Seeking God's Face

"You have said, "Seek my face." My heart says to you, "Your face, LORD, do I seek."

All week, I have meditated on that verse. These are the words of David, from Psalm 27.

David had a heart for God. He hungered for God. He starts out in that Psalm by saying,
”The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?... One thing have I asked 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 gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.

David longed to live in God’s presence, beholding his beauty, seeing him face to face.

In another Psalm, David put it this way, “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water… My soul clings to you…” (Psalm 63)

How did David come to have such longing for God? I don’t have the answer. I know that he was a shepherd and spent a lot of time alone with the sheep. But there were a lot of shepherds in Israel. When God sent Samuel to anoint one of Jesse’s son as king, he told him that He did not care about outward appearance, but He saw the heart. God chose David, as a young boy, to be the next king of Israel because of something that He saw in David’s heart. God said “I have found in David the son of Jesse a man after my heart, who will do all my will.”  David was willing to do whatever God said, but, more importantly, he had a heart for God.

We know a lot about David.

David was brave-he was ready to fight a giant when he was a teenager

David was uninhibited in his praise for God-he danced full force before the Lord when they brought to tabernacle to Jerusalem

David was creative-he wrote numerous songs of praise and thanksgiving; and he invented musical instruments to use in worship

David was committed to God-he wanted to build a temple, but when God said that his son would be the one to build it, David collected the building materials for it.

David was honest-the Psalms are full of honest, heart-felt, sometimes painful crying out to God

We know a lot of things about David, but these are just windows into his heart and soul. I want to know how he came to have a heart for God. Back to Psalm 27, it seems like there was a time when David had a conversation with God.

 

David asked God, what do you want from me, and God said, “Son, just seek my face, just love me and want me enough to seek to be with me. I want you to want me.” And David said, “Then that is what I will do. I will seek your face, and strive to live in your presence.”

The Church Needs the Influence of Women

God created male and female, on purpose. Men and women are different, on purpose, designed to be different, to reveal different aspects and characteristics of God. We need to understand the differences, honor and appreciate what each brings to our society, and especially, to the church.

We need both men and women to be fully free, fully functioning in our churches. Just as a family needs both a mother and a father to really provide all that the children need, so the church needs both men and women to function in a whole and healthy way.  Children can grow up to be healthy well-adjusted individuals when raised by a single parent, but we all agree that the best environment for a child is both parents in the home, fully involved in the child’s life. Mothers and fathers interact with their children in different ways. Mothers cuddle their babies; dads throw them in the air. Mothers nurture children, talk with them, teach them how to relate to other people. Fathers teach their children to take risks, to seek adventure, to be independent.  Of course, these are broad generalizations, but they are common traits.

The Church has been like a single Father family. The church leadership has always been dominated by men, so the focus has been very male oriented.  Men and women are gifted in unique ways, and both should be welcomed into important roles in our churches. Speaking again in broad generalizations, women tend to be more relational, more sensitive to the needs of others, more intuitional, quicker to “sense” when something is wrong that is not readily apparent. Women tend to be better listeners, and better communicators. Aren’t these characteristics that are desperately needed in our churches?   Bringing women into leadership areas of our churches could produce churches that are more balanced, healthier, better able to care for the people.

The Role of Women in the Early Church

(This is continuing a series of post started Sept. 13)

Women were an active, important part of the church in the very beginning.  

At the birth of the church, women were engaged in prayer along with the disciples and others.

Act 1:13 -14 And when they had entered, they went up to the upper room, where they were staying, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot and Judas the son of James.  All these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.

 In Romans 16, Paul speaks of Phoebe as a deacon  (the word translated servant is diakonos, usually translated deacon), of  Prisca and Aquila as fellow workers in Christ Jesus, and of Junia as “of note among the apostles”.

Euodia and Syntyche are called his fellow-workers in the gospel in Philippians 4:2-3.

Paul tells of women who were the leaders of such house churches (Apphia in Philemon 2; Prisca in I Corinthians 16:19),  Nympha of Laodicea (Colossians 4:15).

Lydia in Acts 16, was first convert in Phillipi The four daughters of Philip appear in Acts 21:9 as prophetesses.

Women were active in service, in speaking, and in leadership in the church.

God designed men and women to be one in Christ. Sin violated this design and made us competitors instead of teammates. But when Jesus died on the cross, He took the whole mass of alienated men and women and brought all of us together.  We are now members of one Body, as Paul said, and there should be no division in the body (1Cor12, Romans 12).
Jesus prayed that we would all be one, and share a fellowship like He had with the Father.

We get a glimpse of this in Acts 1 as the men and women who were followers of Jesus “continued with one accord in prayer and supplication”.  As this group of men and women in “one accord” prayed together, God did an amazing thing. The Holy Spirit came upon them— all of them—“and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance”(Acts 2: 4). The Holy Spirit didn’t just bounce around to the men and skip over the women. He filled them all! As Peter explained to the onlookers, this outpouring was God’s fulfillment of Joel 2: 28-29: "And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit.

As God poured out His Spirit, He ended the divisions among us. We are one in Christ.
As members of one body, we are all part of a whole, and we must work together to stay alive. We are each different, have different gifts and functions, but we are a team, a unit. We value each other and are connected and we need one another.

Just as we understand that in this body, there can no longer be a hierarchy based on race, economics, or social status, neither can there be based on gender.

Gal_3:28  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.