Jeremiah 24:7 And I will give them an heart to know me, that I am the Lord; and they shall be my people, and I will be their God: for they shall return unto me with their whole hearts.
	Over the course of the previous weeks and months, we have been dealing with our spiritual relationship in Christ. God has spoken to us Sonwise, in Christ. He has made Himself manifest to us, in Christ. We are joined together, in Christ. We are brought into a living relationship with God, in Christ. And, we have been urged and urged and further urged not to be deterred from knowing more and more of God, in Christ. We have been exhorted not to become side-tracked, not to allow ourselves to be led off course, not to settle for the temporal when the eternal is in view. We have been exhorted to lay a course in our hearts after Christ, and only after Christ, never swerving to the left nor to the right, but constantly pressing on, as the Apostle states “to the on-high calling”. 
	We have seen the glory of God vested in Zion, and what we are come to, not tomorrow, not next year, not in the future, but now, in Christ. Many of us have been called forth from our reticence, to push ahead, in Christ, to not become bogged down in our attitudes, and in our doctrines, but to seek after God’s own heart in the knowledge of our call to Zion. Such is the state of our fellowship, today, in the Lord. There are those among us who desire more and more of the Lord, and there are those among us who have yet to take the call to heart, who have yet to decide that we cannot risk being left behind in the pack of nominal Christians who are but plodding along, enduring their salvation until the end of their sojourn on this earth. My brothers and sisters in Christ, there is security in the pack, there is comfort in being surrounded by the pack, there is a sense of loyalty in the pack, but where is Christ? Where is the One who gives us life? Where is the One in Whom we place our complete trust and rest and security? 
	You see, running with the pack sets up the pack mentality that does not need to learn more of Christ. Rather, it means conformity to the rules that the pack creates. It means that we are obligated to the requirements that fit the interests of the group, rather than the interests of God. Packs bunch together in order to perpetuate the group, while we are called to glorify God.
	Our passage deals with the fact that we are the recipients of a heart that is capable of knowing more than what the pack would have us to know. Knowledge is dangerous in the life of a pack, of a group gathered together for a specific purpose or reason. Knowledge means that one’s being is expanded beyond the usually accepted, and opened to the further truth of God, which takes one beyond the finite ideas of the group. That becomes a dangerous and threatening situation to the life of the pack, because it means that the artificial boundaries and guidelines that bind the pack together are being threatened, and the pack will try to stop anything that would bring about the doubt of the existence of the group to continue.
	I don’t know if this makes sense in the terms that I am trying to relate, but the fact is that we cannot afford to be bound up by a pack mentality. We are being taught of God, by God. This will mean that as we accept and seek after God on His terms, in His manner, with His heart to know Him more, we will lose all sense of that pack mentality, all sense of any security in our numbers of pack members, and find everything focused on Christ. Does this mean that we will forsake our fellow Christians, with a desire after what is mine and only mine? Heaven forbid, rather that is the antithesis of the pack mentality, being out for me, myself and I while forgetting all about our fellow Christians. And that extreme too, is not the focus of who we are in Christ Jesus, as our hearts are after Him in all His glory. Our passage does not speak of individuals, to whom God will singly give a heart here and a heart there to know Him. It states that He “will give them an heart to know me.” One heart after God, working in the lives of His people. So, we do not have a sense of a group nor pack mentality, neither of an individual mentality, but rather a body of believers, the people of God, instilled with one heart after God.
	We have the picture of fellowship, a gathering of those people in whom God has so worked that they are of one heart after God, to know more of Him, to seek after all that God has to give in Christ, and who seek to give all unto God in their fellowship one with another. It is not a pack mentality, because the focus is not on the group and the survival of the group, but on whatever brings glory and honor and praise to God. It is not an individual effort, but a joining of each heart together before God for Him to have His perfect way in the lives of the individual and in the fellowship. One heart after God, given by God, with the focus upon God in all His fullness.
