I am working my way through Timothy Keller’s book on prayer. Chapter Eleven, “As Encounter, Seeking His Face”, really caught my attention. “You are adopted into the Father’s family. You have the very divine life in you, the Holy Spirit. You are loved and accepted in Christ, you know about these things and yet at another level you don’t know them. You don’t grasp them. You are still dogged by your bad habits, often anxious, or bored, or discouraged, or angry. You may have many specific problems and issues that need to be faced and dealt with through various specific means, yet the root problem of them all is that you are rich in Christ and nevertheless living poor.” (Timothy Keller, Prayer) Wow! Do you know what came to mind when I heard that quote? The Beverly Hillbillies. I know, you are shaking your head and laughing, what? The Beverly Hillbillies ran from 1962-1971. It was about a desperately poor widowed hillbilly, living in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. Jed discovers oil on his land, while hunting rabbit. Instantly rich, Jed and the rest of his hillbilly family pack up and move to Beverly Hills. The show centers around the idiosyncrasies of this out of place family and their neighbors and banker, from Beverly Hills.

Can you imagine becoming instantly rich? Now, can you imagine, having all that wealth, every physical need you might have, being instantly satisfied, and yet, you don’t change the way you are living? You have all that wealth, and you continue scraping by, struggling through each day, barely surviving, while your enormous fortune goes untouched. Of course not! And yet, how many of us, how am I, really living that way? When it comes to the riches of God’s power, what am I leaving untouched? Paul addresses this very problem in his letter to the Ephesians. “For this reason I kneel before the Father,from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.  I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”

Timothy Keller writes that even though we know that we have access to God’s riches, we don’t grasp them. Grasp is defined as, “to take or seize eagerly”. We may know that the Holy Spirit lives within us. We may understand that Christ suffered and died on the cross for our sins. We may know that God the Father, loves us in the most perfect way a father can love. But do we grasp it? Am I seizing that knowledge eagerly? And what comes to mind when you think of seizing eagerly? Do you think of grasping in desperation, as you would if you were dangling over a cliff? Do you imagine how you would grab at a stack of cash, if it were caught by the wind and began to blow away? Or do you imagine how you would react being placed before a banquet table of food, if you were starving, and hadn’t eaten in many days or weeks? I believe that all of us would be desperate in any of these situations and nothing would be able to deter us from feeding and satisfying that desperation. Our relationship with God should be the same.

It’s more than going to bible study, taking time for personal devotions, and praying. It’s a desperate search. It’s changing my heart and submitting my will. It’s looking up at the night sky and thinking about how vast the universe is, and then praising Him, realizing how great He must be to have created all that I see. It’s running scripture through my mind as I work. It’s singing songs of praise. It’s turning every moment I can into worship for Him and for who He is. One of my favorite verses has always been Matthew 6:33. “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” This isn’t a wealth and prosperity promise. This is a promise that He will give us more of Himself, as we continually seek Him. Seeking Him will take away bad habits, our anxiety, our fear. When we lay those burdens at the cross and we open our hands to His grace, He will pour out upon us His love. He will sanctify us, and through His power, we will be changed. When trials come, as we know they will, we will be rooted permanently in His love, so that nothing will be able to tear us away from Him. Through His power, we will be able to understand the full measure of His love. Seeking that love, seeking relationship with our triune God, will give us riches beyond anything we can conceive, and then, we will no longer be living poor.