You Will Seek Me and Find Me, When You Seek Me with All Your Heart

There is a verse in the Bible that people hold onto through the darkest seasons of their lives. In the book of Jeremiah, chapter 29, verse 13, God says this:

If you are reading this on a good day, that verse may sound like a nice thought. But if you are reading this on one of those days, the kind where your chest feels heavy and you can't explain why, where you smile at people all morning without meaning a single smile, and where you are holding yourself together with the last thread that you have left, then you can hold onto this verse when you have nothing else to hold.

And I want to talk about it honestly, from one broken person to another, with no pulpit and no wagging finger.

When seeking feels impossible

Let me be honest about something that people seldom say out loud in church: sometimes you don't want to seek God. Sometimes you are too tired, too hurt, too angry, or too disappointed to look for anything at all. You may have prayed and then watched what you feared most happen anyway, or trusted someone who betrayed you, or believed and still lost.

The Psalms are full of this kind of honesty. David, whom God describes in the Bible as 'a man after my heart', wrote lines like these:

That is the prayer of someone in agony who has nothing figured out. God let David say it and then put it in the Bible for the rest of us, so that when we feel the same way, we can know that we are neither the first nor alone.

If you feel abandoned by God, or if you do not believe in God at all and wonder why people talk to someone whom they can't see, then I wrote this article for you, with no aim but to keep you company.

The context around the verse

Jeremiah 29:13 appears on cards, posters, and social media, usually on its own, without the verses around it. When you read what surrounds it, the verse means far more.

God spoke these words to the Israelites while they were in exile in Babylon. They had lost everything: their homes, their temple, their land, and their identity as a nation. They were captives in a foreign country among people who worshipped different gods, with no idea whether they would ever go home again.

They were in a season of devastation, with no victory in sight.

God sent a letter into that devastation through the prophet Jeremiah, in which God says this:

Read that again slowly. God said these words to people whose lives lay shattered after the exile, who had every reason to believe that God had forgotten them, and who were living in the rubble of everything that they once had.

The promise is not 'seek me when you are strong', but 'seek me in your brokenness, and I will be there'.

What 'with all your heart' means

This is where a reader can stumble, because 'with all your heart' sounds like a condition, as if God were saying that you earn the right to find him once your faith is strong enough, your prayers are pure enough, and you try hard enough. The phrase means something else, as you can see from the Hebrew.

The Hebrew word for 'heart' in this passage is lev. In Western culture, people treat the heart as the seat of emotion; in Hebrew thought, however, the lev is the seat of the whole person, which means the mind, the will, the emotions, and the desires. When God says 'seek me with all your heart', he is saying 'come to me with everything that you are', which means the person that you are today, with everything that you wish were different about you.

That includes the doubt, the anger, the questions that you are afraid to ask, the grief that you don't know how to carry, and the cynicism that builds up over years of disappointment.

God asks for no polished prayer from someone who has it together; he asks you to come as you are, fully, holding nothing back, and to direct that honesty towards him.

The woman in Luke 7 who washed Jesus' feet with her tears came with no elegant words, only a broken heart and wet eyes, and she poured everything that she had onto his feet. Jesus received her. Then he turned towards her and spoke to Simon, the Pharisee who was hosting the meal and judging her, saying, 'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.'

She sought him with all her heart, and she found him.

To those who do not believe

I want to speak directly to you in this section.

I don't know what brings you here, whether that is curiosity, a friend who sends you the link, or a hard season. You may have grown up around religion and walked away from it, you may not believe at all, or you may be somewhere in between, neither hostile to the idea of God nor convinced.

I respect that.

Your questions are fair ones. Faith is hard, since people who believe in God still feel pain. If I pretended otherwise, you would see through the dishonesty at once.

What I will say is this: the ache that you feel at 2 a.m., when the distractions stop and you are alone with your thoughts, is real. It is no weakness, and it is nothing to medicate away or scroll past, because it is a signal that you are longing for something that you cannot put into words.

