“SEEKING HIM”
Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 22, 2015
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania
TEXT:
With my whole heart I seek You; let me not wander from Your commandments.
Psalm 119:10 (ESV)
Several times through the years I have been asked by well-meaning Christians: “Have you found God?” My answer has always gone something like this: “Well, actually I’m still seeking Him. But I am very grateful that in His mercy and grace He found me.” We hear a lot about people seeking God, but the truth of the matter, as it is revealed to us in the Word of God, is that the only people who genuinely seek God are those who already believe in Him. The natural state of man, infected with sin, renders every individual to be spiritually blind and dead and an enemy of God, as we read in Paul’s letter to the Romans: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. . . . There is no fear of God before their eyes” (Romans 3:10-12; 18). In our relationship with God, it is always He who takes the initiative, through His Holy Spirit convicting us of our sin and condemning us with the Law and, through that same Spirit, comforting us with the assurance of forgiveness and New Life with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The problem with people taking the initiative in seeking God is that they tend to go about seeking Him in the wrong way and in the wrong places. Most people these days scorn what they call “organized religion” (I often wonder if disorganized religion is more to their liking!) and prefer instead something that they call “spirituality,” which seems to include any kind of “other-worldly” experience that does not involve a clear confession of faith. God has not promised to meet us in the daily horoscope, in psychic readings, in Tarot cards, in our inner thoughts and feelings, or anywhere else where unbelieving people are likely to seek Him. He has promised to meet us only in His means of grace--the saving Gospel of His Son Jesus Christ as His Spirit gives it to us in Word and Sacrament. Since God in His mercy has found us and “called [us] out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9), let us seek to grow closer to Him this morning by meditating on what King David has to say in the text before us regarding how we are to seek Him and where we are to seek Him.
The psalmist sings to the Lord: “With my whole heart I seek You.” The believer who truly seeks the Lord is one for whom the Lord is his number one Priority in life. Our God--the One who became human, lived, suffered, died, and rose again for us--is not content to be just one of our interests among many. He is either everything to us or He is nothing. The people who pursue “spirituality” in our day dabble in all kinds of religious teachings and practices, many of which contradict each other--and they think that their spiritual “diversity” makes them somehow superior to the person who is wholeheartedly committed to one faith. But the Creator and Preserver of all things says: “I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:5). He cannot and will not tolerate anything short of the wholehearted commitment that David is talking about when he speaks of seeking the Lord with his whole heart.
But seeking the Lord with your whole heart also means being open to what the Lord reveals about Himself and His will. Far too many people in this world try to create their own god in their own image. They have such a firm concept of who God is and what He is like--a concept that is based not God’s revelation but on their own personal preferences--that they cannot understand or accept anything that is at variance with their own idea of what their god ought to be like. How many times have you heard someone say: “I can’t believe in a God who would . . . “ and then go on to list what they see as the Lord’s greatest offenses? They honestly want to believe in God, but only with the condition that God fits into their preconceived ideas of what He is like and what He determines to be right and wrong. They are seeking God aimlessly and without any certainty because they are looking for Him in their own minds and hearts, both of which are infected with sin and are therefore unreliable.
But the believer can have certainty when he or she seeks the Lord to learn of Him because the Lord Himself has invited us to find Him in His revealed Word. In this very Psalm David praises the Lord for this revealed Word when he sings: “Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105). We can be certain that the Word of Scripture is truly God’s Word, as the apostle Peter assures us when he writes: “No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). In His Word is where God has promised to meet us, to speak to us, and to reveal Himself to us. It is a Word that tells us who He is and what He is like. In its Law and Gospel it shows us the righteousness and justice of the Lord as well as His mercy and grace, revealed in the Gospel of His Son Jesus Christ. It is a Word that we can count on--a Word through which God convicts us of sin and forgives us because of His redeeming grace manifested in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
This Christ--“the Word [who] became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14)--is the One in whom God has revealed Himself most clearly because “in Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9). Everything that God is is, by His will, given to us in the Baby who lies helpless in the manger and the Man who hangs equally helpless on the cross. If we ever want to know what God is like or how He would deal with the situations of life that we have to deal with every day, all we need to do is look at the life of Jesus because in Him God walked this earth and lived among us as One of us. He not only sought us and found us, but He also identified with us in the most intimate way possible: He literally took our place by living our life in our sinful and broken world, going even so far as to take our place under His own righteous Law and judgment, fulfilling the Law perfectly in His life and suffering the penalty for our sin in His suffering and death.
We can seek the Lord, as the psalmist did, only because the Lord first sought and found us and claimed us as His very own. Having been made alive in the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, we in turn seek God in order that we might grow closer to Him and, by the Spirit of the slain and risen Christ, be conformed to His good and gracious will, daily dying to sin and rising again to live for Him. All of this is ours by His grace--the grace that we see in the blood-stained cross and empty tomb of Jesus, to whom we sing in the words of the hymn:
“Oh, the height of Jesus’ love, higher than the heav’ns above,
Deeper than the depths of sea, lasting as eternity!
Love that found me--wondrous thought! Found me when I sought Him not.”
(Lutheran Service Book #611, stanza 2).
Amen.
May the One who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, making us kings and priests before His God and Father, lead you to a life of repentance and trust. May He also be glorified in the lives of you, His people. He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it. Amen.