“After removing him, God raised up David their king. He testified about him: ‘I have found David the son of Jesse to be a man after my heart, who will accomplish everything I want him to do.’”
Twenty-eight sessions have given you more theology, more identity, more authority, and more practice than most believers ever accumulate in a lifetime. This last one asks the only question all of it was ever actually for: not what do you know, but what do you want?
David is the Bible’s own answer to that question, and Scripture doesn’t flatter him to get there. He committed adultery, then murder to cover it. He failed as a father, badly, more than once. And yet God’s own verdict on his life is “a man after my heart” — not a man without failure, but a man whose deepest, most consistent appetite, failures included, was for God Himself. Session 2 opened this entire curriculum with a subsection called simply The Pursuit. Twenty-seven sessions later, this closing session finally answers the question it raised: pursue what, exactly, and why does it matter more than everything else this series has taught you?
Consider This
If someone had to name your single most consistent appetite over these last twenty-nine sessions — not your best intention, your actual, consistent want — what would they say it was?
Opening Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, You have taught me so much across this journey. Don’t let it end as information I finished. Let it end as an appetite I can’t put down. Show me what David knew, and make me, whatever my own failures, a person after Your own heart. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Every one of the last twenty-eight sessions has quietly assumed something this one finally says outright: pursuing God isn’t one more spiritual discipline alongside the others. It’s the reason any of the others are worth doing at all.
“O God, you are my God. I long for you. My soul thirsts for you, my flesh yearns for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water… My soul pursues (דָּבְקָה) you; your right hand upholds me.”
Word Study
דָּבַק dabaq H1692
“pursues” · Psalm 63:8
Range. BDB defines dabaq as “to cling, cleave, keep close” — a primitive root describing something impinging on and adhering to another thing, extended figuratively to pursuing closely enough to catch. Session 20 gave this same word its first full treatment in this book, anchored on Genesis 2:24 and Ruth 1:14: the word behind an ungodly soul tie, two people bonded together in a way Scripture treats as genuinely serious.
The sense here. David uses the identical verb — not a softer synonym — for what his own soul does toward God. Dabaq isn’t a word Scripture reserves for warning; it’s a word Scripture also uses for the single healthiest attachment a human soul can have.
Why it carries the argument. Session 20 asked what you’re wrongly clung to. This session asks the same question pointed the other direction: is God the object your soul actually clings to, the way Session 20’s dabaq described an unhealthy tie clinging? Scripture’s own vocabulary suggests the capacity for this kind of attachment isn’t the problem — misplacing it is. Rightly placed, on its rightful object, dabaq stops being a bondage word and becomes a psalm.
Source. BDB, s.v. דָּבַק.
Voices
“Because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological.”
— A.W. Tozer, pastor and author, The Knowledge of the Holy, 1961
Every genuine problem you’ve ever had traces back, eventually, to your relationship with God — which means pursuing Him isn’t a separate item competing with the rest of your life for attention. It’s the most practical thing you could possibly do with any of it. It’s also, by David’s own repeated testimony, the most dependable: “For you are my rock and my fortress” (Psalm 31:3), true on the days it felt true and — just as often, reading his own Psalms honestly — on the days it plainly didn’t.
Consider This
Here’s the diagnostic, as bluntly as it can be put: show anyone your calendar, your checkbook, and your social media feed, and you’ve shown them who or what you actually worship. What occupies the majority of your thought life? Where does your time actually go, not where you wish it went? Answer those three honestly before reading further.
Not every pursuit earns that description. Scripture names the alternative bluntly:
“Their idols are made of silver and gold— they are man-made. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see, ears, but cannot hear, noses, but cannot smell, hands, but cannot touch, feet, but cannot walk. They cannot even clear their throats. Those who make them will end up like them, as will everyone who trusts in them.”
An idol, in this Psalm’s own logic, isn’t only a statue on a shelf. It’s anything you’ve quietly made the object of the appetite this session is describing — anything you’ve come to dabaq, cling to, instead. And the warning in the passage’s last line is worth sitting with rather than rushing past: you become like whatever you pursue. An idol that can’t see, hear, or feel eventually produces worshipers who can’t either — numb to exactly the things a living relationship with a living God was supposed to keep alive in you.
