“One thing I have asked of the Lord,
That I will seek after:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord
All the days of my life,
To gaze upon the beauty of the Lord
And to inquire in his temple.”

Psalm 27:4

Asking the Lord for something we desire does not eliminate the need to seek after what we desire, especially if our request is for a deeper walk with the Father. In fact, if we truly desire what we are asking for, then we will seek hard after it. Making a request of God and then not putting any feet to that request is not necessarily a sign of deep faith; it could be a sign of laziness and apathy or a revelation that what we say we truly desire is not really that deep of a longing.

Of course, that is not to reinforce the adage that, “God helps those who help themselves.” Certainly God can fulfill our desires without any help from us. But in an age where most things can be acquired with the click of button, it is good to remember that while growth in godliness, “dwelling in the house of Lord,” and understanding the radiance of his beauty are gifts of God’s gracious self-revelation, they are also things that must be sought after with unyielding tenacity. Intimacy with God and Christlikeness in word and deed are not items on Amazon that simply need to be placed in a cart and shipped overnight. Which is why it is good to talk of the fight of faith, because we must fight every day to find God as more satisfying and more to be sought after than anything else. It is good to talk of the fruit of the Spirit, because fruit takes effort to cultivate and time to blossom and ripen. And in both illustrations, our efforts, our seeking, simply yield God’s power; God fights the battle and God produces the fruit in the mysterious mixing of divine sovereignty and human responsibility.

If we long to know God and walk in his ways, we will pray fervently for his help, and we will also actively press on hard to know him. It is not one or the other: we must pray that God would allow us to know more of who he is and make us more like himself, and then we must seek after him with all our heart, banking on the encouragement and the promise of Proverbs 8:17: “I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently find me.”