Seeking God with Your Heart

In two previous posts I expressed my desire to experience the presence of God and my understanding of how this might come about. This post continues the discussion.

Jeremiah 29:12-13 offers this promise: “Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart.”

These words from Jeremiah are very encouraging to me in my quest to know God and experience God personally. They tell me God hears my prayer and I can find God. This will come as I seek God with all my heart. The biblical understanding of heart is much bigger and deeper that our usual usage today. It describes the core of our being and the center of our will and action, as well as the source of our love, our deepest desire and commitment.

Loving God is central to the religion of Israel as seen in Deuteronomy 6:5-7, the Shema, the basic confession of faith: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.”

When I re-read these words recently, I was struck by a question: Do I really love God? I think about God. I pray to God, I worship God. But do I love God? Do I devote my whole being—heart, soul, and strength to God? Do I desire to be close to God? Do I feel affection for God? Do I long for the presence of God? Do I value God above all else? And I had to answer, Not always, maybe not very often.

This led me to a decision. I will meditate on loving God. I will sit quietly in God’s presence and allow my feelings as well as my thoughts to reach out to God. I will meditate on God’s love for me. 1 John 4:10 reminds us that love starts with God’s love for us: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us.”

I am convinced that we will experience God when we devote ourselves to loving God with all our heart. And, as I will discuss in the next post, loving God also involves loving our neighbor, and acting out that love in ways that bring us into contact with God.

Experiencing the Presence of God

 What I want at this point is to know God and to experience God in a personal way. This is how I ended my last blog, and I want to pursue it further.

Where do you start? I think by being still. Psalm 46:10 advises, “Be still and know that I am God.” Recognizing God, letting the reality of God sink in, paying attention to God, is where we have to start. To do that, we have to stop other things for a while, clear a space in our consciousness, let God be God, set our minds free to know the ultimate reality over all things. It even means we don’t have to work at it. We don’t have to do anything but be in the presence of God. Just be still and know. This practice is often called contemplation.

Contemplation assumes that we do know something. God has made himself known—through actions in the history of Israel and the church, through the revealing life of Jesus Christ, through the Scriptures, through the teachings of the church through the ages, and by the witness of people today who know God. But contemplation looks at that, condenses it into one supreme truth, lays aside the study notes, and simply knows that God is God. There is a lot to know about God, but you don’t have to know very much to experience the presence of God.

Contemplation grows into prayer. Awareness of God calls for a response. Personal knowledge involves two-way communication. Prayer is confession, taking honest inventory and admitting the things that keep us from God. Prayer is adoration, pouring out our hearts in awe and wonder at the greatness of God. Prayer is giving thanks as we express our gratitude for God’s blessings. Prayer is petition, as we ask God to provide for our needs and the needs of others. Most importantly, prayer is conversation between a child of God and the loving Father.

Prayer grows into worship and community. The knowledge of God has to be shared with others and expressed publicly. We are helped by the presence of others who know God. We are supported by the worshipping, witnessing community, which is the church.

The fact that God tells us to be still and know God suggests that this is something we have to be told. Experiencing the presence of God doesn’t just happen. It requires an intentional movement. It also needs to be reinforced and sustained by repeated practice. It’s not something you do once and then move on. It is a way of living that leads to fullness of life.

Jeremiah 29:12-13 offers this promise: “Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart.”

Longing for God

I find myself these days wanting to experience the presence of God. I have never been inclined to mystical experiences. My religion has been unbalanced toward the intellectual side. My Baptist background, though it called for a personal relationship with Christ, gave more emphasis to reading the Bible and attending church services. Many of these services attempted to reach an emotional climax, but this was designed to lead to a confession of sin, repentance, and a transactional acceptance of Jesus as Savior.

We were always suspicious of secular experiences of spirituality—finding God in nature, poetry, drama, music, --because they did not focus on Christ as the way to God. Very emotional experiences, such as in Pentecostalism, were suspect because they could not be controlled within the confines of our standards of doctrine and behavior. Classical mysticism was closed to us because it was associated with Catholicism. Even Protestantism, as I appreciatively found it revised by Karl Barth, rejected mysticism in favor of the Word.

As I grew older and learned more, I realized that my piety and my theology were too limited. As I reached my eighties and now face prostate cancer, I have begun to seek something I had been missing. I have long anchored my faith in trusting God. There is much we—and I—do not know. I don’t know how I will face suffering as health declines. I do not know very specifically what will happen when I die, or what lies beyond death except in general terms based on symbolic language in the Bible. But I can accept the unknown because I really do trust God. I know that the ultimate power over all things is the loving father revealed in Christ.

What I want at this point is to know God and to experience God in a personal way. This is the desire expressed by the psalmist:

As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? (Psalm 42:1-2, NRSV)

--To be continued in a future post