Lift the Light of Your Face

He could write you a page on the character of God and every line of it would be right.

He is just. He is faithful. He keeps covenant. He provides for those who are His, and He forgives when a man repents, and He does not deal with us after our sins.

He believes all of it and he does not merely believe it in the way people say they believe things; he has staked a life on it. He has kept his word in situations where nobody would have known if he had not, because he believes God keeps His.

And there is one sentence he has never been able to say, and he found it in a conversation with his brother-in-law at a table in the spring, and it embarrassed him.

His brother-in-law, who is not a deep man, said something offhand about God being pleased to see him.

And he heard himself say: I do not think of Him like that.

Not disagreeing. Reporting. And it stayed in the room in a way neither of them expected, and his brother-in-law changed the subject kindly, and he has been chewing on it since.

Because it is true. He believes God is fair. He believes God is generous. He has never once believed God is glad.

Somebody asked for exactly this in a psalm

There be many that say, Who will shew us any good? LORD, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us (Psalm 4:6).

Look at the structure of that verse. There is a crowd asking a very reasonable question, which is: who is going to show us something good. They want outcomes. They want the harvest and the safety and the improvement, and there is nothing wrong with any of that.

And then the psalmist, standing in the middle of that crowd, asks for something completely different. Lift up the light of Your countenance upon us.

He does not ask for the good. He asks for the face.

And what is remarkable is that this is treated as a legitimate request. It is not a poetic flourish and nobody in the psalm corrects him for it. A man is allowed to ask God for His face, in the plainest terms, as a thing he actually wants.

You have permission to ask for the one thing you have never asked for. The word puts that request in a psalm without qualification, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a man bold enough to ask for nearness rather than only for provision, because Scripture says He is the one who cries Abba, Father from inside a person.

A cold correctness

Now let me say the difficult thing, and I say it as a friend at a table and not as a critic.

Everything you believe about God is true and none of it is warm.

Just, faithful, covenant-keeping, generous, forgiving. Read that list again. Every item is about what He does. Not one of them is about how He regards you. A man could believe all five with total conviction and still picture God as a good magistrate: entirely fair, entirely reliable, and entirely finished with him as soon as the case is settled.

And that is what you have got. A doctrine with no face in it.

You are regarded and not only dealt with. The word says the LORD takes pleasure in His people (Psalm 149:4), and pleasure is not a synonym for fairness, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a verse like that past a man's mind and into the place where his pictures of God are actually stored.

A shining face is an involuntary thing

Here is the picture, and it is a table picture, which is where you will get it.

A shining face is what a man's face does when somebody he loves comes through the door of a courtyard. He does not decide to do it. It happens before he has thought about it, and everybody in the courtyard sees it, and it cannot be faked by somebody who is merely being polite.

That is the exact thing the blessing asks for on your behalf: the LORD make His face shine upon you.

Not the LORD be fair to you. Not the LORD deal properly with you. Make His face shine, which is the language of gladness, and it is what the priests were told to say over ordinary people every single time.

You are the one somebody's face lights up for. Scripture says He will rejoice over you with joy and joy is not a word about administration (Zephaniah 3:17), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in a man who has been theologically correct and emotionally alone for years.

And I will be honest, because you would want me to be. Asking for this does not mean you feel it tonight. God may lift the light of His face on you in a way you do not detect for a year. What is settled is that the request is legitimate, that it is in the book, and that a man who starts asking for the face has stopped treating God as a magistrate.