Our scripture reading this morning is from Psalm 63, and I'm going to invite Douglas Carter to come and to read that passage for us.
! A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah.
O God, you are my God.
Earnestly I seek you.
My soul thirsts for you.
My flesh faints for you.
As in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory.
Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.
So I will bless you as long as I live.
In your name I will lift up my hands.
My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food.
And my mouth will praise you with joyful lips.
When I remember you upon my bed and meditate on you in the watches of the night.
For you have been my help.
And in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.
My soul clings to you.
Your right hand upholds me.
But those who seek to destroy my life shall go down into the depths of the earth.
They shall be given over to the power of the sword.
They shall be a portion for jackals.
But the king shall rejoice in God.
All who swear by him shall exult.
For the mouths of liars will be stopped.
Amen.
All right, we're working our way in the summertime through some of the psalms in the mornings.
And we've said most weeks that psalms are prayers.
Sometimes they're prayers.
Sometimes the psalms are meditations.
Meditations where the author is actually talking to themselves about the experience of the Christian life.
And when you look at all the psalms together, all 150, what you have is a guidebook really or a blueprint for what it is supposed to be like to experience seeking after God.
So what the experience of seeking God's face in this normal life should be like.
And you can look at all 50 together to get a sense of what that's like.
Like, Psalm 63 is probably one of the two or three purest examples of what it is to seek God.
What it looks like played out from the internal thought life of David here.
It is a prayer entirely about the experience of communion with God.
So you would have noticed that as Douglas read it, just the language like,
I thirst for God.
Or my soul clings to you.
Or your love is better than life.
So this is language of deep communion with God.
And so this is one of the purest examples of really what the whole of the book of the psalms is doing.
So last week we were on holiday the past couple of weeks.
And I watched a short little film that somebody sent to me on YouTube made by some of the churches in England.
And it was about the awakening of spiritual hunger in the UK.
A story that many of us will have read and thought about and seen in the media.
And it talked about how in the early 2000s, really all the way up to COVID,
so many folks were still in a space of militant atheism, of anger at religion.
But since COVID, there's been a shift towards spiritual hunger.
And so one of the questions that's been coming up is,
what does it even mean to have an experience of God?
What's it look like to have a real experience of the real God?
And so lots of people are asking that.
And then some of the people that they did testimonials with,
they were being interviewed and they said that their experience of God was things like,
you know, I heard God tell me in my normal work day,
stop what you're doing and go plant a church next to this cafe.
And so different people were giving their different takes on what an experience of God might be like.
And there's confusion.
I think anybody in this room would probably admit,
it's hard to really know the answer of what should an experience of God be like?
What should deep communion with God feel like?
What should it look like?
What should be happening to me?
Should these things be happening to me?
If I'm having real experiences of God in my life?
And we here at St. C's are,
this is a Presbyterian church, free church.
And that means we are oriented towards being a cerebral bunch.
So we like to write what we believe on paper.
We like to read it.
And that means that we will always tend towards a more intellectualist side of the pole
of what it means to experience God.
We will think of experiencing God as knowing God through knowing propositions,
through knowing ideas,
through learning more about God means knowing God deeper and deeper communion.
Of course, there's the opposite end of the pole,
which is the mysticism tradition of the Christian faith.
And in the most far-reaching mystical ideas that have been around in Christianity,
the idea is that you seek an unmediated experience of God,
which means you want to vacate your mind of concepts and language and words.
And only then could you get closest to the God who you can't really know.
And so Christians throughout the centuries have vacillated between shifting between those two things.
Personality has a lot to do with it and the tradition you may have been brought up in.
And so we feel oftentimes confused and saying,
what should an experience of real communion with God actually look like and be like?
Where do you go?
Well, the book of Psalms all collectively actually tells us what it looks like to experience God
according to God's own word, according to God's own hand.
And Jonathan Edwards, he's one of the great theologians,
pastors of the American Christian tradition.
And he's well known for thinking about the experience of God and communion with God
more than most others in the past couple of centuries.
And this is what he talks about.
He says, experiencing God can never be divorced from knowing things about God.
That's a must.
But in knowing the truth about God, there's something else.
And this is what he calls it.
He says, a profound inner sense of the heart.
Where you taste God's infinite beauty and holiness that transforms what you care about
and what you love.
So Edwards says, the biblical model of the experience of communion with God
absolutely includes theology.
It includes knowing things about God that are true.
But then there is something else.
There is a inner sensation, an inner taste of God's divine beauty
that displaces things you used to love and changes what you care about.
And very famously, Edwards says, there's a world of difference in knowing that honey is sweet,
learning that honey is sweet, and tasting honey, and delighting in honey.
And he says, you need both.
You need to both know the sweetness of God,
but you also need to have an experience of the taste of the beauty of God.
