Seeking God’s Face

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I’ve been in church long enough to know that sometimes there are those times of worship where you just feel like you’re just right here with God, just face to face. And you can feel His presence. A couple of things I need to clarify there.

We know that if we’re believers, God is always present with us, whether we feel it or not. And as I’ve told you throughout this series on worship, worship is not just music. It’s not just what we do here.

on Sunday mornings, although that is part of it. But I’ve been in church long enough to know that when we come together for these times of corporate worship, there are times where you feel like you and God are just right there. And there can be times outside of church, and should be times outside of church, where you feel like you and God are just right there.

You can feel His presence. You just are overwhelmed by His glory and such. But there are also times where we come to worship either in church or are working on worship of him on a daily basis, and we just feel like the worship is dry, it’s disconnected, it’s dispassionate.

You know, those times where you feel like you’re talking to God and your prayers don’t go any further up than the ceiling. And it’s normal. I’ll say it this way. It’s normal that we have those times.

We see saints all throughout scripture. I think of Elijah when I think of this. Elijah would be on the mountaintop one moment, and next moment he’s down in the valley and feels like, does God, you know, where is God?

Does he even care about me? It’s normal for us to have those moments. What’s not normal, and what we should avoid, is getting to where we think that those moments should be the normal course of things.

That what we should avoid is getting to a place where we’ve convinced ourselves that’s all there is. We’ll have those valleys. Maybe you’re having one of those valleys today.

I know sometimes I’ll walk into church and I’m too distracted. That’s why I prayed this morning about the distractions in worship. Sometimes I’ll walk into church and I am so distracted by what’s going on at home, by what I’m going to have to deal with in the coming week, by who’s done what that’s just gotten under my skin, that I am focused on everything but God when I come to worship God.

And it’s not surprising that when we come in and we’re not prepared, I say come in, when we come into church to worship corporately and we’re not prepared, it should be no surprise when we feel like worship falls flat. And it’s no different outside these four walls. As we worship God on a daily basis, that if our hearts are not prepared and are not sensitive toward God, it should be no surprise when our worship falls flat and it just feels like we’re disconnected from God.

Now, I’m speaking specifically on this to those who have trusted Christ as their Savior, because God is always present with us. We’re indwelt by his Holy Spirit. Sometimes our feelings will lie to us, though, and tell us that he’s distant.

It’s normal to have moments in the valley, but we should not convince ourselves from that, that the valley is a normal place to live our lives. And I’m afraid that a lot of Christians do fall into that trap of saying, you know what, this is all there is. This is what my Christianity is.

Just me going through the motions of this worship and focused on everything else, and I always feel distant from God. I never feel like God hears me. I never feel like God’s doing anything in my life.

When really, it’s because we have hung on to the valley by allowing ourselves to get distracted by every other stinking thing that comes into our field of vision. And when I think about this idea of this dry worship and how this is not all there is, and this is not where we’re supposed to stay, when I think of the opposite of what we long for, a close fellowship with God, a worship where we sense his presence, and we revel in his presence, when I think about that, I think about King David. Because I think we would be hard-pressed to find a more passionate worshiper of God in all of Scripture.

Somebody might say, well, what about Jesus? Yes, of course, Jesus. Jesus is God the Son, and so he had a closer relationship with God the Father than anybody else.

He’s a different person of the same God. They’re going to be close. But when we’re talking just plain mortals like you and me, we would be hard-pressed to find a more passionate worshiper of God in all of Scripture than King David.

And I think that for that reason, we can look at his life. We can look at some of the songs that he wrote, some of the things that he said about his own worship, and I think we can learn some things from that. So this morning, if you haven’t already, turn with me to Psalm chapter 27.

Psalm chapter 27. And we’re going to take a look this morning at why David’s worship of God was so powerful. And there’s a very clear key to it that I see in here.

He starts in verse 4 and says, One thing I have desired of the Lord, that will I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and inquire in his temple. Let’s stop there for just a minute, and then we’ll go on to verse 5. We need to understand that David viewed this never-ending quest for God, this never-ending quest to know God, to know Him more, to love God, to love Him more deeply, he viewed this quest as his greatest pursuit.

King David viewed his quest to know and love God more as his greatest pursuit in all of his life. And this was a man of great ambition and a man of great destiny. Aside from the fact that God elevated him to that position, you’ve got to be a man of great ambition and great destiny to go from being the youngest in your family, somebody so insignificant that your father forgets about you when they’re looking for somebody to be anointed king, and to go from that, somebody that your own father says, him, to being the king of Israel, and the one who finally unites the kingdom of Israel.