Pause & Reflect
Naming it honestly: what has most often served as the “idol” competing for the pursuit this session describes — not necessarily something dramatic, just whatever your actual attention and appetite have defaulted to?
If pursuing God is the appetite underneath everything else this curriculum taught, this section asks the practical question: pursue Him how?
“My aim is to know (γνῶναι) him, to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings, and to be like him in his death.”
Word Study
γινώσκω ginōskō G1097
“know” · Philippians 3:10
Range. Thayer’s defines ginōskō as “to learn to know, come to know, get a knowledge of” — knowledge built through discriminating, personal experience rather than secondhand report. It’s the New Testament’s ordinary word for relational, experiential knowing, distinct from simply possessing correct facts about someone.
The sense here. Paul has just spent three verses listing his own genuinely impressive theological credentials — his pedigree, his training, his righteousness under the law (3:4–6) — and calls all of it “liabilities” and “dung” (3:7–8) compared to one thing: ginōnai, to know Christ. He isn’t devaluing correct doctrine; he held plenty of it. He’s naming something correct doctrine was always meant to produce and never meant to replace.
Why it carries the argument. Session 24 already gave this series’ fullest treatment of relational knowing through the Hebrew word yada (Jeremiah 9:24) — the same distinction this word draws in Greek. Paul, the most theologically trained man in the New Testament, spent his whole ministry building doctrine and still called knowing Christ personally the one thing worth having. Twenty-eight sessions of this series’ own doctrine were always meant to end exactly here, not stop short of it.
Source. Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, s.v. γινώσκω.
Scripture ties this knowing to a specific promise, not a vague feeling: “May grace and peace be lavished on you as you grow in the rich knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord” (2 Peter 1:2) — grace and peace don’t merely accompany this knowledge, they grow with it, in proportion to it. Jesus names the actual mechanism in His own words to His disciples: “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you want, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7) — remaining, the same continuing pattern Session 27’s mathētēs word study already named, is how pursuit stops being a single decision and becomes an actual life.
Notice, too, that Jesus doesn’t leave “remaining” undefined. He ties it to something specific: His words remaining in you — not merely heard, but kept, returned to, actually digested. Session 27 already built the practice this describes in full: ta’am, tasting Scripture rather than only studying it. This closing session doesn’t add a new key to pursuing God. It names what should now be obvious: every rhythm this curriculum has already given you — feeding on the Word, listening, obeying, worship — was never a separate curriculum from the pursuit. It was always the how. And Jesus names what remaining produces, in the very next line: “you bear much fruit and show that you are my disciples” (John 15:8), and again, “I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that remains” (John 15:16). Pursuit that stays only internal — a private appetite with no fruit anyone else ever sees — isn’t yet the whole pattern Jesus describes. The fruit is what makes the pursuit visible, to you and to everyone watching.
Voices
“I saw more clearly than ever, that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was, to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not, how much I might serve the Lord, how I might glorify the Lord; but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished.”
— George Müller, missionary and orphanage founder, personal journal, 1841
Müller — a man whose actual, documented ministry fed and housed thousands of orphans without ever soliciting a donation — didn’t discover this principle as a retreat from active ministry. He discovered it as the thing that made his active ministry sustainable for over sixty years. Pursuing God first wasn’t Müller’s escape from the work. It was Müller’s engine for it.
What About … Doesn’t Reducing Everything to “Just Pursue God” Undercut Twenty-Eight Sessions of Careful Doctrine?
“This book has spent twenty-eight sessions building careful arguments — word studies, exegesis, contested positions staked and defended. Now the last session says the point was just to want God more? Doesn’t that make all the careful work beside the point?”
No — and Paul himself is the strongest possible answer to this exact objection, since nobody in the New Testament built more careful doctrine than he did. He doesn’t say his theological training was worthless; he says it became a liability only in the sense that clinging to it instead of Christ would have cost him the very relationship it was supposed to serve. Jesus makes the same point even more directly: “Now this is eternal life — that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent” (John 17:3). Eternal life isn’t defined here as possessing correct information about God, even though correct information about God is exactly what makes that knowing possible rather than a knowing of the wrong god entirely. Every word study, every contested position, every hard exegetical case this series has made was never competing with pursuing God. It was building the accurate map so the actual journey wouldn’t go somewhere wrong.