You need to not only be told honey is sweet, you need to be able to taste that honey as well.
And that's what you see happening in Psalm 63 and throughout so many of the Psalms.
David here is undeniably experiencing an immediate felt experience of God's presence.
And he's not here necessarily saying God is telling me things and giving me new information.
Instead, how does he express it?
He says, the experience of God is, my soul thirsts for you.
And so that means that when I think when you look at the Psalms as a whole,
one of the things you realize, if you were to ask the question,
is a real experience of God something God gives you to hear primarily?
Is it an experience of vacating your mind and try to experience the transcendence of God
in a way that you've never met before?
I think when you look at the Bible, the main thing that we're given is,
you know you're experiencing God in your life when you have an appetite for God.
So the main thing that we're given here in Psalm 63 is that, that when you can say in some measure,
any measure at all, I do thirst for God, then that means that you are and have had an experience
of the real God in your life.
So let me dig into that a little more, according to David here,
thinking about the details of the experience of God he gives us,
and then secondly, the experience of God in the wilderness.
And then lastly, just a very brief reflection on the basis of that experience.
So what is this experience?
A little bit more detail on that idea.
So look at verse one.
This is the main idea of what he means by an experience of God here.
He says, oh God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you.
Now the order, that's the main idea of the whole Psalm,
the order of that, those two clauses matter so much.
Oh God, you are my God, therefore I seek you with earnest.
And it can't be flipped around.
It has to be in that order.
The order matters so much.
This is when he says, my God, that's covenant language.
It's the same way that God told Abraham to speak only after God came to Abraham and said,
I will save you, I will deliver you, and I will make you, I will be your God,
you will be my people.
And only then was Abraham able to say, this is my God.
And so notice the order.
David says, my God, therefore earnestly I seek you.
One writer points out the importance of saying my God.
You can think about it this way, as I read this week.
Like, how many people in your life do you say my about?
So if somebody comes to you, if somebody comes to me at the end of the service during tea and coffee
and says, I'm new here, I haven't gotten to meet Heather,
I might say, do you mean my Heather?
Because there's multiple Heathers that go to this church,
but I do have a my Heather here.
Or if somebody asks, where's Isabel?
I might say, do you mean my Isabel?
I have a wee daughter named Isabel.
But if they come to me and they say, you know, I was hoping to get to be introduced to David,
I probably wouldn't say, do you mean my David?
Or Don told me this, and there's lots of Don's around here,
but I wouldn't say, are you talking about my Don or another Don?
Now, I love all the Dons, and I love all the Davids,
but there's a difference, because friendship doesn't even really allow you to say my.
And so when David says, my God, he's talking about deep covenant family relationship with God.
So much so, that if you look down to verse 7 and 8,
he uses two more words that really help us see this.
He says, for you have been my help.
And this is one of the rare places that the word help shows up.
This word help in the Old Testament,
and it's the same word that shows up in Genesis chapter 2
for the way Adam talks about Eve,
or the way Eve is described to Adam.
She is my help.
That's not language of servitude in Genesis 2.
It's language that throughout the rest of the Old Testament
is only ever used of God to say, he is my help.
He is so intimately close to me.
It's marriage language.
And then down in verse 8, right after that,
my soul clings to you.
That's the same word that shows up rarely in the Old Testament,
but in Genesis 2.24, when it says,
a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave,
hold fast, cling to his wife.
And so these marriage metaphors are being used
with covenant language to show the intimacy of this relationship
that God has, that David has with his God here.
Now the order, therefore, the main idea,
is that the order he puts this in is the gospel itself.
He says, you are my God, therefore earnestly I seek you.
And here's why.
Because in the Bible,
we learn that every single human being
is spiritually hungry for the real God,
for this God, the God of the Bible.
Every person is.
And even in the most ardent campaign
against Christianity and the other religions
from militant atheism in the early 2000s,
the Bible actually still teaches
that even Dawkins and Hitchens,
at their greatest powers,
still were hungry for the real God.
They still actually want the real God.
That's part of what's deep down in the human soul.
We were made by God.
We were made for God.
And he is our only and truest and deepest satisfaction.
But at the same time,
the Bible says that nobody wants God.
So because you were made by God,
actually you do want God.
But at the same time,
because you are a sheep that has run away, rebellious,
you don't want God.
So Romans 3 says, no one seeks for God.
No, not one.
We have all gone astray.
We have all run away from God.
And so we've got this great tension
that generic religion, the world religions,
what are the world religions?
The world religions are simply expressions
of people's hunger for the real God.
But because they don't actually want the real God,
because we're all idolaters, all rebellious,
they've just attached themselves to things
that aren't actually the real God.
Hinduism, Buddhism,
this is just expression of desire,
hunger for the real God,
except they misplace worship to the wrong thing.
And in the same way,
every single one of us wants the real God.
