We began this series on Knowing God by looking at Jeremiah 9:23: “This is what the Lord says: ‘Let not the wise man gloat in his wisdom, or the mighty man in his might, or the rich man in his riches. Let them boast in this alone: that they truly know me and understand that I am the Lord who is just and righteous, whose love is unfailing, and that I delight in these things. I, the Lord, have spoken!” (New Living Translation). The most important thing in life, the thing we were created for, is to know God and worship Him. The abundant life that Jesus came to give His followers is not a life of luxury and ease, but a life of fellowship with God. This is eternal life: knowing God. This is what we were created for, and it’s what our hearts long for. St. Augustine said “You awake us to delight in Your praise; for You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (The Confessions of St. Augustine, a modern English version by Hal M. Helms, p. 7). Our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. This is the way we were made, and we can’t escape it, no matter how hard we try.
Over the course of these sermons, we’ve looked at a number of passages that describe different aspects of God’s character. Early in the series, I read this quote from A.W. Tozer: “Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God.” Our natural tendency is to remake God into our own image, to try and fit Him into our own schemes, to turn Him into a servant of our own selfish whims and desires. Or, we turn Him into a grim, exacting taskmaster. Our view of God will affect the quality of our Christian lives, so we need to keep bringing ourselves back to Scripture, allowing God’s Word to correct the misconceptions that creep into our minds from time to time. I encourage you to go back and pray through the passages we’ve studied in this series, to fix more firmly in your minds some of these descriptions of God.
But knowing the truth about God is only part of the story. Satan knows perfectly well who God is, but it does him no good at all. Knowing the truth, we then need to go on to cultivate His presence in our lives. We need to spend time with Him, getting to know Him in a growing relationship. “This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). That’s why I recommend not just studying the passages from this series, but meditating on them and praying through them. Think through them in God’s presence, in the context of prayer. That way you’re not divorcing study and prayer: you’re allowing your mind to be instructed about God’s revelation of Himself, and you’re cultivating a relationship with Him at the same time, turning the things you learn into worship and prayer.
Psalm 63 has much to say about cultivating a relationship with God over a lifetime. The psalm is attributed to David, and although these superscriptions were added to the psalter centuries after the psalms were written, it fits well with what we know of David. He was a man after God’s own heart, a man who hungered and thirsted to know more of God. It’s a psalm of David, written “When he was in the Desert of Judah.” He’s crying out to God “in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” This reflects both his physical and spiritual condition at the time. He’s longing to be at the Temple, the place of worship where God makes Himself known. Verse 9 makes it clear that he is in danger: “They who seek my life will be destroyed.”
This psalm doesn’t grow out of a time when everything is going well. He’s fleeing for his life, and he’s in a “dry and weary land where there is no water,” far from the place of worship, but he’s hungering and thirsting for the presence of God. It’s easy to tell ourselves that we’ll give more attention to our spiritual lives when things start to slow down, when there aren’t so many pressures and problems to deal with. Several years ago, a friend of mine was talking to a man about his relationship with God and the man responded, “I’m a farmer; I don’t have time to be sitting in church when there’s work to do.” Just a year or two later this man was dying of cancer, and although he turned back to the Lord during his illness, he wished he’d ordered his life differently. It’s tempting to think that we’ll work on our relationship with God later, when we’ve gotten some of these other things out of the way. David, as a leader, has lots of other burdens, but the desire of his heart, the thing that grips him and determines the direction of his life, is to know God and worship Him.
Notice, first of all, David’s dissatisfaction with his current spiritual condition: “O God, you are my God; I earnestly search for you. My soul thirsts for you; my whole body longs for you in this parched and weary land where there is no water” (NLT). A.W. Tozer said, “Contentment with earthly goods is the mark of a saint; contentment with our spiritual state is a mark of inward blindness. One of the greatest foes of the Christian is religious complacency. The man who believes he has arrived will not go any farther.... Religious complacency is encountered almost everywhere among Christians these days, and its presence is a sign and a prophecy. For every Christian will become at last what his desires have made him. We are all the sum total of our hungers. The great saints have all had thirsting hearts” (The Root of the Righteous, p. 55). Every Christian will become at last what his desires have made him. What are you desiring lately? What are you hungering and thirsting for? Are your desires moving you closer to God, or further away from Him? Are you content with where you are? Or are you, like David, longing for more of God?