	It is in this manner that God will bring forth those who are after Him with a whole-heartedness, who have joined themselves in utterness unto the purpose of His glory on this earth. It is a matter of being brought into a living relationship in Christ, and thereby into a living relationship one with another in Christ. A whole-heartedness after God sets aside all the hindrances that characterize most of us as individuals in a group, and rather works to bring about the life of Christ more livingly in the individual and in the fellowship of the body as we gather together to learn more and more of Christ.
	One key is found in Deut. 6:5 And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. Love is a characteristic of who we are in Christ. Our very being is set in the Love that is Christ. How do we express our Love unto God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our might? It is as we give ourselves to the Lord as He gave Himself to us, even unto His death on the cross. As we lay down our lives for one another, so are we expressing the Love with which we are indwelled by Jesus Christ. The pack does not lay down its life for one another, the individual members are sacrificed at the discretion of the entire pack, for the sake of the whole. As Christians, in the Lord, desirous after the Lord, we are set on a course of self-sacrifice for the glory of God. This means that we ask Him to do what ever it takes in our lives to bring complete and eternal glory to Himself. There is no aspect of forcing someone else into service, but rather a willingness to serve instead of being forced into service. We seek not after our survival, but after the survival of the other, in a course that would serve to lift and encourage one another rather than to destroy and to tear down one another.
	Psalms 119:2 Blessed are they that keep his testimonies, and that seek him with the whole heart. Obedience, not to the law of the pack, but to the law of the Holy Spirit opened in our hearts and fully in line with the Word of God is another key to our true knowledge of God. It is an obedience which does not seek after gain for the individual, but after gain for the Lord and desirous after only that which will bear fruit after the heart of God. It is an obedience, which sets aside the course of this world, and will follow God on whatever course He sets for our lives, no matter what the road neither what the sacrifice involved. It is the obedience that can only be brought into our lives by the work of the Holy Spirit, and followed only as we seek after the Holy Spirit to become the governing force of our lives. Obedience that will show forth in fellowship not our glory, but the complete glory of God. It is not a matter of blindly following some charismatic individual to the utter ends of the earth. That is not obedience, but folly. Rather, our obedience is developed as God makes known what we should do, what would please Him and what would be best for our lives according to His infinite knowledge and work, and then our choosing to have Him have His way in our lives. Our obedience is that obedience that is worked into us in a living manner to desire after only what God would have and setting aside our desires and our plans for His desires and for His plan.
	Prov. 3:5 Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thy own understanding. This is another key in focus this evening. Learning to trust the Lord with all our heart. It is true that this is an impossible task on our own. We are unwilling to give up any avenue of our ability to take care of ourselves. We want to be in control of our lives and of our livelihoods, and yet that is not what the Lord desires from us. He wants us to learn to trust Him to take care of us, as He does even the sparrow in flight. We are to seek after Him to have His complete way in our lives, no matter what the cost or the road, in order to build a true relationship in which we are fully aware that without God, we are in a hopeless abyss. The pack wants us to trust the pack for everything, while the Lord wants to show us just how trustworthy He is, if we will but seek after Him in every avenue of our beings. 
	The greatest fear we share, as humanity, is that we will not have a sense of someone to trust. The gang problems of our society are symptomatic of the need to trust someone, anyone in order to affirm that we are somebody. Gang members, representative of a pack mentality, owe their everything to the gang. It is in gang relationships that they have a surety of someone to trust. If that trust to the gang is violated, the betrayer pays the ultimate price.
	In Christ, we have no such fear of violation of trust. We are trusting Him with our everything for eternity. That alone should be  sufficient to allow us to trust Him with our earthly lives and beings for the period of our sojourn. We need to allow the Holy Spirit the opportunity to work in us to the end that we can trust God with every aspect of our being. This includes family, finances, work, school, home, personal and business. Nothing is beyond the effective ministry of God, so why do we try to hide things from Him? Consistently, we gather things into our own little cubby holes, like pack rats, trying to keep just this or just that from the Lord, because we say that we are unable to let go of it, or because it is something that is too hard to deal with in the Lord, or because that is just the way that we are. We try to keep a little control to ourselves because we do not want to trust the Lord with everything, because He might not do it our way. That is what needs to come under the Lord’s ministry, every area of our being, especially those that we refuse to turn over to the Lord. To come to Him with whole-heartedness is to set aside, in every degree and aspect, that which we want for what He desires. Nothing short of that. Holding nothing for ourselves, seeking after nothing unto ourselves, in full awareness that what we want must become conformed to what He wants to bring forth from our beings.
