Seek My Face

One thing I ask of the Lord, and this I seek:

that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,

to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek Him in his temple....

 

To you, O my heart, He has said, "Seek My Face!"

Your Face, Lord, I will seek (Ps. 27:4 & 8).

 

I awoke this morning thinking about the joy a child has in hide-and-seek.  I can just hear the scream of delight and the belly laughter from a small child when he/she discovers, or uncovers, the person for whom she has been searching.  What is it about this game that brings such joy?  I think it is the earnestness, or focus, of deliberately looking for one specific thing -- and then finding it. 

 

As life goes on, our search becomes less focused, more diffused, for the most part -- until we lose something vital or precious, something we really, really need to find:  our health, the car keys, a job, or even a lost child.  Until we search desperately, we don't know the joy of finding.  As long as we have everything we need on a daily basis, most of us don't need to search at all.  This is why Jesus noted how difficult it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.  But when we really need, and we are helpless ourselves to supply that need, the joy of receiving is overwhelming.  We are led into humble gratefulness, thanksgiving, and praise to the One Who supplied our need and Who answered our desperate plea.

 

As the Israelites moved through the wilderness toward the Promised Land, God allowed them to experience hunger and thirst, so that when He supplied their need, they would learn gratitude and praise.  In fact, the thing that concerned Moses the most before he died was that the Israelites would forget gratitude:

 

The Lord is bringing you into a good land--a land with streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey, a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills.

When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land He has given you. ...Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.....You may say to  yourself, "My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me" (Deuter. 8).

 

If you want to find a grateful person in America today, look for an immigrant, one who has not forgotten how hard life was in his native land, one who hungered and thirsted and who gave all that he had to seek a new existence in a free land.  That is a person who has found what he was seeking with all his heart, and who never forgets to be grateful.

 

If we want to experience the joy of finding, we have to know what it is we are seeking.  The very first time I read Ps. 27, over 40 years ago, I knew that it was my "lifetime Scripture."  I'm not sure I had ever heard that phrase before, but I was sure at that moment that Psalm 27 expressed my heart's desire -- to seek the Face of the Lord.  Before I read the words, I would not have known to express them, but seeing them on the page, my heart latched onto them:  this is what I want, I thought to myself: "I want to seek His Face."

 

We may not know what it is we want until it is revealed to us.  Scripture tells us that our hearts are "deep waters," not accessible even to our innermost thoughts.  But it also tells us that the Word of God is a "sword" that penetrates even to the division of spirit and soul, that uncovers the deepest thoughts of a man (Heb. 4:12).  If we do not know the "one thing" we seek, it is possible to ask the Lord to show us the secrets of our own hearts.  Those secrets, unfurled, will lead us straight to heaven.