Desperate for God… Really?

How can a person move from being comfortable with where they are at, to being desperate to know, love and obey the Lord Jesus Christ like never before. Is wanting to know God deeply and honestly something God really wants for each one of us? Are we content to stay where we are at because we feel comfortable knowing that those around us also are at the same level of comfortableness and we don’t want to rock that boat? How can we be desperate for God? Are there things we can do that will move us from where we are to where God might want us to be? Or is this being desperate something that is entirely up to the Holy Spirit to give to a few select people? Do we have no say in the matter be cause we have convinced ourselves that knowing God, loving God and obeying God is only something we can talk about but never truly practice? If we can choose to be more desperate some of the thoughts below might help start and keep us moving forward:

Just a story about one man’s awareness of the truth that if he really believed it would have changed his life and the lives of countless others. If I believed what I say I believed wouldn’t I be desperate to live it out in my life?

Charlie Peace was a criminal. Laws of God or man curbed him not. Finally the law caught up with him, and he was condemned to death. On the fatal morning in Armley Jail, Leeds, England, he was taken on the death-walk. Before him went the prison chaplain, routinely and sleepily reading some Bible verses. The criminal touched the preacher and asked what he was reading. “The Consolations of Religion,” was the replay. Charlie Peace was shocked at the way he professionally read about hell. Could a man be so unmoved under the very shadow of the scaffold as to lead a fellow-human there and yet, dry-eyed, read of a pit that has no bottom into which this fellow must fall? Could this preacher believe the words that there is an eternal fire that never consumes its victims, and yet slide over the phrase with a tremor? Is a man human at all who can say with no tears, “You will be eternally dying and yet never know the relief that death brings”? All this was too much for Charlie Peace. So he preached. Listen to his on-the-eve-of-hell sermon:
“Sir,” addressing the preacher, “if I believed what you and the church of God say that you believe, even if England were covered with broken glass from coast to coast, I would walk over it, if need be, on hands and knees and think it worthwhile living, just to save one soul from an eternal hell like that!