This was a great man, but for him, he wanted great things, and he pursued great things, but there’s nothing that he pursued in his entire life that mattered to him more than his pursuit of the presence of God in his life. Nothing mattered more than the presence of God in his life. And we see this here in verse 4.

He says, one thing I’ve desired of the Lord, and that will I seek. He said, there’s one thing I want. It’s as if God came to him and said, I’ll grant you three wishes like a genie would.

And David said, no, there’s only one thing I want. How many of you are going to turn down two free wishes? God didn’t actually come and offer him three.

He says, there’s one thing I want. I’m not making a long list here of all these things that I want. There’s one thing that I want.

And he says, that will I seek. There’s one thing I want, and I’m going to go after that. Sometimes there’s something that we really want, and yet we let ourselves get distracted and we pursue everything else.

Yesterday, I wanted a clean house. And I got distracted and pursued everything else. And guess what didn’t happen?

but David said there’s one thing I want and that will I seek there’s one thing I want and that’s the thing that I’m going to go after he says that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple now dwelling in God’s house meant being continually in the presence of God I don’t think David literally means at this point that he’s going to set up shop in the tabernacle you know put me a bedroom right there next to the Holy of Holies. That wasn’t going to work for a number of reasons. He’s speaking metaphorically here, though, and saying he wants to be in the presence of God, and he’s using the idea of the house of God.

At that point, they had the tabernacle. Soon after, they would have the temple. He was using the picture.

He was using the house of God as a picture, because even though we believe God is everywhere, there was something special about the presence of God in the tabernacle. That was where God came to commune with mankind. That’s where God came to fellowship with mankind.

That’s where they had the Ark of the Covenant, which was the symbol of his presence within the nation of Israel. And so for David to say, I want to dwell continually in the tabernacle, in the house of God, David was saying, I want to be in God’s presence all the time. All the time.

He had a single-minded focus. Now, there are times in his life, some of you know the story of King David. There are times in his life where he gets away from this single-minded focus and it never works out well for him.

But in these times where David’s heart is so close to God’s, it’s because of this single-minded focus. I heard a story years ago that I think it was Ann Richards when she was governor of Texas and running against George W. Bush when he ran for governor of Texas the first time.

She was criticizing him about being single-minded. She said all he cared about was tax cuts. And she said, you could ask George W.

Bush, what time is it? And he’ll say tax cuts. Okay.

That story has stuck with me, the idea of single-minded focus. I think if you were to ask David, what time is it? He would have said time to be in God’s presence.

Okay. That was where his focus was. He wanted to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of his life.

He says he wants to behold the beauty of the Lord. Beholding his beauty means taking it all in, seeing who God is and taking it all in as much as we can because God is infinite and we’re finite and there are things that we will never be able to comprehend about an infinite God. But he’s talking about beholding the beauty of the Lord.

He’s talking about seeing his glory, his goodness, and his greatness and just basking in it. He wanted to spend time in the presence of God and just know him and just be amazed by him, to be awed by him. He says, and to inquire in his temple, to go and seek him at his temple, to ask questions, to inquire after him, to never ever stop trying to know God.

I’ve been a Christian for a lot of years. I know I haven’t been on this earth for a lot of years, but I’ve been a Christian since I was five years old. And so that brings me, I don’t want to sit there and do the math.

What is that, 28 years then I’ve been a Christian? I just turned 33, and my children think I’m ancient now. I’ve been a Christian for a lot of years.

If you spend 28 years getting to know somebody, you’d think you’d know them pretty well, right? You’d think you’d know everything there is to know about them. Not so with God.

If I live another 28 years, if I were to live another 128 years, there would still be more to know about God. And that’s what David’s saying here. David’s somebody who already knows God, and yet he still wants to go inquire at the temple because there’s more he wants to know.

God is unsearchable, unfathomable. No matter how much we learn about him and his goodness and his greatness, there’s always more to discover. So David lays out the fact, this is the one thing I want out of life, is to spend time in the presence of God and know him better.

This is a man with single-minded pursuit of God. Let’s look at verse 5. He says, For in the time of trouble, he shall hide me in his pavilion.

In the secret place of his tabernacle, he shall hide me. He shall set me high upon a rock. Now this passage, this whole passage, Psalm chapter 27, was likely written pretty early in David’s life.

I don’t think he’s king yet at the point that he’s written this. As a matter of fact, a lot of biblical scholars think that this was written around the time that he’s running from King Saul. So God has already anointed him to be king.

