One of the headlines making the rounds this week caught me because of how honest it was: Complicated Men and the Search for God. Not simple men. Not men who have it all together. Complicated ones — carrying regret, questions, false starts, old wounds, half-finished prayers. Men, and women too, who want God but are not sure they qualify.
I want to talk to that person today, because I think there are more of you reading than you might guess. And I want you to hear this plainly: the search for God is never a search among the qualified. It is a search among the complicated. That is the only kind of person there is.
God has never required you to be uncomplicated first
There's an idea that floats around, usually unspoken, that says you have to sort yourself out before you can come to God. Clean up the language, fix the marriage, kick the habit, settle the doubt, then present yourself. It sounds reverent. It is actually backwards.
Look at who Jesus drew. Tax collectors with dirty money and dirtier reputations. Fishermen who cursed and quit. A woman at a well working through husband number five. A thief on a cross with hours left to live. Jesus was not gathering finished products. He was gathering people mid-story, and He was not embarrassed to be seen with them.
Paul, who knew a thing or two about being complicated, wrote it as plainly as it can be written: "But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). Not after we cleaned up. While. That word carries the whole gospel.
The father who runs
The picture I keep returning to is the one Jesus painted in Luke 15. A son takes his inheritance, wastes it, hits the bottom, and turns for home rehearsing a speech about how unworthy he is. He is complicated, ashamed, half-expecting to be hired on as a servant if he's lucky.
And here is the line: "But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him" (Luke 15:20).
The father was watching the road. He saw the boy while he was still a great way off — still dirty, still rehearsing, still complicated. And the father ran. In that culture a grown man did not run; it was undignified. He ran anyway. God is not standing at the door with His arms crossed waiting for you to prove you've changed. He is scanning the horizon for the first sign you're headed home, and He covers the distance you can't.
What I see the Spirit doing
I lead people. I watch them up close. And what I see over and over is not neat conversions in tidy people. I see the Holy Spirit meeting men and women right in the middle of the mess — a man who thought God was done with him weeping in the third row, a person who prayed for years with nothing and then, quietly, an answer. That article about half of Americans reporting a miraculous answer to prayer isn't surprising to me. God still moves. He is present and personal and active, and He does not wait for us to become impressive.
If you prayed and the answer hasn't come, hear me: your complication is not disqualifying you either. The father in the story didn't run because the son arrived polished. He ran because the son came. Your turning toward Him — even a shaky, doubtful, one-degree turn — is enough for God to move toward you.
Come as you are, but do come
The good news is not that you're fine as you are and nothing needs to change. Things do change when you come home; the father put a robe on the boy and a ring on his hand. But the change is something God does after the embrace, not a fee you pay before it.
So if you've been circling the search for God for a while — reading, wondering, keeping a safe distance because you feel too complicated — stop rehearsing the speech about why you don't qualify. Nobody qualifies. That is exactly why Jesus came. Turn toward the road. He is already running.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.