Seeking God: Full Time Work

I’ve been reading and thinking lately about what it means to seek God, and I’ve decided it is much more involved than I first thought. I’ve realized that seeking God is not an activity I can add to my already busy life, as if it were just another item on my to-do list:

1. buy groceries
2. pay bills
3. put gas in car
4. seek the face of the Almighty

No, seeking God is an all-consuming matter, the full-time work of a man’s or woman’s entire life. Seeking God isn’t something I can accomplish in an hour a week on Sunday morning or even in my daily time alone with God in His Word and in prayer. Seeking God cannot be a part-time hobby; it must be my life’s work.

What would it look like to make seeking God my full-time work?

It’s not hard to understand why the desert fathers and mothers thought it best to retire to the wilderness, to a life of isolation. They understood that if they wanted to know God intimately, they needed to devote themselves unreservedly to the task. So they dedicated themselves to the disciplines of fasting and solitude and silence.

Those spiritual forebears are widely admired for their dedication to seeking the face of God, but there were problems with their approach. For one thing, their isolation meant they couldn’t be very neighborly; their sole focus on knowing God meant they couldn’t give adequate attention to the second greatest commandment (“love your neighbor as yourself”). They also dropped out of fulfilling the church’s great commission: to make disciples of all nations. A life of total isolation might help me know God more intimately, but it won’t help me obey Him more fully.

So, short of withdrawing from society altogether, what would it look like to seek the face of God while I’m about my ordinary days in the middle of family life, church life, and my social life? I think there are two practical implications, one with regards to my interior life and other expressed in my exterior life, that is, in my daily activities.

1. I cannot seek God while I am continuously committing willful sin.
 
It is a simple fact that I cannot simultaneously seek the face of the Holy One while I am consciously and continuously giving myself to sin. If I want to give myself to seeking God, I must make a conscious and decisive break with my own particular besetting sin; I must, by God’s grace, abandon it complete.

This is not a matter or achieving perfection or even making myself worthy of being with God. The Puritans had a word for the continuous struggle with sin that all believers know while they are in this body: they called it “indwelling sin,” and I know that sin all too well. It is my constant inward bent toward self and sin and rebellion, and it is a fight for me every day.

But if I want to seek God, I must not also imagine that I can entertain my favorite vice in my heart and mind and habits. Sure, I may try to deceive myself. I might try to manage the cognitive dissonance that comes with serving two masters, but the Spirit won’t let me live long in that state of self-deception.

I must choose.

2. If I want to seek God, I must find ways to integrate my spiritual life into my ordinary life.

If I want to seek God, I must cultivate the habit of an ongoing conversation with Him, one that doesn’t come to an end when I leave church on Sunday or walk away from the Bible reading and prayers in the morning. Through ongoing prayer (my words to Him) and reflecting on Scripture (His Word to me), I can continue conversing with my Savior as I go about my business during the day.

Here we have testimony from Christian history. Brother Lawrence was a seventeenth century monk who cultivated the habit of “practicing the presence of God.” He spent his days in the monastery in prayer and in his assigned duties in the kitchen. He discovered that he could carry on his prayers while at work in the kitchen, “practicing the presence of God.” That is the title of his book, where he outlines how he came to develop the habit of spending his time – all of it – seeking the face of God.

I had a friend who would write down a phrase or verse or a probing question from his time alone with God in the morning and carry it with him to read and reflect on it throughout the day. He was carrying on in his daily life the conversation he began with God in the morning.

Another way to incorporate my prayer life into my ordinary life is through what have been called “breath prayers,” short phrases or prayers that I can repeat to myself throughout the day. One of the most famous breath prayers is the “Jesus Prayer,” the words we first hear from the lips of the blind beggar who repeatedly shouted out to get Jesus’ attention: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me” (Luke 18:35-39).

I once heard the Jesus Prayer set to a simple tune, which I often sing to myself. You can find it here, in the death scene (the last two minutes) of a film on the life of the martyr Jon Hus. In the film, they set the Jesus Prayer to this haunting tune, which I often sing to myself.

I’ve just begun to think about what this means and how to carry it out in my life. I’ll report more later.

Persevere.