The Truth about Seeker Worship

     In worship we are not the seekers. 

     The first question ever asked by Yahweh God was a question about seeking.  When the Man and the Woman heard, along with the soft rustling of the evening breeze, the sound of God, they cowered in fear and fled to hide themselves.  One might question the wisdom of this.  The guilty do not think why they hide. They just hide.

     “Where are you?”

     Maybe this means God did not know where they were hiding.  Maybe they could just out last Him, after all.  I mean, how long would God really look for them? 
Eden was pretty big and they had found a great place to hide.  So, they waited.  They held their breaths and tried not to move.  They peered through the branches and leaves and strained their eyes to see.

     Was God getting warmer or colder?  We’ve all played the children’s game of hiding and seeking.  Some of us may have been pretty good at it.  Back in the little settlement called Rawhide in northern Lee County, Virginia, I knew some of the best places to hide.  I’d crouch down and watch, softly giggling at my own cleverness.

     Well, as the Man found out, God is pretty hard to beat in a game of hide’n seek. The next thing the Man knew, there was the Yahweh God, standing right there in front of him, looking down at him.  The question, “Where are you?” had not been prompted by God’s surprised confusion at not finding the two of them in the usual place for their evening walk.

     Worship is, at its very core, a seeker service.  It is just that we are not the seekers.  We are the sought.  The first question of God is a kind of metaphor for the whole of salvation history.  Seeking God.  Guilty, hiding, shame-faced mankind.  God really is, as C. S. Lewis called Him, the “Hound of Heaven.” He is racing at our heels, fresh on the scent, while we dart this way and that to avoid Him.

     “Yahweh’s eyes rove to and fro across the whole world to support those whose hearts are loyal to him.” (2 Chron 16:9 Jerusalem Bible)

     In Christian worship, we come together and acknowledge that it is we that have been found and God Himself who has done the finding.  We seek God because it is God who has sought us.  And what we will do is celebrate the game of hide’n seek is over and that we all lost.  He found us.