In addition to Jesus instructing us to Ask, He also says that we should Seek. Seeking holds the promise of finding. It could be implied that if we fail to seek, the chances of finding will be greatly reduced.
We lose things all the time. Then we must go through the rather painstaking process of re-tracing our steps, trying to find where we misplaced the keys. But in this case, we are seeking for something that we personally or individually have not misplaced. We didn’t have them to start with. And so, this direction from Jesus certainly includes seeking knowledge and wisdom; seeking (eternal) life and seeking the Lord.
One of our problems is that we seek, or look, in all the wrong places (and I’m not sure, based on the lyrics, if singer Johny Lee ever found it). We listen to our own intuitions, which are not reliable. We listen to the notions of the world around us, which are worse - not only unreliable, but also deceptive.
It seems clear that if we are going to seek for these things; if we are going to seek the Lord, then we must seek for Him in His Word, the Word of the Lord. Here we are, many of us stuck at home, and we may find that God is blessing us with extra time to spend seeking Him in His Word. Here are some hints about our attitude as we do so.
We need to seek the Lord like children - without a bag of pre-conceived notions that tend to re-shape the words of Scripture before they ever enter our minds and hearts. We need to consciously remove the stubbornness of our hearts that resists hearing what God wants us to hear. We need to hear what God has to say as though hearing it for the first time. This is real seeking.
We need to think about what we read. We need to meditate. We need to talk to God about what we have read, and specifically ask for insight, and for protection against twisting what we read for our own selfish or psychological purposes.
Ask, seek, and knock. Three things that we should be doing daily.
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