Hide and Seek

January 11, 2012

“You will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart, I will be found by you, says the Lord.” (Jeremiah 29:13-14)

Remember the childhood game, “Hide and Seek?” As a child, in the summertime the neighborhood children would all collect at my house late in the evening and sometimes even after dark to play outdoor games. I remember “Kick the Can”, “Piggy Wants a Signal,” “Annie Over,” “Red Rover,” and my favorite was “Hide and Seek.” With all the violence in the world and with the big competitor, TV, I don’t see children playing outside very much anymore, and certainly not after dark. But, what fond memories those were!

Everyone knows the concept of Hide and Seek, where one person is “It” and he closes his eyes and counts to a specified number, while all the rest hide. Depending on the thoroughness of hunting and the speed at which “It” can run, the first one “found” will be “It” the next time, after all the others are found. The most fun is when you can hide so well no one can find you, or you can run so fast that “It” cannot out-run you to “home.” There is not a perfect spiritual analogy to the “Hide and Seek” game because God is not hiding – He is right in plain sight. It is people’s sin that blinds them so they cannot see Him. People are the ones trying to hide in their sins, both secret and public, and they don’t know it is God Who is seeking them. They have a dissatisfaction, a longing for something they know not what. Augustine put it this way, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” Someone else said, “Our lives have a God-shaped void which only God can fill and satisfy.” The Truth is that man cannot be satisfied with the things of this world to fill the longing in his heart – neither fame, fortune, sex, success, happiness nor accomplishment - only until we “find” Jesus will we be satisfied and find rest. Jesus was “It” when He came searching from heaven. He searched for man with “Love.”
His purpose for seeking for us when we were so lost was to show us His love (Luke 19:10). He did this best when He took our place on that cross, died and went to sit on the right hand of God the Father to continue to seek us with His love by interceding there for us. He left His Holy Spirit to continue to seek us with His wooing love. He is the One who makes us dissatisfied with all our earthly searches. He causes us to be hungry and thirsty for God, when we are unwilling to “seek” Him. The Holy Spirit’s wooing is like the old saying, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” The solution to this dilemma is to give the horse a cake of salt and let him lick it for a while, then his will is changed and he will run to the water to satisfy his thirst. The Holy Spirit is the cake of salt and Jesus is the water (living water).

As Luke 19:10 puts it so succinctly, “The Son of Man (Jesus) came to seek and save that which was lost.” Jesus was “It” first, and then He left His Holy Spirit to cause us to become so thirsty for Him that we become the seeker – seeking Truth, Love and Fulfillment. In our seeking the Holy Spirit brings “the cake of salt” into our lives by convicting us of our sins and through the dissatisfaction with our lives; by the loving life of a Christian lived before us; and revealing the love and Truth of the scriptures to us. All bring a great longing for the “real thing” – (real love, truth, success, riches and values in life). He pleads with us to "Seek the Lord while He may be found." We must be like the horse to begin running and seeking for the only One Who can satisfy our thirst and fill the void in our lives.

In our text scripture, God is telling us a Truth: “You will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart, I will be found by you.” Half-hearted seeking will not be successful. The only way we will find the sumum bonum (the supreme good from which all others are derived – Jesus, the Living Water), is to “Seek” Him with all your heart. When we find Him all our seeking and striving for the elusive will be gone. We will be completely satisfied because we have found the One Who is the “All-in-All.”

“Seek first of all His kingdom and His righteousness then all these other things will be given to you besides.” (Matthew 6:33)