I’M LOOKING AT WHAT I WROTE LAST TIME. About seeking. And it occurs to me – not for the first time – that I’m not very good at taking my own advice.
I look at what I spend my time seeking…
-- a better income (I’m self-employed).
-- entertainment (I love movies and there are several TV shows I hate to miss).
-- sexual gratification. Let’s be honest. We are bombarded with sexual imagery even if we don’t go looking for it. I’m happily and faithfully married, but I seem to have the same drives I had when I was 16.
-- Things: like a new car, better computers (they’re tools of the trade, after all). I can hardly go through my email without seeing two or three things I wish I could afford. Then, I’m a musician of sorts, so there’s always some new instrument or piece of gear I wish I had. Being a homeowner provides a whole list of Things I’d like to acquire. The list seems endless.
-- Spiritual Things: these are easier to excuse. I’d like my son and my best friend to be healed. I’d like to see something dramatic in the way of revival for our youth group and our church. I’d like to have more impact for my ministry efforts. I’d like to have more of the gifts of the Spirit. But it’s all still ‘stuff’, even if it is stuff from God.
It’s amazing how much time and energy seeking these things requires. It’s amazing how easily any one of them can distract me from what’s really important. It’s sad – pathetic, even – how little time there is left to seek the Lord Himself.
I suspect I’m not very different from anyone else. There are so many things to desire that our focus is split. Shattered is more like it.
Matthew 6:22 is one of those verses that I think has more impact and relevance in the King James.
“The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”
Both the NIV and NASB translate ‘single’ as ‘good’ and that makes sense in modern English. If your eyes are good, you can see where you’re going.
But the KJV gives it a somewhat different meaning. If your eye is ‘single’ doesn’t have to do with being physically one-eyed, but rather, with being focused. Compare this with what the writer of Hebrews says in 12:2 –
“Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith…”
As Christians, nothing less than Jesus Himself is our objective. If we allow ourselves to be distracted, if we take our eyes off the goal even for a second, we falter. I falter.
This is, I think, not only my problem, but the general problem of the entire Church in the post-Christian West. We have a sort of spiritual ADD where we are constantly being pulled this way and that. We want God, but we also want what everyone else has, what our society with its massive culture of consumerism tells us we can’t live without.
My prayer, first of all for myself, and then for all of you, my brothers and sisters, is that we will take steps to develop a ‘single eye’, a focus on Jesus Christ that cannot be broken.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Focus
Ask, then Seek
We are looking at Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 7:7) -- “Ask, and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened for you.”
Last time, we discussed the verb “to ask” and concluded that asking requires making contact, it requires the admission of some need or desire, and also the admission that the person asked may have what we need or desire. Some level of relationship is created every time we ask for something. God wants us to ask because it begins or continues that relationship.
Jesus tells us to seek, and again, this is a verb of continuing action. Seek and keep on seeking.
Seeking adds a different dimension to prayer. When we ask for something, we are conditioned by experience to ask for it once. We are, in fact, irritated when we have to ask a second time. Seeking, however, requires and investment of time, effort and determination.
The verb implies that what we want may not be obvious or easily found. That getting what we want is not necessarily going to be immediate. It’s entirely possible that we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for. Seeking prayer may be brief, but it can never be casual. It is part of a larger effort to find something enormously important.
Seeking always has an object: In prayer, that object is always God: God’s mind, God’s will and purpose. God Himself. We may think that what we want is the resolution of a specific and immediate problem or the supply of a specific need, but ultimately, that resolution is only to be found in the PERSON of God, not in an isolated thing or event.
Seeking requires an openness to learn – we search for something because we don’t know where it is or how it is to be obtained. Perhaps one of the reasons we don’t seek in prayer is because we’re more than a little afraid. The path to what we want may not be an easy one. It may not lead us where we expect to go. It may require of us an effort we don’t want to make. It may take us out of our familiar comfort zone. And what we find may not be precisely what we expect.