He’s got his plate full, just trying to stay alive and get to be king, and yet he’s saying, the thing I really want is to know God more. So he’s writing this during the time that he’s literally running for his life from King Saul, who wants to kill him. And in the midst of all this running, in the midst of all this fear, in the midst of all this everything being upside down in his life, topsy-turvy, he expresses here a tremendous amount of trust in God, a tremendous amount of faith in God and his care for him.

And he was able to do this. He was able to trust God because he knew God, and he’d seen God at work. They had a relationship.

He knew that God was a God who keeps his promises. He knew that God is a God who is faithful. He knew that God is a God who cares for his children.

And sometimes we begin to, we get into circumstances that are difficult, and we begin to doubt whether or not God’s going to take care of us. Boy, if we think about what we really know about God, that shouldn’t be a concern. If we know God, we know that he’s faithful.

We know that he cares for us. And David was able to put this trust in God because he had a relationship with God. And he knew God.

I tend to be a little bit leery of strangers, as we all ought to be. I mean, not that I see strange people at Walmart. Well, I do see strange people at Walmart.

But not that when I see strange people at Walmart, I go running the other direction. I mean, if somebody approaches me in the parking lot, somebody approaches me in the parking lot and I don’t know them, I’ve automatically got shields up. What do you want?

I’ve had somebody, when I was trying to unload groceries, step between me and the cart where my children were sitting in the seat, and I came unglued on them. I didn’t mean anything. You step between Papa Grizzly and his children, you don’t get a second chance here.

Okay, I’m leery of strangers. Because I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’re about to do.

Please don’t think your pastor’s going around being rude to people at Walmart. As long as you don’t get between me and my kids, as long as you don’t get between me and my kids, you’re probably all right. I may be a little leery about your intentions, but I’m not going to just blow up at you, all right?

But I automatically, I see people out in public that I don’t know, and it’s natural for us to be a little leery of them. We don’t automatically trust them because we don’t know them. There’s no relationship.

I know my wife, and I trust my wife. There’s not really any question in my mind about what she’s going to do. Is she going to do something to hurt us?

I don’t mean physically. I know what her intentions are because there’s a relationship there, and I trust her. I would trust her with my life.

I hope it doesn’t come to that, but I would trust her with my life because I know her. David didn’t look at God as a stranger at Walmart that he had this distant connection to that maybe he’s here to hurt me, maybe he’s not. He had that relationship, that closeness with God where he says, I know him, and I know that he’s going to take care of me.

In the time of his trouble, he’ll hide me in his pavilion. He’ll shelter me in the secret place of his tabernacle. He’ll hide me.

He’ll set me up on a rock where nothing can hurt me. He’s talking about the trust that he has for God. And yet, even in this relationship where David knew God, where he had this trust for God, he didn’t allow himself to grow complacent toward God.

That can happen sometimes in a relationship where you’ve known each other for a lot of years. You know almost everything about each other. You grow complacent, and you stop trying to learn about the other person.

That didn’t seem to be where David was going in his relationship with God, because even though he had this relationship where he knew God and he trusted him, still we go back to verse 4, and he wanted to know more about who God was. The more he knew about God, God should be, God’s presence and the knowledge of God should be addictive for us. See, the more David knew about God, the more David knew God, the more he wanted to know God.

It’s like an addiction. Sometimes people will, in a good way though, sometimes people will get hooked on a substance and the more they have of it, the more they want to have of it. It’s my exact relationship with pie, which we talked about for the Christmas party.

The more he knew of God, the more he wanted to know God. There was no complacency there. Now let’s look at verse 6.

In verse 6 he says, And now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me. Therefore I will offer sacrifices of joy in his tabernacle. I will sing, yes, I will sing praises to the Lord.

So instead of this complacency because of his familiarity, David grew to love God. It wasn’t, oh God, it’s you again. It was, you know, your children get to an age where you come home and they don’t care.

You’ve been gone all day, they don’t care. You know who’s always excited to see you? You dog.

I can be gone all day. And I walk in and the kids are like, oh, it’s you again. Some days, no, they’re still little enough that they usually get excited, but some days it’s just like, oh, you again.

The dog, I can walk out to the truck and come back, and he’s like, I thought you were never going to come back. I’ve missed you so much. This was David’s relationship with God.

He didn’t look at God and say, oh, I know you so well. Oh, it’s you again. He’s taking God for granted.

He was so excited about the opportunity to spend time in God’s presence. David loved God. He loved God so much that it overflowed out of him when he thought about God.

The love just overflowed out of his spirit. And he was emboldened by his trust in God. He said, no matter who comes at me, he said, God is going to raise my head above all my enemies.

