Your Face, Lord, I Will Seek

She is a seeker. That word gets used carelessly but in her case it is exact.

She has sought guidance about three jobs and one house. She has sought healing for her mother and then, later, for herself. She has sought wisdom about a friendship that went wrong in a way she still does not understand. She has sought provision, twice, seriously, in months where it was not obvious how it would work.

Twenty-nine years of genuine, patient, unembarrassed seeking, and she would tell you, and it is true, that she has seen God answer a great many of those.

She was reading Psalm 27 in a car park, waiting for somebody, with about eleven minutes to spare, which is where a surprising amount of her reading gets done.

When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, LORD, will I seek.

And she read it again, and then a third time, and she found she had gone very still, because she had noticed something about her own life that she could not immediately put down.

Twenty-nine years of seeking. And every single thing she had ever sought was something He could give her.

Not once, in twenty-nine years, had she sought Him.

The invitation and the reply

Look at the structure of that verse, because it is a conversation and it has two speakers.

When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, LORD, will I seek (Psalm 27:8).

God speaks first. That is the part people miss. The seeking of the face is not a spiritual achievement somebody worked up to; it is a reply. God said seek my face, and the psalmist's heart heard the invitation and answered it in the same words.

Which means the invitation has been open the whole time, and there is a specific reply it is waiting for, and you have been answering it with a different sentence for twenty-nine years.

You have been invited to seek the face and the invitation has never once been withdrawn. The word puts God's request first and the human answer second, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an invitation like that audible to a woman in a car park with eleven minutes to spare, because Scripture says He searches the deep things of God and shows them to us.

The hand and the face

Here is the distinction, and it is the whole article.

Seeking the hand is asking God for what He can give. Guidance, healing, provision, wisdom. All good. All invited. Jesus taught people to ask in the plainest possible terms and He never once suggested that asking was a lower activity.

Seeking the face is going after the person rather than the provision.

They are not opposites and one is not holy while the other is worldly. They are simply two different pursuits, and a woman can be excellent at the first for three decades and never once attempt the second, and nobody around her will notice, because a person who seeks God's hand looks exactly like a person who seeks God's face from the outside.

You are able to go after the person and not only the provision. Scripture says in Thy presence is fulness of joy (Psalm 16:11), and presence is a word about a somebody rather than a something, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a person from asking to seeking, because He is called the Spirit of adoption and adoption is about a relationship rather than a supply line.

Why the face is harder to want

Now let me say something honest about why this has not happened by accident in twenty-nine years.

Seeking the hand has an outcome you can measure. You know whether the house came through. You know whether your mother got better. There is an answer, and an answer is a kind of safety.

Seeking the face has no measurable outcome at all. You cannot tell, at the end of an evening spent doing it, whether it worked, and for a practical woman that is uncomfortable in a way that is difficult to admit to.

So the hand gets sought, because the hand gives you something to hold, and the face waits.

You are permitted to want Him with nothing attached to the wanting. The word says one thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD (Psalm 27:4), which is the same psalm three verses earlier setting out exactly this, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an unmeasurable pursuit feel like something rather than nothing.

And I will keep it honest, because you would leave otherwise. Seeking the face does not produce an experience on demand and there is no technique here. You may do this and feel nothing at all and that will not mean it did not happen. What is settled is that there was an invitation, that it is still open, and that a woman who has answered it once has a different relationship from a woman with twenty-nine years of answered requests.