“The great saints have all had thirsting hearts” This overwhelming sense of longing has characterized God’s people, at their best, throughout the centuries. St. Augustine prayed: “Hide not thy face from me. Let me see thy face even if I die, lest I die with longing to see it.” David Brainerd was a missionary to the American Indians during the early colonial period. He died, at the age of 29, in the home of Jonathan Edwards. Brainerd had an exceptionally strong prayer life; his diaries were published after his death and have inspired many others to a life of prayer. Brainerd said this about himself: “I never feel comfortably but when I find my soul going forth after God. If I cannot be holy, I must necessarily be miserable for ever.” He’s dissatisfied with his current spiritual condition. He wants to know more of God.
David says he is longing for God “in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” No doubt he’s looking around and describing his surroundings in the desert. But he’s not only describing his physical environment. He’s saying that his spiritual environment corresponds to what he sees when he looks out on the desert. This world, spiritually, is a “dry and weary land where there is no water.” God gives us many good gifts in this world, but they all, in themselves, leave us with the feeling that something is missing.
David is dissatisfied with his current spiritual condition, but at the same time he’s assured of his relationship with God. That’s the second thing I want to point out in this psalm: David, with all his longing for something more, is assured that God is his God. He begins the psalm: “O God, you are my God.” He’s experienced God’s presence in worship: “I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory.” But this is not only a thing of the past. He goes on to say: “I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands. My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you.”
I’ve known people who are nervous about the doctrine of assurance. They’re afraid that if people are assured of God’s love and favor they’ll just do whatever they feel like doing. They’re worried that the doctrine of assurance will become a license to sin. What we really need, in this view, is to be plagued with doubts about God’s favor, so that we’ll spend our lives trying to please Him. Fear is the thing that motivates us to diligence in our spiritual lives, and we’ll become more godly people if we live with some measure of doubt about whether or not God will accept us in the end.
The simplest answer to this argument is that it is contrary to Scripture. It’s contrary to the message of grace, and it is contradicted by the experience of God’s people throughout many centuries. Martin Luther, early in his life, struggled with doubts about whether or not God would accept him. His doubts drove him to excesses which nearly killed him, because he could never be sure that he was doing enough. No matter what he did, he was plagued by doubts and fears. It was after he understood the message of grace that he was freed to serve God from his heart. Until that time he was in bondage to his fears. He even found that he hated God, in the depths of his heart, for making such difficult demands.
David, in Psalm 63, is assured of God’s favor: “O God, you are my God.” But that doesn’t lead him to become complacent and indifferent. It has just the opposite effect: “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you.” It’s the same later in the psalm. He’s assured about the future: “My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you.” He’s assured that he will continue to enjoy God’s favor in the future, and this leads him to cultivate God’s fellowship all the more: “On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.” In verse 8, both things, assurance and diligence, are there: “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.” God is holding onto him, and he is clinging to God. Charles Spurgeon, the great 19th century preacher, said this in response to verse 1 of this psalm: “Full assurance is no hindrance to diligence, but is the mainspring of it” (The Treasury of David, vol. 3, p. 134). When we’re assured of God’s love and favor, we seek Him diligently, as David does here in Psalm 63. Full assurance leads to diligence in seeking God. “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you.”
The third thing to notice is that David is talking about something more than a vague sense of longing and dissatisfaction. His spiritual desire radically affects the way he orders his life. He expresses his longing in the latter part of verse 1: “my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” That says something about how he feels. But before this, he says something about what he does: “earnestly I seek you.” He commits himself to a life of praise: “I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will life up my hands.” He meditates on God: “On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.” God is at the very center of his life. He has other responsibilities, but knowing God is the main business of his life.
I’ve known many people who wish they were more spiritual. They’ll say things like, “Oh, I wish I had the discipline to spend more time with God.” Or, “I wish I would spend more time in God’s Word.” They see others growing spiritually and they admire from a distance: “I wish I was more like that.” But the truth is that we can spend a lifetime wishing for this sort of thing, and it will do us no good. Proverbs 13:4 describes these people: “The sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.” A sluggard, a slothful person, wishes things were different, but he won’t apply diligence and self-discipline. He craves, but he gets nothing.
David is often described in Scripture as a “man after God’s own heart.” What does this mean? Read the account of his life in Scripture. He made serious blunders and committed grave sins. We probably know more about his failings than we do about any other person in Scripture. He doesn’t fit our ideal of what a saint should look like. So what was so special about him? Why weren't his sins spiritually fatal? With all his failings, why is he still described as a man after God’s heart?
