Then you will seek Me, inquire for, and require Me [as a vital necessity] and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart. – Jeremiah 29:13, Amplified Bible

Think about those things in your life that you deem necessary. How much time and energy do you devote to them? Things like working to provide for the family, preparing meals, and washing clothes are things we need to do on a constant basis. We attend to such things regularly because we have to, or our worlds will fall into disarray.

How about God? Is He necessary to you? You may say yes in your mind, but what do your actions prove? Are you one of those Christians who rarely talk to God in prayer? Or, are you one of those that rarely invite God to talk to you by reading the Bible? Maybe you do read your Bible and pray every day, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you see God as a necessity. Many Christians who read and pray every day do so to head off any guilt they would feel if they didn’t read and pray. Others read and pray regularly in order to look holy, getting glory for themselves by telling others that they read and pray every day. Such people have 10-15 minutes of quiet time just so they can check that “to-do” off of their list, and then they don’t think about God again until their next regularly scheduled 10-15 minute time slot.

When times get tough, though, God becomes necessary to us. When things are bad, God no longer fits into a regularly-scheduled 15-minute appointment slot. We need him not to fulfill a checklist item but to sustain our very existence. As such, we run to Him constantly throughout the day in prayer and Bible study. It is in those times of pain and anguish that we learn to rely on God because we see the folly of relying on ourselves. It is in such times that we, like Job, esteem the Word of God more than our necessary food (Job 23:12). And it is in those times that we realize a difficult truth to bear: we often end up suffering because, without the suffering, we would never recognize how much we need God.

In Jeremiah 29:13, God foretells of the time – at the end of the Babylonian captivity – when the Israelites would indeed find Him a vital necessity. Through the pain of captivity, the Israelites would learn to seek God as their necessary food. The irony of the situation was that they were captives in the first place because they didn’t find Him necessary to begin with. Had God been a necessary component of life before the captivity – had they relied on and trusted in Him rather than on themselves and on other gods – they would not have committed the sins that led to the captivity. They would have obeyed God’s voice, and the Babylonian captivity would have never happened.

The time to see God as a vital component of your life is now. If you choose Him as necessary now, you very well may be able to avoid the painful situation that will make Him necessary to you later.