Psalm 27:8
You have said, “Seek my face.” My heart says to you, “Your face, Lord, do I seek” (ESV).
Our response to the Lord’s invitation starts from the heart—our inner person, the seat of personality. It starts from our mind, emotions and will responding jointly to God’s gracious call. God wants our hearts above all. Guard your heart with all vigilance, for from it are the sources of life (Proverbs 4:23 NET). But thank God that, although you used to be slaves of sin, you obeyed from the heart that pattern of teaching to which you were handed over (Romans 6:17 CSB). Though outward obedience to God is good, it means nothing unless the heart is also seeking God. You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules’” (Matthew 15:7-9 NIV). Here are some characteristics of true spirituality, as we seek God from the heart. It is:
- Focused on Christ
- Rooted in redeeming grace
- Flowing out to love to God and people
- Living by faith
- Expressing joy and hope
- Growing in grace and knowledge of the Lord
We cannot explore these matters now. But we must also understand that true spirituality comes from the heart. It is not something that happens because of external pressure. Some people are “fine” spiritually as long as someone else is applying pressure on them. Friendship can have many positive benefits. There is a proper place for this in true spirituality. See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness (Hebrews 3:12-13 NIV). And let us watch out for one another to provoke love and good works, not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching (Hebrews 10:24-25 CSB). However, there is something terribly wrong if the motivating power to seek God is outside one’s heart rather than inside it. Such a religion would show the lack of a new heart and the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, who motivates us according to Christ and the gospel. So then, our response starts from the heart, not as the efficient cause, which is Christ, but as the place where seeking God begins. God speaks to our heart and our hearts reply to him.
The response communicates with God: My heart says to you…. “David saw God in all his commandments” (Sibbes). He did not bring God’s communication down to the level of bare “book talk”. Instead, he saw the word as it truly is, as God speaking to us now in written form. The Scripture often declares, This is what the Lord says…. In other words we must lay hold of God’s continuing communication with us through the words, and this means that we must respond to God personally when we hear his voice in the Scriptures. “God and Father, you are speaking to me, and I would speak with you.” So then, we should take the opportunity the Bible presents to us when we read it to respond to God’s communication to us by communicating with him, the living God! This is what some mean by praying the Scriptures back to the Lord. Read a passage, and then use it as the framework of your communication to God.
Grace and peace, David