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Hear my voice when I call, LORD;
be merciful to me and answer me.
My heart says of you, \u201cSeek his face!\u201d
Your face, LORD, I will seek.
Do not hide your face from me,
do not turn your servant away in anger;
you have been my helper.
Do not reject me or forsake me, God my Savior. \u2026
I remain confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.
Wait for the LORD;
be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD.
(Psalm 27:7-9,13-14)

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The phrase that stands out to me in this text is: \u201cMy heart says of you, \u2018Seek his face!\u2019 Your face, Lord, I will seek.\u201d

How often is that true, I wonder? How often do the longings of our heart attach themselves to seeking the face of God?

I think we find that our longings attach themselves far more often to lesser things. The constant scroll of a web page or app\u2014any really\u2014that just keeps us mindlessly flicking. The attractiveness of a person on the street. The lure of escape from our present moment though any number of outlets: substances, sports, gaming, social media, busyness, politics, whatever.

Some of these things I just listed off are things you might recognize to be wrong, but others you might see as quite ordinary and benign. The Christian tradition has long recognized that actually, even very good things, like our families, can become idols in our lives. Things that begin to reorient our desires and the longings of our hearts away from the Creator to the created.

Such that the things that we seek are no longer the things of life to the full that flow from our Creator and Redeemer, but rather lesser things, that when pursued as ends in themselves, only leave us longing for more.

Sports are great. Beauty and relationships are great. Games are fun. Work is fruitful and can be quite meaningful too. Social media is a wonderful tool of connection. But they are, all of them, meant to be received as gifts of God that draw our eyes and attention to Him. None of them are ends in themselves. If we treat them as such, we\u2019ll only find our senses dulled and our hearts broken.

Our senses and our seeking were created to find their fulfillment and joy in the face of God. The longing, the aching emptiness, the restless striving we feel in this life, are the cries of our heart to \u201cseek his face!\u201d

But we tend to attach our longings, loneliness, and strivings to lesser things, because we fear we won\u2019t be received by God when we stand in His presence. Whereas we know that our phone screen, which we can easily hold, see, and control, will always accept us, even if we come in our pajamas at noon with our life in a mess.

But to stand in the presence of God\u2014to stand before His face\u2014well, that may be what our heart cries for, but it is also one of the things that we most fear. Seen in the penetrating light of God\u2019s face, known for what we really and truly are: will we still be loved?

You hear the Psalmists wrestle time and time again with the same anxiety, even here in the 27th Psalm. \u201cDo not hide your face from me, do not reject me, do not forsake me! Hear my cry, Lord,\u201d the Psalmist says.

And yet, in a step of faith despite these very real fears, the Psalmist turns the heart\u2019s cry of longing into a movement of the soul, mind, and body: a daring act of attention to God\u2014seeking his face in prayer.

And then the Psalmist turns around and invites us to join too. To turn away from whatever lesser things we may have been occupying ourselves with and to give our attention instead to the Lord. Waiting on him in confidence that we will see his face and his goodness yet, here in the land of the living.

And we indeed do have confidence of that fact, because it is in Jesus that we stand before the face of God: seen, known, loved, and forgiven.

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