God isn't waiting for you to find Him. He's constantly chasing you

By Scott Sauls, Op-ed contributor Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Spiritual indifference rarely announces itself. It arrives slowly.

Prayer starts to feel more like a duty than a conversation with God. Scripture reads more like an instruction manual than a living message from Heaven.

We show up at church, sing the familiar words, listen to a sermon, pray the prayers, and somewhere in the middle of it all we are thinking about the week’s responsibilities or this afternoon’s game.

We know instinctively that God has not changed. And often, we can see ways we have backed away. We have let ourselves become distracted, inconsistent, and numb. So, we assume that closing the gap must begin with us: pray harder, read more Scripture and more Christian books, serve better, and somehow recover the Godward energy that has gone missing.

Examining our hearts is good, and so is returning to the life-giving practices or “means of grace” that have fallen by the wayside. But underneath those good instincts, a more anxious assumption can settle in: God stays close to people who stay steady, and we have not been steady.

In 40-plus years of following Jesus, I have felt that tension more than a time or two. I suspect you have felt it too.

So, what if Christian faith is sustained less by our search for God than by His search for us, and the mercy we set out to discover has been out looking for us the whole time? What if we are far more found than we feel?

The mercy that pursues us

There is a line at the end of Psalm 23 that many believers can recite from memory, though it’s hard to know how many of us dare to believe it: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Psalm 23:6, ESV).

To English ears, follow can sound almost passive, as though goodness and mercy are lagging a few steps behind us. The Hebrew word is radaph, commonly translated pursue or chase. David chose the language of determined pursuit.

He knew what being pursued felt like. King Saul, who was jealous and vindictive, had hunted him through the wilderness with a small army.

David also created his own trouble. He wrote psalms of radiant trust, and he used his position as king to see Bathsheba, send for her, and take her. He arranged the death of her husband, Uriah. He tried to cover the whole thing up. The Bible refuses to sanitize David or turn him into a virtuous hero for our inspiration.

Still, led by the Holy Spirit, David says that goodness and mercy pursued him all the days of his life.

All of them. This included the days when his motives were clean and his prayers were strong, and also the days of fear, compromise, numbness, grief and moral collapse. God did not put His stamp of approval on everything David did. God also did not abandon David or reduce him to the worst things he had thought, said or done. He confronted him through the prophet Nathan, disciplined him, forgave him, and kept leading him home.

None of this means our regrettable choices carry no consequences. Felt distance from God is real as an experience. But our moral successes and failures are not reliable evidence of God’s presence or of his posture toward us. The dark “valley of the shadow” is part of Psalm 23. David never promises that the valley will be pleasant or short-lived, or that we will someday understand clearly why God has us walking through it.

What the psalm promises is, “You are with me.”

The man who could not outrun grace

The English poet Francis Thompson was educated with the priesthood in view, then was sent to study medicine, and neither future materialized for him. He failed his medical examinations several times, left for London in 1885, and spent years homeless, in poor health, and addicted to opium. He slept outside. He survived at times by selling matches and newspapers. During those years, he sent some of his writing to the Catholic magazine Merry England. Its editor, Wilfrid Meynell, saw that the writing was excellent, eventually tracked Thompson down, and with his wife, Alice, helped provide the care and stability Thompson had long suffered without.

Out of that experience came the poem he is best remembered for called “The Hound of Heaven.” It opens with a confession:

“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years...
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace...”

Through much of the poem, the writer is trying to get away from God. He runs through his own mind, through pleasure and sorrow, and through every shelter — real or imagined — that promises to keep his maker at a distance.

The hounding footsteps keep coming toward him. They are “unhurrying” and “unperturbèd,” the footsteps of a love that is not offended by his wandering or discouraged by his resistance.

The image of the Hound of Heaven has endured because it challenges the story we instinctively tell ourselves about life with God. Thompson wrote as a man who knew failure, compulsion, poverty, and shame on a deep level. Grace, in his telling, is not a prize we claim at the end of a successful human search for God. To the contrary, grace is the patient and determined reach of God toward us while we are running from Him, the love that keeps pursuing us while we are still hiding from Him.

