Why Seeking God Feels Dry: Are You Seeking The Right Thing? - Psalm 63 Part 8 Series

Psalm 63:1 O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you. My soul thirsts for you. My body longs for you in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

Review

Step 1 in learning to love God is to resolve to prefer God over this world, after having counted the cost. Another step was hungering and thirsting for mystical fellowship with God through direct experiences of His attributes. The word David used to describe his quest to satisfy his hunger and thirst for God was “seek.” “Earnestly I seek you”

Seeking God means making an effort to fulfill your longing for God. Satisfying fellowship with God is always available, but not easy to attain. Seeking is hard, but even though it is hard, it is a wonderful process that is itself desirable.

Ps 27:4 One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what 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.

“If I had just one wish it would be to gaze and seek, seek, seek (in His temple – a place where seeking results in a lot of finding).”

Why is not it joyful for me?

Lack of Faith

If you have not found the process of seeking God to be a joyful one, there are a few possibilities. One could be lack of faith. Another could be lack of eagerness in your seeking. And third could be that your seeking is not really a seeking after God, but for something else.

The first of those, lack of faith, was discussed in the last lesson. If you do not enjoy seeking because you do not anticipate a lot of success in the process, or it does not seem to you that God’s presence will be satisfying to you, one way to increase your faith is by tasting and seeing that He is good. Another way is by making your soul listen to the Word of God – especially God’s great and precious promises. Faith comes through hearing the Word. Find the promises in Scripture that describe how wonderful the presence of God is, how wonderful fellowship with Him is, and how wonderful relational knowledge of Him is. And then let your soul just rest on those and take delight in them. Memorize them so that you can meditate on them so that you can take delight in them and trust in them. That will increase your faith.

Seeking something other than God

If you’ve been seeking and seeking and seeking and not finding, another possibility is that you are seeking the wrong thing - something besides God; because if you earnestly seek God you will find Him.

2 Chrn.15:2 If you seek him, he will be found by you

Ps.9:10 you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you.

Isa.45:19 I have not said to Jacob's descendants 'Seek me in vain.' I, the LORD, speak the truth; I declare what is right.

Seeking God will never turn out to be a vain effort – you will find Him. But there is a lot of earnest seeking that people think is seeking for God but that really is not. We think that just because we are earnestly praying and earnestly reading our Bibles and earnestly doing ministry and earnestly involving ourselves in fellowship, we must be seeking God. But that is not necessarily true. Sometimes we pour ourselves into prayer with great earnestness, and we think we are seeking God, but really all we are seeking is relief from some suffering. Or we are seeking to have God give us some thing we really want. And God Himself is not actually the object of our seeking. He is just the means we are using to get what we think will satisfy.

Sometimes we pour ourselves into ministry thinking we are seeking God, but really we are just seeking successful ministry – not fellowship with God Himself. Remember, if you are doing something because God called you to do it; that fact in itself does not guarantee you are engaging in fellowship with God.

Sometimes we pour ourselves into studying God’s Word thinking we are seeking God, but in reality we are only seeking information or insight. There are some people who study the Bible simply because they want information. They want to know as many Bible facts as possible. And there are a lot of different motives for that. For some it is so they can impress people and come off as a really knowledgeable Christian. For others it is so they can have a sense of self-confidence. Others study simply out of curiosity.

They are “into” the Bible like other people are “into” biology or chemistry or literature. When a person has a strong interest in a subject, enjoyment comes from learning new things in that field. And some people (a lot of pastors I think) enjoy learning new things from the Bible because they find the Bible so interesting. But they are not really seeking God Himself.