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Seeking God With Your Whole Heart

Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart, who also do no wrong but walk in His ways! 
                                                                  (Psalm 119:2-3)

The psalms, and mostly all of the Bible’s poetry, operate through what is called parallelism. As a literary device, parallelism draws on this idea of connection and similarity. Parallelism is when an author constructs parts of a sentence to be grammatically similar, often repeating a specific word, phrase, or idea. This repetition creates a connection between the ideas discussed. These parallel ideas also become emphasized and become more important for the reader. (Study.com, Parallelism in Poetry) Parallelism, then, is used in the Bible to compare an idea previously mentioned and paint how it should look like in another context. 

The 119th psalm is chiefly characterized with this poetic device. All throughout the psalm, the psalmist would reword what he was describing in a preceding line and giving it a more concrete picture. What struck me the most in today’s assigned reading (vv. 1-24) is in verse 2:

“Blessed are those who… seek Him with their whole heart.”

What really is to seek Him with my whole heart? I’ve been crying out to the Lord about this. For the longest time, I’ve always been burdened by the thought that I might not be seeking God with my whole heart. That I feel like I’m not dedicating and devoting my whole life to Him enough. I’ve always felt that I wanted to “do more” for Jesus. Serve God more. And for years I have wrestled with the thought, “What else can I do for God?”

Through many nights and not a few tears, I have tossed and turned with the thought. I always feared to look back at my life after many years of pilgrimage in this world and regretfully say, “I wish I served Jesus more, and better.”

And so I have always tried to figure out what I can do for Him, and for His kingdom. I chose to teach to have wider opportunity to touch more souls. I chose to specialize in humanities and the arts to have the license to talk of life and life’s important lessons. I chose to constantly put myself out of my comfort zone by talking and listening to other people for any chance of sharing to them what Christ has done for me. And I have always, always desired to seek a way to take His word to the people more explicitly. To be a biblical counselor, or even to be a teacher-missionary. And I have been so consumed by this desire, that I’ve come to think that I must be this, in order to be able to say I’m serving Jesus more; that I’m serving Him with all that I am. With my whole heart.

But while these things indeed are so noble and worth desiring and aspiring for, I think I’ve been missing the point of seeking God wholeheartedly all this time. To seek God with your whole heart is not to draw near to His throne to suggest to Him how you can serve Him better. It isn’t coming up to Him with such excitement and saying, “Dear God, I figured out a way how to use my life to best serve You. I think You’ll like it.”

But to seek God is to keep His testimonies. To seek God is to obey the precepts that He has commanded, and obey it diligently. To offer your life to Him is to humbly approach His throne to ask of Him, “What would you have me do, Lord?” To seek God with your whole heart is to do no wrong, whether small or great, but to steadfastly keep His statues in all areas of your life.

To seek him wholeheartedly is to soak yourself in His word, find out what He demands of you from there, and steadfastly obey. It’s sad that I have read through Psalm 119 so many times before, but that the theme of the whole psalm has not been impressed in my heart until just this morning.
With my whole heart I seek you; Let me not wander from your commandments! 
                                       (v. 10)

How does one say he’s seeking God with his whole heart? If he keeps the entire word of God in his heart, and if he seeks to walk in those precepts, to obey those statues, up to even the seemingly smallest matter.

To seek God with one’s whole heart is “to lie passive in God’s hands, and know no will but His.” (C.H. Spurgeon)

Even at the expense of one’s noblest, most praiseworthy, godly desires.

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