle and bad. It has to be done very gently. It has to be done very consistently. And you heat it up and they scoop off what they call the dross, all the dirt, all the debris, all the things that don’t belong, and they scoop it off and then they come back and they scoop it off again. And every time they scoop it off, it looks like it’s gone, but more bubbles up to the surface and they scoop it off again, and then more bubbles up to the surface. And it gets finer and finer every single time.
Conia [00:27:41]:
And when you ask a silversmith how they know when they’ve got it all, when it’s. When it’s done. They say, when I can see my reflection in the silver. You’re not done until Jesus can see his reflection reflection in you. And he’s always more and better, so you’re always more and better. Get into his word, seek Him. And then sitting your two chairs time. Sitting your.
Conia [00:28:22]:
What our friend Kevin Davis calls your vertical alignment time. You want to get vertically aligned with God so your horizon is clear. I love that. Isn’t that great? So get vertically aligned with God. Go sit with him. Ask him what he wants to reveal to you and when he knows that he has your attention. After you get through the pleasantries and ask after you get through the Lord, I’m kind of tired of this, and this is bugging me. And he’s got your attention.
Conia [00:28:55]:
He’ll start to reveal to you. And it’s okay if you open up your Bible and you start reading and you have no idea what you just read. How many of us do that? We’re sitting there reading for half an hour and we’re like, what on earth did I just read? But it gets clearer and clearer the more you read. And that’s why you read over and over and over again. Because when you read, it takes your mind sometime to disengage from all the other stuff that’s going on around you. It’s not easy just to kind of hit the clutch and shift into okay. Now I’m in read mode. You really need some time to disengage.
Conia [00:29:36]:
And so those first few moments of reading, they’re probably not gonna be great. It’s like the first pancake, right? You don’t. You always toss the first pancake. So those first few moments of reading, you’re probably not getting as much as you could. And it’s that. That time where you give it some more time and you read and you read and you read a little bit more, and it starts to become clear. And I remember in high school when we had to read Shakespeare, and I was like, seriously, Shakespeare? It’s in iambic pentameter, which no one can even define what iambic pentame pentameter is. At that point in their growth and their English studies, you get to it eventually, but you start reading it or you start watching it, and you start listening to it.
Conia [00:30:25]:
And at first your. Your ear is just. It’s so foreign. And your eye, it’s so foreign. But as you get into it, as you go, it’s like, okay, I’m picking this up now, getting this, okay. And then you can read it. But it takes that time of just being focused on it. God’s word’s the same also.
Conia [00:30:48]:
God’s word is meant to be read like stories. It’s a bunch of letters to people. It’s a bunch of prophets who said, this is what I’m trying to tell you. And so reading it less as chapter and verse and more as a complete story, each one of the books makes it a little bit easier to understand. Then you can go back and refer chapter and verse. You’re really not going to be able to do chapter and verse without your whole context. So read for context, read for big context first and less for details. And that will help it get down into your spirit.
Conia [00:31:32]:
But that’s all seeking God. And when you seek him and you get into his word, it is amazing that at times he will reveal to you things that aren’t even on that printed page. When he knows that you’re paying attention, when he knows that you’re listening, when he knows that you’re seeking him, he will take that opportunity to reveal to you specific things that were meant for you that may not, like I said, even be on that page. The number of times that we have people come up to us and say, oh, you said this to me in your sermon, and it was so impactful. And we didn’t say that the spirit said it to them, but he knew that they were listening. He knew that they were open and ready to hear, so he was able to speak. I hope today I have encouraged you to go and seek him, knowing when you set out that you will find him. He’s not hiding from you.
Conia [00:32:37]:
You don’t have to close your eyes and count to 100. And you don’t have to wonder if you’re going to find and if you’re going to win, because you will find and you will win every single time. Father, thank you for this time together. Thank you, Lord, that we will find you every time we seek you. Lord, just protect our hearts from the distractions today so that we can see you more and more clearly with every passing moment. We love you, Lord. Thank you for being so available to us. In Jesus name, amen.
Conia [00:33:24]:
Pastor David’s going to come close us out.