Where this stays unresolved: Scripture doesn’t give a formula for how much doctrine is “enough” before pursuit can properly begin. Paul kept building doctrine his entire ministry and never treated the pursuit as something doctrine eventually gets to graduate away from.
Illustration
Picture two believers, each faithful to church attendance for thirty years. One can recite the correct position on nearly every doctrine this curriculum has covered — the Trinity, the gifts, healing, eschatology — and rarely misses a Sunday. Ask what changed in his actual relationship with God over those thirty years, though, and the honest answer is: not much. The other holds her doctrine more loosely in places, has genuinely wrestled rather than simply accepted some of it, but has spent thirty years actually talking to God, actually expecting Him to speak back, actually letting what she’s learned change what she wants. The first has more correct answers. The second has ginōskō — she actually knows Him. Both attended the same sermons. Only one was pursuing what the sermons were pointing to.
Before you answer the question below, it’s worth having the whole list in front of you rather than trying to recall it from memory. The Mission: His Story, Kingdom Life, The Nature of Man, Kingdom Invitation, Kingdom Partnership, Kingdom Violence, Kingdom Conflict, Kingdom Purpose. The Power: Kingdom Voice, Kingdom Power, Kingdom Identity, Kingdom Warrior, Kingdom Authority, Kingdom Prayer, Power of the Tongue. The Preparation: Kingdom Faith, Kingdom Transformation, Freedom & Forgiveness, Agreements & Strongholds, Bondage, Demonization, Kingdom Health. The Prize: The Trinity, The Unknowable God, Knowing God, Kingdom Stories, Kingdom Lifestyle, The End of the Story.
Pause & Reflect
Scanning that list: which of those twenty-eight sessions changed what you know, and which ones changed what you actually want? Are those the same list?
Every reason to pursue God, and every key to actually doing it, converges on one claim this curriculum has been building toward since Session 2’s opening subsection named it directly: the pursuit.
“I have asked the Lord for one thing— this is what I desire! I want to live in the Lord’s house all the days of my life, so I can gaze at the splendor of the Lord and contemplate in his temple.”
Here is the secret, and it is simpler than twenty-nine sessions might lead you to expect: the prize was never the things pursuing God gets you — the healing, the breakthrough, the authority, the identity, the gifts, even the correct eschatology. Every one of those things is real, and this book has argued hard for every one of them. But David doesn’t ask God for one thing and then list the things he actually wants. The one thing is the whole list: to live in God’s presence and gaze at Him. The blessings this curriculum has taught you to expect were never the point pursuit was pursuing. God Himself was always the point, and the blessings were what happen to a soul that finally wants Him more than it wants His hand.
Jesus makes the identical claim about ordinary life’s real necessities — food, clothing, the things Matthew 6:25–32 spends eight verses admitting are genuinely worth worrying about: “But above all pursue his kingdom and righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33). The word this session has built its title around is the very word the NET translators chose for what Jesus commands here. Not seek as one competing priority among several — pursue, the same single-minded chase David describes in Psalm 27:4 and 63:8. Jesus doesn’t promise the food and clothing instead of the pursuit. He promises them as what follows it, the way Session 25’s own material on God’s goodness already argued: God is never stingy toward a soul actually chasing Him.
This is also, not coincidentally, where the story Session 28 traced finally lands:
“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying: ‘Look! The residence of God is among human beings. He will live among them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them.’ He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will not exist any more—or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the former things have ceased to exist.”
The whole biblical story this curriculum has walked you through — from Genesis 1:26–28’s opening mandate to fill and rule a good creation, through the Fall, through Israel, through Christ, through the Church, through Session 28’s own account of how the story resolves — ends exactly where David’s one request in Psalm 27:4 was always pointed: God dwelling with His people, permanently, with nothing left to separate the pursuit from its object. The story that opens with God walking with man in a garden closes with God living among His people in a city. Everything in between, this entire twenty-nine-session curriculum included, was the long argument for why that ending is worth everything it costs you to pursue it now.
Pause & Reflect
If Revelation 21:3–4 is genuinely where the whole story ends — God dwelling permanently with His people, every tear wiped away — how does knowing that change what you’re willing to pursue between now and then?
