Thirsting for God

 “O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee. My soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh longeth for Thee in a dry and thirsty land where no water is, to see Thy power and Thy glory, so as I have seen Thee in the sanctuary. Because Thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise Thee. Thus will I bless Thee while I live. I will lift up my hands in Thy name. My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness, and my mouth shall praise Thee with joyful lips. When I remember Thee upon my bed, and meditate on Thee in the night watches, because Thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of Thy wings will I rejoice. My soul followeth hard after Thee, and Thy right hand upholdeth me.” - Psalm 63

Notice David says, “Early will I seek Thee.” He is a man who is early at prayer. And what is he doing early? He is seeking God.

When David went to the secret place of prayer, he went to find God. He knew, of course, that God is everywhere. That is a great doctrinal truth. But the manifest presence of God is something different and precious. David understood that. He understood that God is found by those who seek Him with all their hearts.

David is not after something from God. He wants God.

Listen to the language of the Psalm: “My soul thirsteth for Thee. My flesh longeth for Thee in a dry and thirsty land where no water is.”

I wonder—can you say such things as that? Can you say, “My soul”—from the very depths of my being, not just intellectually, but my very soul—“thirsts”? "I need God."

It is as if this man comes to God in a time when God has removed Himself, as He sometimes does. God has distanced Himself. He has withheld the hand of blessing from His people. And David is saying, “O God, my God, I miss You. I want You. I long for You.”

You have heard, of course, the language of the deer panting after the water brooks. David is saying, “That is how I long for You.”

But the question you and I have to answer is this: Do we understand the heart behind this language? Real thirst makes a man desperate. It becomes all he can think about, and he will do just about anything to quench it.  David is thirsty for God.

Are you?  There is a very great difference between saying, “Yes, I would like God,” and actually thirsting for Him.

It seems to me this is part of why the Church is such a wilderness today. We come to this verse, and many of us would like to hide behind the hope that this is a description of certain peculiar Christians. But God put this in His hymnbook to be sung by believers in every age because this is the cry of the ordinary converted Christian.

So this becomes a very serious and sobering question: Do you long for God? And how can you say you do if you do not seek Him early? If you have no hidden life of prayer, how can you say that you thirst for Him?

David wants God so much that it is as if he is saying, “Lord, I miss You. I love You, but I am in a dry and thirsty land where no water is. I want You to return.”

Notice what David says next. What does he want? “To see Thy power and Thy glory, so as I have seen Thee in the sanctuary.”

Think for a moment about the glory of God.

For years I sang Amazing Grace over and over again. Then one day, I understood what the hymn writer meant. All of a sudden, I knew what he could see. I realized then that when John Newton said he was once blind but now could see, he was not talking about physical blindness. Because now I too could see.

So what exactly did he see? What was I seeing?  It was not merely the printed letters on the pages of the Bible. It was not simply doctrines. It was the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

I remember when everything changed for me.  Jesus was lovely to me then. Suddenly the Christ of whom I had heard so much was so beautiful in that moment—so desirable, so majestic. And I loved Him. Really, for the first time in my life, I loved Him.

Now I was going to church, and nothing could keep me away. Everything came alive. The songs came alive. The Scripture readings came alive. The sermons came alive. I was hearing Christ. Christ was in everything. And I was coming to church now to meet with God.

Has something like this happened to you?

Can you say in prayer, “O Lord, I long to see Your power and Your glory, just as I have seen You in the sanctuary”? Have you seen Jesus in the sanctuary?

But there’s something more here. Though David is desperate and troubled and longing, he gives three reasons for praise.

First, he says, “Because Thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise Thee.”

 Life is good.  It is precious.  But there is something better.  And what is it?  His lovingkindness.  

I love that word.

Think about David in the wilderness of Judah, away from the sanctuary and the familiar place of worship. He longs for the enjoyment of God's presence. He misses God. He knows, of course, that God has not forsaken him, but he has not been enjoying the manifest presence of God in the same way he had in the sanctuary. It is a dry and thirsty land. He misses the tabernacle. He misses the place of meeting with God.

But still he says, “There is something better than life, and for this reason my lips will praise You, O God.”

What is it? The lovingkindness of God.

That God is so kind because He is so full of love. That He loves you with an everlasting love and therefore deals with you in unspeakable kindness. That in the midst of the wilderness, God is the same.

So much has changed for David, but God has not changed. And so David glories in the lovingkindness of an unchangeably good God.

So many things change in this life, and it is sometimes hard. We do not always want them to change. We like it when blessings are added, but then blessings are taken away. Sometimes we are in the sanctuary seeing the power and glory of God, and sometimes it seems that we are in the wilderness and God’s judgment is upon the Church.

What do we say then?

We say this: “We will praise God because His lovingkindness is better than life.”

It is not hyperbole. This is literally true—that those who know God truly can say with all their hearts, “Yes, life is precious, but the lovingkindness of God is better.” Therefore our lips shall praise Him. We will not be silent.