The sequence of grace

Luke 15 gives us this same sequence three times over.

The lost sheep does not find its way back to the shepherd. The shepherd goes after it until he finds it. The lost coin cannot move at all on its own, so the woman lights a lamp and sweeps the house until it turns up. The wayward, rebellious son does come to his senses and turn toward home, and while he is still a long way off, his father sees him, is filled with compassion, and runs.

The son’s return is not what secures his father’s love. His confession of wrongdoing is not what persuades his father to grant him mercy. Before he has any opportunity to repair what he has broken or prove that his repentance is sincere, his father covers him with kisses, clothes him with the best robe, and seats him at the table.

This is the Scripture behind an excerpt from my book, The Mercy King:

Your moments of deepest discouragement, disappointment, and even self-disgust do not push Jesus away. They draw Him closer. Jesus runs toward you just as the father ran to welcome His prodigal son, interrupting your rehearsed apologies with an embrace that asks for nothing in return. Even the journey home isn’t something you have to figure out on your own.

The sequence here is essential, because it tells us the unvarnished truth about God and about ourselves. We seek, return, repent and obey. None of it triggers God’s pursuit of us. All of it is our response to a desire He already has for us. Grace does not make our response to God unnecessary. Grace is what makes our response to Him possible. Even the faintest wish to go looking for God is evidence that He has already been looking for us. C. S. Lewis wrote as much to a man who believed himself beyond hope: “Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.”

None of this makes us passive. It frees us from the discouraging, tiring idea that we have to work our way back into God’s favor. We keep praying, reading Scripture, confessing sin, receiving the Lord’s Supper, and gathering with God’s people. But we do these things not to earn God’s favor or persuade Him to draw near to us. We do them because He is already near. These are means of grace — gifts God has given us through which we receive again what he has already promised.

And because His posture toward us is mercy, we can begin to face what we have kept hidden or buried: grief we have avoided, resentment we have held onto, shame we have been afraid to bring into the light. We do not have to protect ourselves from the Lord. His desire is to heal us, not humiliate us. As the late Dallas Willard famously taught: “This world is a perfectly safe place to be — as long as you’re living with Jesus in the Kingdom of God.”

This also changes the way we face the future.

Psalm 23 does not promise a life without valleys, enemies or shadows. All three are there. What it promises is that the Good Shepherd will be there too. No day will come when His presence is unavailable, and no road will take us beyond the reach of his goodness and mercy. The future will no doubt hold things we would never choose for ourselves. But it cannot include a circumstance in which Christ is unwilling or unable to search for, find, bless and keep us.

This is the movement of the Gospel from beginning to end. It is not the story of humanity climbing its way up to God. It is the story of God coming all the way down to us. He brought the glories of Heaven into the poverty of a manger. He welcomed sinners and ate with them. He gave his life as a ransom for many. At the cross, he took the judgment and abandonment our sin deserves so that those who belong to him will never be judged or abandoned. And in his resurrection, he showed that his pursuing mercy is stronger even than death.

So, the truest thing about us is not that we have managed to hold tightly to God. It is that in Christ, God has taken hold of us and promised that no one, not even we ourselves, can snatch us out of His hand.

That remains true even when God feels distant. If prayer feels flat, Scripture feels remote, or worship feels impersonal, there may be some searching questions to ask about how you got there. There may also be practices you need to recover. But do not mistake numbness for abandonment. A dry season does not have the authority to tell you that God has removed Himself from you. Remember His promise: “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5).

This assurance frees you to keep turning toward Him, however faintly. Tell Him the truth about what you think and how you feel. Return to the ordinary means of grace, not to earn your way back to God, but because in Christ He has already pledged Himself to you. The Good Shepherd has not lost you in the valley simply because you cannot see Him clearly right now. Your inconsistency, hesitancy, and doubt does not cancel His faithfulness.

The God who came looking for you is still pursuing you, and He is determined to bring you all the way home.

Originally published at Scott Sauls Weekly.