David was emboldened because of his love for God, because of his trust in God. And he found joy in God and he longed to offer sacrifices in his tabernacle. See, he loved God so much that he was saying, I can’t wait to go and offer sacrifices in his tabernacle.

Now, how many of you this morning said, I love God so much I can’t wait to go give offering? Uh-oh. Y’all just got quiet.

Yeah, it’s not even about the offering. How many of you, when it’s time to go serve God in some way, have to sacrifice your time, have to sacrifice your money, have to sacrifice your patience dealing with other people in ministry. How many of you wake up and say, I’m so excited, I love God so much, I can’t wait to go do that.

That’s where David was. He longed to offer sacrifices in his temple, in his tabernacle. And he loved to sing songs of praise to God.

He loved it. He just, it just overflowed out of him. You know, one of the ways I can tell my wife is happy and having a good day?

She walks around the house singing. That happens. Sometimes she doesn’t, well, no, it’s me that doesn’t know I’m singing.

Sometimes I walk around the grocery store singing, which is a whole different situation. But he loved God so much that these songs of praise just spilled out of him. When’s the last time that you were so overcome by your love for God that you’re walking around the house singing songs of praise to him, and not because somebody’s making you, or not because it’s time to do that at Sunday morning, but just because you love God.

See, that’s where David was. he loved God so much he couldn’t hold it in you know those annoying kids in junior high who’ve discovered puppy love for the first time and they won’t shut up about it that’s where David was he loved God so much he just couldn’t hold it all inside so we go to verse 7 and it says hear oh Lord when I cry with my voice have mercy also upon me and answer me so David recognized too what he was in contrast to God This makes it all that much more incredible. See, we think about God and we think about how incredible he is, how amazing he is, how loving he is.

It becomes even more amazing and incredible when we realize that he shouldn’t love us. See, David recognized who he was in contrast to God. We can see because he’s crying out to God for mercy.

God have mercy on me. You know why he’d cry out for mercy? Because he needed it.

He needed mercy. He recognized he was just a mere man. who’s just a mere mortal, a sinful man who is entirely dependent on God’s mercy.

You and I are entirely dependent on God’s mercy. God doesn’t owe me anything except death and separation from Him. That’s all God owes me.

If I want what God owes me, there it is. God is not obligated to love me. God is not obligated to save me.

God is not obligated to bless me with any good gift that He gives. Now, any good thing that I receive from God is because of His mercy. It’s because of His mercy.

It’s because He is kind enough, because He is loving enough, that He would look at me and love me in spite of my sin. And David, in crying out for mercy, recognizes that it’s all the more incredible that God would love us and that God would care for us when we’re just sinners who’ve done nothing to deserve His love and His care. And he saw that he was entirely in awe of God all the more.

Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice, have mercy also upon me and answer me. He was always desperate for more of God’s presence. Now let’s look at verse 8.

Verse 8 says, When you said, Seek my face, my heart said to you, Your face, Lord, I will seek. When you said, Seek my face, my heart said to you, Your face, Lord, will I seek. God had called Israel.

And we look at this quote, and the way we can see it in the Hebrew, it’s a plural thing. He’s talking to more than one person. He was talking to the nation of Israel and said, Seek my face.

Now, I had a little bit of difficulty with this this week because I can’t find any place in the Old Testament where he says, Seek my face, that chronologically comes before this. I couldn’t find the phrase in the Old Testament law in any of the prophets that came before this. so it doesn’t seem to be a direct quote where God said quote seek my face through one of the prophets to the nation of Israel but it is a principle that’s taught all throughout scripture that God wanted the people of Israel to seek his face God wanted the people of Israel to seek him and when God told the people of Israel when God gave this command to Israel throughout his law throughout his word that they were to seek him David from his heart he leapt at the chance.

He said, you don’t have to tell me twice. You said, seek your face and I’m going to do it. Now what we need to understand this morning is seeking his face means longing to be in his presence and know him.

It means longing to be in his presence and know him. It’s kind of a metaphor, but seeking God’s face doesn’t mean I’m going to look at his literal face and see what he looks like. It means I want to be in his presence and know him more.

And this was the single-minded pursuit of David. The way David sought God’s face constantly is the reason why he was able to worship God so passionately. Because he was always pursuing that.

He always wanted to know more of God. He always wanted to know God more deeply. And with that attachment to God, he was then able to worship him with passion that I think is difficult for us to understand sometimes when we’re just trying to go through the motions of worship.

And all of this leads me to the main point of the text, which is we cannot expect passionate worship of God without a passionate pursuit of God. Let me say that again because I want you to hear this. I want you to nail this down.