But that is the great adventure of prayer – the traveling of paths less worn, the experience of blessings we hadn’t dreamed of in the ‘detours’, the revelation of things about ourselves that we hadn’t known, the discovery of depths we hadn’t imagined. Seeking prayer IS an adventure. It is not for the spiritually timid.
But anything worth doing is worth the effort.
Again, Jesus is very positive here: seek and you WILL find. You will find God Himself. Provided you invest yourself in the effort.
“…you will call on Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me, when you seek with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:12-13)
And there is a caveat, found in Isaiah 55:6 –“Seek the Lord while He may be found; call upon Him while He is near.”
I don’t know when it will be, but there WILL be a time when God cannot be found. When you will no longer have the opportunity to seek. Certainly, if we have not made the effort to find Him before death, we will not be able to correct that oversight afterwards. Or perhaps, if we put it off too long, we will become like Pharaoh. You may remember that God hardened his heart, confirmed his resistance and let him live with the consequences.
There is only one thing that is worth actively seeking in this life: an intimate knowledge of the Lord. Without that, nothing else matters. If we waste our lives seeking things that don’t satisfy our deepest longings, we will have nothing when we stand before Him in eternity. We just need to push away the garbage and do it.
Last time, we discussed the verb “to ask” and concluded that asking requires making contact, it requires the admission of some need or desire, and also the admission that the person asked may have what we need or desire. Some level of relationship is created every time we ask for something. God wants us to ask because it begins or continues that relationship.
Jesus tells us to seek, and again, this is a verb of continuing action. Seek and keep on seeking.
Seeking adds a different dimension to prayer. When we ask for something, we are conditioned by experience to ask for it once. We are, in fact, irritated when we have to ask a second time. Seeking, however, requires and investment of time, effort and determination.
The verb implies that what we want may not be obvious or easily found. That getting what we want is not necessarily going to be immediate. It’s entirely possible that we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for. Seeking prayer may be brief, but it can never be casual. It is part of a larger effort to find something enormously important.
Seeking always has an object: In prayer, that object is always God: God’s mind, God’s will and purpose. God Himself. We may think that what we want is the resolution of a specific and immediate problem or the supply of a specific need, but ultimately, that resolution is only to be found in the PERSON of God, not in an isolated thing or event.
Seeking requires an openness to learn – we search for something because we don’t know where it is or how it is to be obtained. Perhaps one of the reasons we don’t seek in prayer is because we’re more than a little afraid. The path to what we want may not be an easy one. It may not lead us where we expect to go. It may require of us an effort we don’t want to make. It may take us out of our familiar comfort zone. And what we find may not be precisely what we expect.
But that is the great adventure of prayer – the traveling of paths less worn, the experience of blessings we hadn’t dreamed of in the ‘detours’, the revelation of things about ourselves that we hadn’t known, the discovery of depths we hadn’t imagined. Seeking prayer IS an adventure. It is not for the spiritually timid.
But anything worth doing is worth the effort.
Again, Jesus is very positive here: seek and you WILL find. You will find God Himself. Provided you invest yourself in the effort.
“…you will call on Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me, when you seek with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:12-13)
And there is a caveat, found in Isaiah 55:6 –“Seek the Lord while He may be found; call upon Him while He is near.”
I don’t know when it will be, but there WILL be a time when God cannot be found. When you will no longer have the opportunity to seek. Certainly, if we have not made the effort to find Him before death, we will not be able to correct that oversight afterwards. Or perhaps, if we put it off too long, we will become like Pharaoh. You may remember that God hardened his heart, confirmed his resistance and let him live with the consequences.
There is only one thing that is worth actively seeking in this life: an intimate knowledge of the Lord. Without that, nothing else matters. If we waste our lives seeking things that don’t satisfy our deepest longings, we will have nothing when we stand before Him in eternity. We just need to push away the garbage and do it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)