You have finished a curriculum. You have not finished the pursuit, and that distinction is the entire point of this closing session.
Nothing about reaching Session 29 changes what David already knew three thousand years before any of this was written: the appetite for God Himself, not merely for what He gives, is the one pursuit that never runs out of road. Every discipline the last twenty-eight sessions built — worship, listening, obeying, feeding on the Word, praying, occupying until He comes — was never meant to end when the reading did. It was meant to become the ordinary shape of an ongoing chase after a God who is Himself the prize, for the rest of your life.
There’s a real risk, reaching the last page of a twenty-nine-session series, of treating the closing session the way you’d treat a graduation: a finish line, a sense of completion, a box checked. David never once, across a lifetime that included this series’ exact themes — authority, warfare, worship, catastrophic failure, forgiveness, and restoration — treated the pursuit as something he’d finished. He was still writing psalms about wanting God more in what were almost certainly his final years. The turn this session asks of you isn’t from ignorance to knowledge. You’ve already made that turn, twenty-eight times over. It’s from knowledge to appetite — from having finished learning about the Kingdom to actually, hungrily, wanting the King.
This is a guided closing exercise applying Psalm 27:4’s “one thing” to your own life, at the actual end of this curriculum.
Find a quiet few minutes and a pen.
Look back. Briefly page back through whatever notes, journal entries, or memories you have from these twenty-nine sessions. Don’t try to summarize all of it. Just notice: what’s the one moment, one verse, or one session that actually changed something in you?
Name your one thing. Write your own version of David’s Psalm 27:4, as honestly as you can: “I have asked the Lord for one thing — this is what I desire…” Finish it in your own words. Let it be about God Himself, not only what you want Him to do for you.
Name your next step. Not a grand resolution — one specific, realistic, concrete thing you’ll do this week that moves you toward the one thing you just named. Write it down.
Pray it. Close with this, in your own words: “Father, twenty-nine sessions have taught me so much about You. Don’t let that be where this ends. Let this be where the actual pursuit begins — not for what You give, but for You. Make me, whatever my failures, a person after Your own heart.”
Big Ideas
Kingdom Principle
The prize was never what pursuing God gets you. The prize is knowing Him. Keep pursuing — for the rest of your life, not just the length of this series.
Closing Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, thank You for every session, every argument, every practice this curriculum has given me. Don’t let any of it end here, filed away as something I once studied. Let it end as an appetite I keep feeding for the rest of my life. Whatever my failures — and David’s example says they don’t disqualify me — make me a person after Your own heart, pursuing You, until the day the pursuit ends the way the whole story ends: with You living among Your people, and nothing left to chase, because I finally have all of You. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Go Deeper
Accessible
A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (1948). The classic this session’s own title echoes — short, warm, and devotional, written specifically to stir the appetite this session has been describing.
Substantial
John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (1986). A sustained, practically-minded argument that pursuing your own deepest joy and pursuing God’s glory are the same pursuit, not competing ones — a natural next step from this session’s Kingdom Secret.
Academic
Augustine, Confessions (c. 397 AD). The foundational text behind this entire tradition of thought — “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You” — read at full theological and literary depth.
Forthcoming from this curriculum
You’ve now finished all twenty-nine sessions. Four standalone companion courses continue the pursuit this closing session has been describing — each takes up ground Kingdom Essentials could only gesture at.
Kingdom Guide (forthcoming). Session 1 named it directly: this whole curriculum leans on Scripture as reliable testimony without stopping to make the full case for why. This course makes it — composition, transmission, canon, and the reasoning behind trusting the book you’ve spent twenty-nine sessions inside of.
Kingdom Stewardship (forthcoming). Session 5’s George Müller illustration and Session 8’s Parable of the Talents both gestured at this territory — managing what’s actually been entrusted to you — without developing it fully. This course does.
Kingdom Purpose (forthcoming). Session 8 opened the question of your unique Kingdom purpose; Session 28 pointed here for the practical follow-through. This closing session’s “one thing” and that course’s “what, specifically” are two sides of the same pursuit.
Kingdom Eschatology (forthcoming). Session 28 made its case in miniature for the story this closing session ends with (Revelation 21:3–4). The full course argues it exhaustively, verse by verse, across Daniel, the Olivet Discourse, and Revelation.