I want this to be bouncing between your ears as you’re trying to go to sleep tonight. We cannot expect a passionate worship without a passionate pursuit of God. It just doesn’t work that way.

We can’t say with our attitudes, with our hearts, God, I’ll take Him or leave Him, and then come to try to worship Him and expect it to be meaningful in any way. We’ve already seen in previous weeks as we’ve gone through this series that worship is tied to a covenant relationship with God. If the relationship with God is non-existent, Or if we allow ourselves to grow cold toward the relationship, it shouldn’t be any surprise for the worship to grow cold.

How can we expect that our worship not be diminished if we push the relationship to the side? And so this morning, if you’re sitting there, if you’re a believer, again, the bulk of this message this morning is for those who’ve trusted Christ as their Savior. I don’t want to convince anybody who’s never trusted Christ, you know what, if I’ll just chase God a little harder, I’ll be fine.

This comes after what Jesus did. When you get right down to it, David and everybody else that was saved in the Old Testament was saved in the same way we are. They were just looking forward to Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross while we look back at it.

So this is assuming those who put their faith in God’s provision for salvation at the cross, that you’ve trusted Christ as your Savior. God calls us to seek His face. Seeking God’s face is not something we do naturally before we come to Christ. And the Bible says we’ve all gone astray like sheep.

There’s none that seeks after God. No, not one. We’re all unrighteous.

This is talking to those who’ve trusted Christ, who’ve been indwelled by the Holy Spirit and been empowered to do this. God says, seek my face. In verse 8, he says it right there.

David quotes it as a command that God says, seek my face. God calls on us to seek his face. We can worship God more freely if we know him more freely.

And God does intend for us to find him. You may be sitting there this morning saying, well, that’s great, seek my face. It’s not like I can know where to find God.

God’s a mystery. Folks, you need to know God intends to be found. If God didn’t want us to find him, if God didn’t want us to know him, he would have never revealed himself to us and we would have been none the wiser.

But Acts 17, which we looked at a couple weeks ago, talked about how God has orchestrated human history, and it says, So that they should seek the Lord in the hope that they might grope for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. God has worked things out to make himself knowable and make himself found. And he ultimately reveals himself in the person of Jesus Christ. Ultimately, if you’re going to worship God in a meaningful way, you’ve got to seek him deliberately.

And that can only be done through Jesus Christ. So if you’re a believer this morning, the message to you is if you feel like worship is meaningless, it’s disconnected, it just doesn’t feel right, seek God’s face. Don’t just come to worship unprepared, not only on Sundays but throughout the week. Don’t just try to worship unprepared.

But consider if you’re seeking God, if that’s the ultimate pursuit of your life or not, and start seeking His face. If you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, It has to start with Jesus Christ, because you and I can only know God through Jesus Christ. John 1. 18 says, No one has seen God at any time.

The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. We can’t just find God the Father on our own, but Jesus Christ came to make Him known. The book of Hebrews says, God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed heir.

of all things, through whom also he made the worlds, who being the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high. That’s Hebrews 1, 1 through 3. And if you recall back months ago when we started studying through the book of Hebrews, that passage means when it calls Jesus the express image of his person, it means God was showing us through Jesus Christ exactly who he is and what he’s like.

If you want to know God, if you want to be able to pursue God, you have to start with Jesus Christ. And through Jesus Christ, believers, you can seek his face today. To those who’ve never trusted Christ as their Savior, it starts with Jesus Christ. It starts with recognizing that we’ve sinned, we’ve fallen short of God’s glory. We can’t have a relationship with him on our own.

We can’t be to him on our own. We’re separated and we can’t get back together with God. We can’t have peace with him on our own because we’ve blown it with our sin, with our disobedience.

And you and I could never do enough to undo the wrong that we’ve done. We could never be good enough. We could never earn it or deserve it.

Instead God sent his only begotten son, Jesus Christ, to take full responsibility for my sins and for yours and to be nailed to the cross to shed his blood and to die. Bearing the full weight of the wrath of God on sin, taking the full penalty that we owed, paying the whole price for our sins so that our slate could be wiped clean. And now God offers forgiveness and salvation through Jesus Christ, through Jesus alone.

If you believe that your sin has separated you from God, if you believe that Jesus Christ died to be your one and only Savior, and that He rose again to prove it, And if you’re willing to trust Christ as your Savior and ask God’s forgiveness, He will save you. He will forgive your sins in full. He will give you eternal life.

And He’ll give you a relationship with the Father. And at that point, at that point, the relationship with the Father begins. And we can pursue Him wholeheartedly in a way we could not otherwise do.