Second, he says, “My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness.”

How many times in this rich land of ours have we sat down at a table literally covered with good food? You sit down almost tasting it already, and afterward you rise from the table satisfied and content.

That is the language David uses here.

He is in the wilderness. He is away from the tabernacle. Yet he can say, “My soul shall be satisfied.”

Not my mouth, not my body, but my soul—my innermost being—shall be satisfied as with a great feast.

What is he talking about?  He is talking about satisfaction with God.  Having God, he has enough—not barely enough, but enough to satisfy him to the full, so that he can say, as in another psalm, “My cup runneth over.”

This is not a material cup. This is a man afflicted, and yet he is sure that God, in the midst of affliction, will satisfy him.

Samuel Rutherford used to speak of being “well-feasted with a great King.” He was talking about what it is to know a little bit of heaven on earth: to be able to get alone with God—even if unable to go to church because of sickness—and there, wherever you are, unable to lift your head, to meet with God and be richly satisfied.

Surely that is what the psalmist meant when he said the Lord would “make all his bed in his sickness.” Not merely God’s sovereignty or care, but His dear presence.

One smile from the Heavenly Father is worth more than worlds.

When in weakness or loneliness you turn your eyes and heart toward heaven to meet with God, He can satisfy you in ways language cannot describe.

But if you know this—if you can say, “My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness”—then you will determine, as David did here, to praise God, and to praise Him with joyful lips.

Third, he speaks about remembering God upon his bed. And reader, isn’t it wonderful that we can go to our bed with God? Having said goodnight to our friends and family, we can rest with Him, and there in the night meditate upon Him.

And what was David’s meditation in the night?  “Because Thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of Thy wings will I rejoice.”

So you notice in this psalm it is praise upon praise upon praise. And it is striking to me because he began with such troubled pleadings. He is not in a good place. He is in a wilderness—a dry and thirsty land where no water is.

But that is the wonder of the Christian life.

We can take up the book of Lamentations and identify with it. We can weep over the sins of the Church and the nation. We can know the times in which we live, and it can actually break our hearts. But we still have reason to praise God.

Even in a spiritual wilderness, even when things are not right in the Church, things can still be right in my own soul. 

This is David’s meditation: “Because Thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of Thy wings I will rejoice.”

I believe that everyone born of God, coming to those words, cannot help but pause and say, “Oh yes, You have been my help.”

Hasn’t He? Has He not lifted you out of the miry clay and set your feet upon a rock?

It is good to think about God’s goodness in general. It is good to think about God’s goodness to the Church through history. But what a joy to think about God’s goodness to us personally—His goodness to me.

He has been your help, hasn’t He?

When no one else could help you, and perhaps no one else wanted to help you, He helped you. He reached down into the very pit of your sinful misery and pulled you up. He was found by you when you were not seeking Him. And you found Him because He first found you.

Hasn’t He been kind to you when you have been so unkind to Him? Hasn’t He been faithful to you even when you have been so unfaithful to Him?

When you were not watching for Him, He was watching for you. When you were not looking for Him, He came looking for you, to bring you to Himself.

And so what does David say?

“Therefore in the shadow of Thy wings I will rejoice.”

In other words, from this place of security, knowing that in Christ I am safe, I will rejoice. I am not going to mope around. I am not going to complain and murmur. I am going to rejoice.

What does he mean?

Have your children sometimes run to you and said, "I’m so glad you’re my dad”? Or, “I’m so glad you’re my mommy”? They are rejoicing, aren’t they? They are glad.

I think that is what David means.

Do you tell your heavenly Father these things?

Do you say, “I want to see Your face. I want to hear Your voice”?

As you meditate on His kindness and goodness to you, do you get alone and say to your Heavenly Father, “Father, I love You”?

Think what intimacy with God you might have if you truly believed the Bible—if you went to Him in Jesus’ name and poured out your heart before Him. And I do not mean a covetous heart that is always asking for things. I mean a heart that loves Him.  Saying to Him, “I love You. I am so glad that You are my God. I am so glad that You are my friend, my Beloved, my Saviour.”

How we should rejoice in God.

Conclusion

What we have here is a snapshot of a believer’s experience.

Of course, I do not mean “believer” in the merely intellectual sense, or in the sense of historical faith. I mean a person truly born again by the power of the Holy Spirit.

This is the experience of a born-again man living at a time when the church is in declension, when he is in a wilderness, doing what the born again always do.

And I understand that it comes in ebbs and flows. I know we have times of declension and backsliding. I understand that we are sometimes faithless, even if He is always faithful. But the heart of the believer—as John Owen put it—is like a needle drawn to a lodestone, or like a compass. It always returns north. It always comes back to its love.

“Happy is that people, that is in such a case: yea, happy is that people, whose God is the LORD (Psalm 144:15).”

* For this post, I have taken an old sermon and heavily edited it for readability.