I think part of the answer is found in the longings expressed in this psalm. The central focus of David's life was to know God. David made it the business of his life to walk with God, and this took priority over everything else. Despite all his failures and sins, David sought God earnestly throughout his lifetime. He fell, but he didn't turn away, and each time he fell, he repented and was restored. His sins grieved him, not simply because they brought trouble into his life, but because they caused a break in his fellowship with God. David was a man after God's own heart because he desired the thing that God is most concerned about. God desires that we give Him the ultimate priority in our lives, that we hunger and thirst after more of Him, that we become obsessed with knowing Him, as David was.
I often quote A.W. Tozer, because he hungered and thirsted after God for a lifetime, and he said a lot of helpful things in this area. He was especially concerned about the lack of spiritual growth he observed in Christians he knew. He was distressed at seeing people who’d been Christians for 30 or 40 years, but who seemed to have made no progress toward spiritual maturity. Here’s what he said about the problem: “The causes of retarded growth are many. It would not be accurate to ascribe the trouble to one single fault. One there is, however, which is so universal that it may easily be the main cause: failure to give time to the cultivation of the knowledge of God” (“We Must Give Time to God,” in The Root of the Righteous, pp. 10-11). For the most part, we don’t know God very well because we don’t spend time in His presence. We need to make time for Him, and we need to persevere in seeking Him over the course of our lives.
But beyond this, here are a two suggestions I made at the beginning of this series.
1) Avoid things that dull, or take the edge off, your spiritual appetite. We won’t always have a strong sense of longing for God. David says, “earnestly I seek you,” before he says, “my soul thirsts for you.” Strong spiritual desires are usually the result of diligence, not the cause of it. So, part of cultivating a spiritual appetite is saying “no” to things that will draw us away from God. Sin is obviously one of these things, but there are also things that may be legitimate in themselves but they tend to keep you from seeking God. Other people may engage in these things harmlessly, but it doesn’t work that way for you. I have friends who don’t own a TV for that reason. They see others who watch in moderation, but if the TV is there in the house they lose control over it, and soon they find that their prayer life has been undermined. For others it can be a hobby that consumes all your free time, or a certain type of books or music; not things that are sinful in themselves, but they end up harming you. They dull your spiritual appetite and draw you away from seeking God. Excessive recreation is another possibility. Whatever it is in your life that gets in the way of seeking God, you need to avoid it. Don’t make excuses, and don’t try to justify yourself. Admit your weakness, cry out to God for help, and lay the thing aside. It may be fine for others, but not for you. Avoid, put aside, anything that takes the edge of your spiritual appetite.
2) Put yourself in places where you’ll grow in the knowledge of God. David, in this psalm, is cut off from corporate worship because of his circumstances, and he’s longing for the day when he’ll again be able to worship at the place where God has chosen to reveal Himself. As soon as God opens the way, he’ll be there. Don’t miss an opportunity to be someplace where people seem to be enjoying fellowship with Him. Discipline yourself to attend times of corporate prayer, whether you feel like it or not. Don’t allow yourself to avoid corporate worship unless you’re truly unable to be there. Christ has promised to be present when His people are gathered in His name. We tend to pamper ourselves too much in this area. By taking yourself in hand and dragging yourself to church when you really don’t want to go, you’re demonstrating to God that you’re in earnest and that you truly desire to know Him. He’ll respond to your diligence. And, related to this point, seek out fellowship with people who know God better than you do. We learn by example, and hunger for God is contagious. Seek out people who are hungering for more of God. Take pains, be diligent in cultivating a hunger for God.
As we come to the end of this series, let’s remember that we are faced with two alternatives. We can’t escape who we are. We can’t escape the fact that we were created to know God and worship Him. We can spend a lifetime trying to live as if things were otherwise. We can seek to live for ourselves, grasping after whatever we think will make us happy. But we’ll find, again and again, that it’s not what we were hoping for. Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him. This world is a dry and weary land where there is no water. So the only real solution is to surrender to His will and seek Him. This is the conclusion the author of Ecclesiastes reaches near the end of his book: “Honor and enjoy your Creator while you’re still young, Before the years take their toll and your vigor wanes, Before your vision dims and the world blurs And the winter years keep you close to the fire” (12:1-2, The Message). Or this, from Hosea the prophet: “Come, let us return to the Lord! He has torn us in pieces; now he will heal us. He has injured us; now he will bandage our wounds. In just a short time, he will restore us so we can live in his presence. Oh, that we might know the Lord! Let us press on to know him! Then he will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn or the coming of rains in early spring” (6:1-3, NLT). Let’s press on to know Him. Let’s make it the business of our lives to know Him.
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