“For Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel.” — Ezra 7:10

Ezra did not drift into devotion. He did not ease into it gradually, hoping it would take hold somewhere along the way. He set his heart. He made a decision — a consecration — and everything else in his life realigned around that moment.

There is a day like that for some of us. A specific day. A line crossed. A prayer prayed. A heart that said, once and for all: I am done living at a distance from God. Nothing is going to keep me from Him.

And from that day forward, any free moment becomes Bible time. Any quiet space becomes an opportunity to think about Him, to meditate on His Word, to talk to Him. Not because someone is watching. Not out of duty or the fear of falling behind on a reading plan. But because He and His Word have become your delight — the thing your soul reaches for the way a thirsty man reaches for water.

Have you had that day? Do you remember it?

I do. And I want to tell you about mine.

A Prayer. Eight Months. An Exact Date.

Ten years ago this week, God answered a specific prayer I had prayed in one of the darkest seasons of my life.

What I prayed and how He answered is between me and my Lord. But I will tell you this: He answered it in such a precise, unmistakable way that I have never forgotten the exact date it was fulfilled — and I will carry that date to my grave as a monument to His faithfulness.

What led to that prayer was this: I knew I was not putting God first. I knew I was not spending time with Him the way I should have been. I was going to church every week. I wasn’t tolerating sin. But I was a comfortable Christian — not giving my best or first fruits to God. He wasn’t always first. I was fitting Him in when I had time, if I had time. I gave Him the leftovers, not first place. I knew I didn’t know Him the way I should. I knew I didn’t have my spiritual priorities in order. And in the back of my mind I knew I could do better … I thank God that I had the heart to admit this and repent with godly sorrow.

And then the trials came. Not one. Many. All at once. And I found myself utterly at His mercy with nowhere else to turn.

So I prayed. Specifically. Desperately. Continuously for months. And I waited in anticipation.

Eight months later, He answered.

Starting Over at Genesis 1:1

When God moved, something broke open in me. Not a casual gratitude — something far deeper. An eagerness I had not felt in my relationship with Him. I wanted to know Him. Not know about Him. Know Him.

Like Ezra, I set my heart. I made a decision. And I started at the beginning.

Genesis 1:1. Every book. Every chapter. Every verse. When I came to passages that revealed something about the nature and character of God — what grieves Him, His majestic holiness in Exodus 19, His protectiveness over widows and orphans, everything I could learn about who He is — I highlighted them in my Bible.

Then I prayed something that has shaped every year since: Lord, give me wisdom to understand what You want me to know from what I am reading, that I might live my best life for You. Open my eyes that I may see and apply marvelous things from Your Word.

He answered that prayer too.

I would take a single verse about who God is and think about it for days. Weeks. Months. I am still thinking about some of those verses years later, turning them over in my mind like a man examining a gem he cannot fully comprehend. This method has unlocked more insight about God and His Word than anything else — like pieces of a puzzle, every new piece placed revealing the shape of the ones still missing. For example, God’s holiness alone occupied my meditation for eight full years before I had the courage to write a single sermon or blog post on it. I was so overwhelmed by what Scripture revealed that when I finally preached that sermon, I preached it alone — in the privacy of my own study — because I was not certain I could stand before a congregation and hold myself together long enough to finish it.

I am still not certain I could.

The Trials Did Not Stop. They Got Heavier.

I want to be honest with you about something because a testimony that only tells you about the breakthrough and leaves out what came after is not the full truth.

When I purposed in my heart to diligently seek God, I did not step into a life of smooth sailing. The trials did not subside. In many ways they became more severe — deeper, longer, more pressing than anything that had driven me to that first desperate prayer. More than once over these ten years, I have found myself in the middle of a storm so relentless that the only thing I could do was pray and wait. And more than once, that waiting has stretched not for weeks or months but for years.

Years of praying the same prayer with different words and emotions that changed me from the inside out. Years of trusting a promise I could not yet see fulfilled. Years of waking up and choosing, again, to believe that He who began a good work would be faithful to complete it. And that He would keep the things I had committed to Him against that day.

Deep study and meditation taught me something essential about suffering that has changed how I face every trial: not all suffering comes from the same source. Some is the work of the enemy, permitted within limits God sets — as Job 1 and 2 show plainly. Some is the intentional discipline and refining of a Father who loves us too much to leave us as we are — as Hebrews 12 and James 1 make clear. And some is simply the result of time and chance, the common lot of living in a fallen world that Ecclesiastes speaks of honestly. These are three distinct sources, and learning to discern them by deep study, prayer, and meditation on His Word — more pieces of the puzzle falling into place — changed everything about how I endured.

In those seasons, I learned to do what David did. When everything had been stripped away — his city burned, his family taken, his own men turning against him — Scripture says David strengthened himself in the LORD his God (1 Samuel 30:6). There was no one left to encourage him. No voice to steady him. He went to God alone and found what he needed. I have had to learn that same discipline. When the weight is heaviest and no human comfort reaches the depth of the pain, you turn to the Word and you strengthen yourself in the LORD. It is not a feeling that arrives on its own. It is a choice — and then, slowly, the strength comes.

I also found myself returning again and again to Job. Not because my trials came anywhere close to what Job endured — they did not. But because Job taught me two things I could not have learned as clearly anywhere else. In the first two chapters, you see exactly how the enemy operates — his access, his accusations, his limitations, the fact that he cannot move against you one inch beyond what God permits. That knowledge alone changed how I faced suffering. The trials did not become easier, but they became legible. I could see the hand behind man’s suffering, and I knew that hand was not sovereign. God is.