Day 1 Read Acts 13:22 and 1 Samuel 13:14 together. “A man after my heart” — not a flawless man, a man whose deepest appetite was for God. Where is your own appetite for God most alive right now? Weakest?
Day 2 Read Psalm 63:1–8. “My soul pursues you” — the same word (dabaq) Session 20 used for an unhealthy attachment. What has your soul most consistently clung to this year?
Day 3 Read Philippians 3:7–10. Paul calls his own impressive credentials “liabilities” next to knowing Christ. What credential, achievement, or correct opinion have you been quietly clinging to instead?
Day 4 Read Psalm 115:4–8. “Those who make them will end up like them.” What have you pursued that has quietly made you more like it — less able to see, hear, or feel what actually matters?
Day 5 Read Psalm 27:4. Write your own version of David’s “one thing” prayer, if you haven’t already in this session’s Experience.
Day 6 Read Genesis 1:26–28 and Revelation 21:1–5 together — the whole Bible’s opening and closing scenes. The story that began in a garden ends in a city, with God dwelling among His people. Sit with the whole arc of Scripture this curriculum has walked you through, one more time, before you close the book.
This is the last Six-Day Practice in this curriculum. Don’t let it be the last week you practice pursuing Him.
If something in this session stuck with you, confused you, or hit harder than you expected, I’d genuinely like to hear it — email me.
Leading This Session
Arc and timing. This session isn’t in the risk map’s list of encounter sessions, but it carries its own kind of weight simply by being last. Protect real time for The Experience — the “one thing” declaration and the next-step commitment are the actual point of the evening, more than any single argument in the earlier sections. If you’re short on time, trim Reasons to Pursue’s Psalm 115 material before you trim the Experience.
Where the room predictably goes. Expect at least one person to feel the weight of “finishing” more than the weight of “continuing” — genuine fatigue after twenty-nine sessions is normal, not a sign anything failed. Name that directly rather than pushing past it: finishing a book and finishing a pursuit are different things, and this session’s whole argument is that only one of them just happened. Expect, too, that David’s failures named early in this session may open a door someone needs — someone in the room may be carrying real guilt over exactly the kind of failure David’s own story includes. Have Session 4’s material on grace ready to reference; this isn’t the session to introduce the gospel from scratch, but a reminder of where it already lives in this curriculum is often exactly what’s needed.
The closing moment. Consider giving people real silence during The Experience’s “name your one thing” step rather than moving the group through it quickly — this is the one moment in twenty-nine sessions built specifically to be sat with, not discussed immediately. If your group has met consistently across this whole curriculum, this is also a natural point for a genuine closing word from you as the leader: not a summary of content, but an honest word about what you’ve watched happen in the room over this journey.
Group discussion questions.
Kingdom Essentials · Session 29 · Argument Map
Kingdom Pursuit
“Twenty-eight sessions have taught you what to know. What do you actually want?”
The same word Scripture uses to warn against an ungodly soul tie is the word David uses for what his own soul does toward God. Rightly placed, it stops being a bondage word and becomes a psalm.
Paul called his own impressive credentials liabilities compared to one thing: knowing Christ, relationally and experientially, not merely correct information about Him.
The blessings this curriculum taught you to expect were never the point of pursuit. God Himself was always the point.
Every word study and contested position this book has argued was never competing with pursuing God. It was building the accurate map so the journey wouldn’t go somewhere wrong.
God dwelling permanently among His people, every tear wiped away — nothing left to separate the pursuit from its object.
So Now
The same capacity for attachment Session 20 named as a soul tie becomes a psalm the moment it’s aimed at God.
Paul called his own theological credentials liabilities next to actually knowing Christ.
David doesn’t ask for one thing and then list what he wants — the one thing is the whole list.
Every careful argument this book has made was building the map, never competing with the pursuit itself.
Kingdom Principle
The prize was never what pursuing God gets you. The prize is knowing Him. Keep pursuing — for the rest of your life, not just the length of this series.
This is the last session. Twenty-nine sessions ago, this curriculum opened by telling His Story. It closes by asking what you’ll do with your one life inside it. Keep pursuing — the forthcoming Kingdom Purpose course and the full eschatology course, referenced above, are two ways to keep going deeper. The pursuit itself doesn’t have a Session 30. It just continues.