This sermon emphasizes the importance of seeking God wholeheartedly, highlighting the need for a deep hunger and thirst for His presence and power. It addresses the lack of seeking God in the church, the necessity of breaking and surrendering fully to Him, and the transformative impact of experiencing the manifest power of God in our lives. The speaker calls for a return to true seeking, away from lukewarmness and compromise, and towards a genuine pursuit of God's presence and holiness.

The hardest part about what I do is seeing people thirsting for God, and it's right there. Seeing them hunger for God, and it's right there. You know what they need to do, but you can't force it. You see people dying spiritually, and you can just offer them this hope, but they have to take it. I see marriage problems that would be fixed like that, if the husband and the spouse broke. And I will submit to you that we have a seeking problem in the church today. That's what's happening folks, and there's only a small minority in this room that know what I'm talking about, but we have a seeking problem in the church. See many people know there's a God out there, and I come to church in this, but they don't know the manifest power of God. When God's Shekinah glory would fill the temple, when men would be in His presence and have to begin weeping and falling down, when women could not stand in the presence of an Almighty God. The manifest power of God, when it comes into your life, it radically changes everything. Many people don't know about that. They know about God, but they don't know Him through this experience. This is what forced Paul to write, Oh that I may know Him in the fellowship of His suffering, in the power of His resurrection, that I may know Him. David said, One thing do I desire, one thing, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. It's this falling hard after God and seeking hard after Him. Many people have the letter of the law, but they don't know anything about the Spirit of Christ. They rule their house with an iron fist, but they don't know about the compassion of Christ. They can break down the Bible better than me, but they need to break their heart. Conviction has been replaced with compromise. Things that should convict us, we're now compromising in these areas. And the lukewarm church hates, they disdain the heat of conviction. When you begin to preach about lukewarm lifestyles, instead of returning and repenting to God, they call the messenger primarily me, legalistic, arrogant, rigid, radical, narrow minded. No, it's biblical. A call to holiness is biblical, not arrogant. See, we've drifted so far, that now when we just talk about normal, biblical Christianity, it looks weird. We have a seeking problem. You know nothing. We come here quoting Scripture and saying, Oh, that sounds great, I love that verse. But we know nothing about hungering and thirsting after God. Have you ever spent hours broken in the prayer closet and worshipping and praying? That's seeking and hungering after Him. Now we give them a five minute devotional, a ten minute prayer on the way to work, we know nothing about the manifest power of God. We have a seeking problem. And I see it all the time, especially in council. If you get a spouse seeking God and a husband seeking God, how can that be divided? Because the Holy Spirit is not divided. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of unity. So you've got the Holy Spirit and a believer, you've got the Holy Spirit and another believer, that cannot be at odds when they're seeking hard after Him. The problem comes when we're not seeking hard after Him. We have a seeking problem, church. This would fix half of our problems. You wouldn't need counseling, you wouldn't have anxiety and depression and fear, you wouldn't be all caught up in this mess and anger and irritability, if you would just seek the hand of the Father. He says, come to Me all who are weak and heavy laden, I will give you rest. If you seek Me with all of your heart, you will find Me. If My people are called by My name, we'll turn from all this wickedness and do what? Humble themselves and pray. Not come to church, we don't need more programs, we don't need another ministry, we don't need another potluck, we need to seek the hand and face of the Father. Basically, how bad do you want it? There's a famine in the land. It's not a famine of meat, it's not a famine of drink, it's a famine of hearing from the Word of God. And that is the hardest part of my job. Sometimes I want to take people and just say, just thirst and hunger after Him. You don't need seven steps of this and 18 steps of that. You don't need a new vehicle, you don't need counseling, you need to break. First comes discipline, then desire. See, we want the desire. I want to feel like the shame. No, first comes discipline. First comes discipline, then desire. You first must be emptied to be filled. You must break to be restored. You must first pray, then have the power. You must first praise Him, then the peace will come. You must seek Him before you find Him. The problem of why many of you have not found Him is you're not seeking hard after God. You're putting Him in this little box. As long as He fits within your schedule, your constraints, your time frame. As long as I don't have to do this, I don't have to do that. I'll take just a little bit of God as long as it doesn't affect me. No, He affects everything. He affects your marriage, He affects your finances, He affects your addictions, He affects your strongholds. He affects everything in our life. That's what He does. Fire will not fall on an empty altar. It was not until Elisha put the sacrifice on the altar that fire fell. Paul says, I beseech you, brethren, to present yourselves as living sacrifices, worthy, holy, which is your reasonable service, on the altar. And that's when fire falls. To be filled with the Spirit of God, you've got to be broken, you've got to be empty. You can't buy just three dollars of God. He needs to have all of your life. Let me read this and I'll be out of your way. It's something I read months ago, but I want to read it again by Wilbur Reese. I'd like to buy just three dollars of God, please. Not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don't want enough of Him to make me love a foreigner. I don't want enough of Him to make me love an unlovable spouse. I want ecstasy, not transformation. I want the warmth of the womb, but not the new birth. I want a pound of the eternal in a paper sack. I'd like to buy three pounds of God, please. That's the problem, church. You need to break. I need to break. I'm preaching to myself just as much as everybody in this room. I'm tired of people thirsting and hungering, and they're right there. They're right there. He just says, take of me, eat, and you will see. But the heart's got to break. It's not a half-heart approach. It's a full surrender life. It surrenders everything.