THEY TURNED BACK, SEEKING HIM
“And when they found him not, they turned back again to Jerusalem, seeking him.” Luke 2:45
No matter how many times we read the great stories of the Bible, they always have something to say to us. Mary and Joseph, presumably with Jesus, were returning to Nazareth from Jerusalem. They had made the sixty-five mile trip to observe the Passover feast. Jesus was twelve years old at the time. Joseph and Mary had assumed that Jesus was with their company as they journeyed, but after a day’s traveling, they realized He was not present. Our Bible verse states that, “When they found him not, they turned back again to Jerusalem, seeking him.” They backtracked and eventually found Him in the temple, in dialogue with the scholars. How relieved they must have been to once again have Jesus in their presence.
Have you ever felt like Jesus was missing from your company as you traveled this road of life? Those who are saved have this wonderful promise, that He will never leave us nor forsake us. We will never be without His promised presence in our lives. However, there are times when He seems to have distanced Himself from us as far as our consciousness or experience of His presence is concerned. We have all felt the absence of His blessing, and wondered if something was amiss.
What should we do when there is something missing in our walk with Him? The Bible says that Joseph and Mary “turned back again to Jerusalem, seeking him.” We have to go back to where we might have left off from walking with Him, and seek Him. What an important privilege it is to seek Him. He wants us to seek Him and to seek Him with all our hearts. It may be that when we turn back to seek Him, we will find the very place that we left His will, disobeyed Him, or walked away from His will. When that occurs, we need to honestly confess our sin and begin to walk humbly and obediently with Jesus again.
When Joseph and Mary found Jesus, He said to them, “wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business.”(49) The same is true in our lives. If we expect to walk close to the Savior, we are going to have to stay close to the Father’s business. Jesus will always be near the Lord’s will for our lives. When we depart from the Father’s will and decide rather to pursue our agenda, we might very well find that Jesus is not walking as closely to us as He once was.