Seeking God - Psalm 32:6 Series

Psalm 32:6 Therefore let everyone who is godly pray to you while you may be found; surely when the flood of mighty waters rise, they shall not reach him. 7 You are my hiding place; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance. Selah.

Introduction

From the time you woke up this morning until right now, what have you done that could be classified as seeking God? And what have you done that could be construed as earnestly seeking God - with all your heart and all your soul? What does it even mean to seek God? We need to know, because seeking God is so fundamental to what it means to be a believer that it is sometimes used as shorthand to describe all of God’s people.

Proverbs 28:5 Evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the Lord understand it fully.

The opposite of an evil man is one who seeks the Lord. So it is pretty important that we understand what seeking the Lord means. The reason this came up is because we have been studying Psalm 32, and the crux of that whole psalm is verse 6.

Psalm 32:6 Therefore let everyone who is godly pray to you while you may be found

Whenever we fall into sin our task is to find God again. The sin puts relational distance between us and God, and we must then seek Him until we find Him again. So I would like to wrap up this series on Psalm 32 with a topical message on the concept of seeking God.

The Meaning Of Seeking

Effort To Know

So let’s start with the definition - what does it mean to seek God?

Hosea 5:15 ... they will seek my face; in their misery they will earnestly seek me.

And when they did, here is what it looked like:

6:1 Come, let us return to the LORD ... 3 Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD

So seeking God means pressing on to know God. And in this context it is not talking about just gaining information. It is talking about experiential knowledge - knowing something by experience. Knowing someone, personally, by experience. That is why it specifies, they will seek my face. So seeking God means seeking His face - seeking to have Him look at you in a favorable way, seeking to have Him smile at you. That is what knowing Him means. You have a personal experience of His power, and then you have a personal experience of His kindness, then an experience of His wisdom - various different experiences of what He is like, and through that you get to know Him better. That is why seeking God and knowing God are used interchangeably.

Psalm 9:10 Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you.

So seeking God’s face means seeking to know Him better through experience. And the goal of the seeking is to satisfy the cravings of the soul.

Effort To Satisfy Thirst For God

Psalm 63:1 O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you

The reason he is seeking is to satisfy the thirst of his soul. Do you know what the thirst of the soul is? Any time you find that you are lacking joy, lacking hope, lacking spiritual strength - or you feel a sense of emptiness, or your emotions are numb or your godly desires drop to dangerously low levels (you don't have very strong desires for good things), or you are depressed or discouraged or restless - those are all examples of what Scripture calls the thirst of the soul. Just as your body gets hungry and thirsty physically, so your soul gets hungry thirsty spiritually. There are physical appetites and there are non-physical appetites. And when those non-physical appetites - your appetite for joy or awe or hope or peace - if those appetites go unsatisfied, your soul gets hungry and thirsty. And the only food and drink that will satisfy the hunger and thirst of the soul is an experience of God's presence. That is why God so often describes Himself as being like food and drink. So when your soul gets hungry and thirsty, and you make an effort to satisfy that hunger and thirst with an experience of God's presence, that effort is what the Bible means by seeking God.

If you are a child of God, God promises to never leave you or forsake you, which means God's presence is always available to you. Sometimes more available, other times less, but to some degree God is always available to His children, which means there is never a time when joy is impossible. Whenever we lack joy, it is always because we are not taking advantage of something that we could be experiencing. It is always available, but it is not automatic. You have to make an effort to experience God’s presence, and that effort is called seeking.