	Honestly, this is the area that requires the most stringent aspects of self-denial. To trust God, is too open our very being to the infinitesimal searching of the Holy Spirit, and asking, yes asking Him to cleanse away every residue of that old humanity, and trusting that we will not perish as that scraping away of self is performed to the day of our redemption.
	Jer. 29:13 And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart. This truth follows so much in line with the previous truth, that they cannot be separated. When is it that we seek after God with all our hearts? It is when the Holy Spirit is working to develop that utter trust in God. It is as He is scraping out that residue of the old humanity, and we are under the effective ministry of God that we cry out in our despair for the Lord to save us. The pain and the frustration and the pressure and upheaval stir up and boil in us until there is no other avenue of escape but to call upon God or perish. No, this is not a pleasant picture that we are envisioning, death never is, but it is a death unto self that will result in a resurrection unto God of a deeper and ever increasing relationship in Christ. As we ask the Holy Spirit to set aside every desire after the things of this realm, so are we fully incorporated into the death and resurrection power of the cross of Jesus Christ. We find that our hearts more and more become focused on the things of God and upon His beauty and upon His glory. Our earnest desires become the very desires of His heart, looking for Him to manifest Himself in every situation as it seems to fall apart around us. Rather than the despair evident in the chaos of this realm, we fully seek after Him to reveal His measure of love in every seemingly impossible situation, and we learn to trust that He will make everything new in Christ. It will not be as we would have envisioned it, but on a much higher and more effective realm in Christ. What seems to be so impossible apart from God, is revealed as so fully in line with the plan and purpose of God that there would have been no other manner for God to heal a relationship except in the manner in which He chose to do it. Our struggles, painful for the time, serve to reveal a deeper glory in Christ to make Himself the Lord and Savior, not just of our hearts, but of the hearts of those around us. He evidences in life, what we thought was out of the question in our imagination. His effective ministry of loving-kindness works to break down the walls and barriers that we could never have breached with all our preaching and teaching. In every aspect of our being, we find that we have to more and more increasingly seek after God in order to live in this realm, and we find that He is ever faithful to be our life in this realm. He wins our hearts in His love, and seals our hearts in Christ. This is what we need to learn. It is the heart of Christ that He has given us as His Body of believers. It is a heart that seeks solely after Him and cannot be satisfied until His heart is satisfied in our lives. And, what is our life on this earth, simply the fullness of the expression of the one Who now indwells us, our Lord Jesus Christ. As He more and more is revealed forth from the lives of those who love Him, so much more is the Heart of God satisfied with the effectiveness of the work that Christ has accomplished once and for ever.
	Let us, as fellow believers, encourage one another and encourage ourselves not to become part of the pack, holding the “pack mentality that seeks after only the comfortable and the conformity to the rules of the pack, individual beings seeking after their own safety within the confines of the pack. Rather, let us in one heart, the very heart of Christ, seek to have Him open in us, as His Body of Believers, the essence of Himself, revealed in the Word and livingly expressed in obedience under the effective working of the Holy Spirit, to the very glory of God. We are not joined unto a pack of believers, but rather, we are made one in Christ. Rather than our focus being on what is good for the pack, let our hearts seek after only that which is glorifying to God, with one heart after Christ, no matter what the road, no matter what the earthly cost. The Holy Spirit needs to join us together into that singleness of heart to know Christ, and Him only! 
	  	Jeremiah 24:7 And I will give them an heart to know me, that I am the Lord; and they shall be my people, and I will be their God: for they shall return unto me with their whole hearts.