C.S. Lewis, who was an atheist for years before he became a Christian writer, described it this way:

You can believe one piece at a time, with no religion to sign up for, no church to walk into, and no vocabulary to change. Faith is a direction that you turn towards, one step at a time, and its first step can be a whisper in the dark: 'If you are there, I am listening.'

That is seeking, and God promises that if you seek, you will find.

When the heart is broken open

There is a paradox at the centre of this verse that is easy to miss.

We assume that we need a whole heart to seek God, one that is put together and healed enough to reach out. However, the opposite is true: a broken heart can be the most honest heart, because a person with a broken heart has nothing left to pretend with.

In Psalm 34:18, David writes:

David writes that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, with no mention of the confident, of perfect theology, or of a spotless track record. If your heart is shattered right now, you may be closer to God than you have ever been.

In Japan, craftsmen practise kintsugi, the repair of broken pottery with gold. They leave the cracks in plain sight and line them with gold, because the breaking and the mending together make the piece more beautiful than it was before.

God works in the same way, leaving your scars in place and filling them with something luminous, so that the places where you broke become the places where the light gets in.

What seeking looks like in practice

You can seek God with all your heart in quiet, small ways, starting with the steps below.

1. 1

   Be honest about where you are

   You can come to God before you clean yourself up, because the Psalms are proof that he can handle your rawest emotions. Tell him that you are angry, that you are afraid, or that you don't even know whether you believe he is real. Honesty is what God asks of you first, and he hears every word of it.

2. 2

   Read the words of Jesus slowly

   If you have never read the Bible, or if you walked away from it years ago, start with the Gospel of John, and read it slowly, a chapter at a time. Pay attention to how Jesus treated the outcasts, the grieving, and the doubters. Thomas refused to believe in the resurrection until he could touch the wounds, and when Jesus appeared to him eight days later, he answered Thomas with 'Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.' He met the doubt with evidence and patience.

3. 3

   Talk to God as you would talk to a friend

   Forget the formal language and the 'thee' and 'thou'. Prayer is a conversation, so you have nothing to perform. If you cannot find the words, Paul writes in Romans 8:26 that the Spirit himself intercedes for us 'with groanings too deep for words', which means that even your silence counts.

4. 4

   Pay attention to what moves you

   God can speak through ordinary moments, such as a conversation that shifts something inside you, a line in a book that makes your eyes sting, or a kindness from a stranger that affects you more than you expect. They can look like coincidences, but God is inviting you through them, so pay attention to them.

5. 5

   Find one person whom you can be honest with

   Find someone who will hear your questions without judging them, someone who has wrestled with their own doubt and come out the other side still holding on, because God never meant you to carry faith alone. The person with all the answers matters less than the one who is comfortable staying in the tension with you.

The promise stands

I want to end with the part of Jeremiah 29:14 that people seldom quote alongside verse 13. After 'You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart', God says in the next line:

Read those six words again: I will be found by you.

That is a declaration from God himself, with no maybe in it and no condition about deserving it. If you look for me, he says, I will make sure that you find me.

God says that he will be found, which means that you have no chasing to do, no attention to earn, and no threshold of worthiness to reach before he shows up. He is waiting for you, as a father waits at the window for a child who is far from home.

The prodigal son in Luke 15 rehearsed a whole speech on his way back, convinced that he would need to beg for scraps. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him, ran to him, threw his arms around him, and kissed him. The son never finished that speech. Because the father's love for him was greater than the son's shame, the father was calling for the best robe before the son could reach its last line.

That is the God of Jeremiah 29:13, who keeps no score and keeps watch for you.

Whatever you are carrying, whatever silence you are shouting into, and whatever wound you are nursing alone, know this: God sees you and knows you, and his love for you did not start when you earned it and will not stop when you fail.

Seek him, even if all that you have is a whisper, a question, or a tear-soaked pillow and three words: 'Are you there?'

He is there, and he will be found.