And then chapters 38 through 42 — God speaking from the whirlwind. Not explaining Himself. Not answering Job’s questions. Simply revealing who He is. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who has put wisdom in the mind? Or who has given understanding to the heart? That passage does not resolve suffering with an argument. It resolves it with a revelation. When you truly encounter the God of those chapters, your questions do not disappear — but they find their place. You become, like Job, a man who has heard of God with the hearing of the ear, but now your eye has seen Him. And that changes everything.

And every time — every single time — the answer has come.

Not always in the way I expected. Not always on the timeline I would have chosen. But He has never once left a sincere prayer unanswered. Never once abandoned me in the middle of the fire. The deliverance has always come, and when it comes after years of waiting, there is no feeling on this earth quite like it. It does not just solve the problem. It does something to your soul that comfort and ease can never do.

It strengthens your faith. It deepens your trust. It draws you closer to Him than you were before the trial began. And it does something else — something that no argument, no sermon, no book could ever produce on its own. It makes you absolutely convinced that God is real. Not intellectually persuaded. Convinced. Settled. Immovable. You have waited on Him in the dark, and you have watched Him come through in providential and specific ways. You cannot unknow that. You cannot be argued out of it. It is written into your history with Him.

I have prayed prayers over the years that took two years or more to be answered. And although the wait was painful, I would not trade a single one of those waiting seasons for an easy life, because I came out of each one knowing God in a way I could not have known Him any other way.

Lord, I believe. That is not a declaration of certainty about how or when. It is a declaration of trust in who. And that trust has been forged on an anvil that only suffering and patient waiting can build.

Psalm 27:4 and 27:8 — David Purposed It Too

As I continued to carefully read each verse to know God, there is a passage that stopped me cold when I first read it with new eyes. David wrote:

“One thing I have asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.” — Psalm 27:4

And then, just a few verses later:

“You have said, ‘Seek my face.’ My heart said to you, ‘Your face, LORD, I will seek.’” — Psalm 27:8

David didn’t say I will try. He didn’t say I will do my best when life allows. He said I will seek. One thing. The one thing. Purposed. Set. Decided.

The greatest aspiration of my soul — one I carry into sleep each night and wake with each morning — is to see God in His glory. From the glimpses and descriptions of Him scattered across Scripture, I have built images in my mind of who He is. I sometimes fall asleep meditating on them. I wake thinking about them. I know that in this mortal frame I cannot look upon Him and live. But by His grace, with continued obedience, holiness, and the glorified body that Jesus will give me in the resurrection — yes, I will see Him someday. And I will stare, marvel, and bask in the glow of His beauty.

When I read those words from David — a man after God’s own heart — and realized that the consuming desire of my soul had already been put into words by a king three thousand years ago, something settled in me. I felt, for the first time in that way, that I was on the right track. Not by my merit. By His grace alone.

Psalm 27:4 and 27:8 have been my favorite verses ever since.

The Day I Understood Why He Called It the Greatest Commandment

Ten years of diligent seeking will eventually bring you to a realization — and when it comes, it is less like a discovery and more like something finally coming into focus that was always there.

Jesus was asked which commandment was the greatest of all. His answer was immediate and unequivocal:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” — Mark 12:30

The greatest commandment. The one above all others.

For years I had read that verse as a standard to reach — a high bar, a demanding call. But the more I pursued God, the more I began to understand that Jesus was not describing the hardest thing He requires of us. He was describing the most natural thing that happens to a heart that has truly encountered Him.

God does not want your compliance. He does not want your religious performance or your dutiful attendance or your checked boxes. He wants you — all of you, every faculty, every affection, every corner of your being — because He is the only One worthy of that totality. He is not asking for love the way a king demands tribute. He is asking for love the way a Father longs for His child to come home.

When that settled into me, everything changed again. I was not following out of compulsion. I was not seeking God to avoid consequence or maintain standing. I was seeking Him because I had come to love Him — really love Him — and love by its very nature runs toward its object. It does not need to be commanded to pursue what it treasures. The command simply names what a transformed heart already wants to do.

That is why He called it the greatest. Not because it is the most difficult. Because it is the most everything. It is the root from which all true obedience grows. Get this right — love Him with everything — and nothing else in the Christian life needs to be forced. It flows.

Ten years ago I purposed in my heart to diligently seek God. What I did not know then was that He was not simply calling me to a discipline. He was calling me to a love. And that love, refined in more than a few long and painful seasons of waiting, has grown deeper every year since. That’s my testimony.

Now I Want to Hear From You

Here is my question — and I ask it sincerely:

Have you had your Ezra 7:10 moment?

The day you purposed in your heart — really purposed, with the full weight of a decision made before God — that you were going to seek Him diligently and nothing was going to stop you?

Was it a single moment? A crisis that drove you to your knees? A prayer God answered so specifically that you still carry the date? Or did it come gradually — a slow waking, a quiet realization one ordinary morning that somewhere along the way, God had stopped being a duty and had become a delight?

And if you are in the middle of a long wait right now — a prayer that has stretched on for months, or years, with no answer in sight — I want you to hear this: He rewards those who diligently seek Him (Hebrews 11:6). Hold on. If you are obedient, the answer is coming. And when it comes, it will do something to your faith that nothing else in this life can do.

Tell me your story in the comments below. When did you purpose in your heart to put God first and keep Him there? What trial drove you there — and what has kept you seeking since? Your testimony may be the very thing God uses to awaken someone else reading these words today.

Earnestly Pursuing God Ministries exists for one purpose: to call this generation out of comfortable Christianity and into the blazing center of God’s heart. If this post stirred something in you, subscribe below and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

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