And at the same time,
we don't want the real God.
What does that mean for this psalm?
What it means for this psalm is this.
If you today can say,
God, I seek communion with you in any way,
it is because God has already sought you.
You can only say earnestly,
do I seek the God of the Bible,
if the God of the Bible has already made you his child.
You see, the order, the order is the gospel.
He says, oh God, my God,
therefore, only because you first sought me,
can I now say, I seek you.
And I hope this is a word of assurance
to every person in here,
because I would imagine for some of you,
if you're like me,
you read Psalm 63,
and you say,
I would love to have communion like this with God.
But I can honestly say,
I'm not sure the last time,
I can't remember being able to pray,
say things,
and feel the way that David feels
about his God in this psalm.
But look,
if you have the slightest inkling,
even if you say today,
I wish I had more of this communion than I do,
then that tiny feeble desire
is only because you have had an experience
of God in your life.
Because the Bible says,
no one seeks God,
no one wants God,
no one chases after God,
only unless God is already chasing after you.
And that means you are experiencing God in your life.
If there's any sense that you can say,
I want God in the slightest degree,
maybe like this,
you might say,
the things that I thought
were going to fulfill me in this life
that I have been pursuing
have become less and less
and less attractive over time to me.
Maybe you got some of them,
and you realized they weren't exactly
what you had hoped for.
And only in that space,
you feel slightly more inclined
to want God more.
That is God working in your life.
That is the experience of God
that is taking place in your life.
And so you can come today
with assurance that
if you desire God at all,
the real God,
it is because God
has already desired you,
has already chased after you.
That means God's grace
is already at work in your life
according to the experience of God
that David receives here.
Now secondly,
we learn here that
that means
one of the most important ways
the Bible teaches us
about the experience of God
is through the evidence of appetite.
So do you have an appetite,
a hunger,
a thirst at all,
like David puts it here,
for God?
And that's the evidence
of God's work in your life.
But where does this tend to grow?
Where does this tend to happen best?
Where does this experience
tend to really come out?
And we learn that also in the psalm.
Look at the title,
what we call a superscript.
So superscripts,
the little smaller printed text
in the Bible
is also part of the Bible.
It's also part of the text.
And we have an introduction here,
a psalm of David,
King David,
when he was in the wilderness of Judah.
And so almost all the commentators agree
that the wilderness of Judah
is a reference to the time
that David fled Jerusalem
because his son Absalom
was trying to overthrow him
and take the throne.
And so this is a story
from 2 Samuel 15 to 20.
And in that section,
David's own son Absalom
had been plotting for years
to overthrow David
and ultimately have him assassinated.
And that means that
when David writes this psalm,
what has taken place
is what has taken place
in 2 Samuel 15.
He has run for his life
from Jerusalem.
He's crossed the Kidron Valley.
He's gone up the Mount of Olives
and he's entered
into the wilderness of Judah.
And there he's starving.
He's thirsty.
The text tells us
that he was barefoot,
weeping,
that he had no armor,
hardly any clothing.
And he's crying out.
And can you imagine,
you know,
being kicked off your throne,
being displaced from your home.
But, of course,
we read later in the story
that the greatest pain
he experiences
is because this is his son.
It's Absalom
that has done this to him.
And it's here
where we get Psalm 63.
That's the context.
Now, what's so striking
about that is because
what you read about here
is not Absalom
or getting kicked off the throne
or the loss of a son.
What you read about here
is him just going directly
into the sweet communion
of God's presence
and saying,
I need you,
I thirst for you,
I hunger for you.
He is literally
in a physically dry,
parched, weary, thirsty land.
And, of course,
his soul is absolutely dry
and parched and weary
and thirsty
because of what his son
has done to him.
But it's seeking the honey,
the sweetness of God's presence
that he goes to.
What does that mean?
It means this.
Communion with God
does tend to grow
in the wilderness experience.
Communion with God
does tend to arise
more palpably
when you walk
into the wilderness.
And Charles Spurgeon
points out in his sermon
on Psalm 63
a few different
wilderness experiences
that we might be going through.
One is the wilderness experience
of terrible circumstance
like he's walking through.
Something you don't want,
something that you didn't choose.
But the others
are the wilderness experience
that sometimes
God puts us in,
which happens
in other Psalms of David
where we're put
in a wilderness experience
because of patterns
of sin in our life.
And as one writer puts it,
sin is the great suppressant
of appetite.
So the more we are
in patterns of sin
in our lives
and the more God
puts us in a wilderness
to wake us up
and shake us back up,
the more we will struggle
with any desire for God.
And so if you come today
and say,
I'm struggling
with desire for God,
I don't thirst for God,
I don't seek God
as sweeter than honey
in my life.
One of the first questions
Spurgeon and I think
the text is drawing us
to ask is,
is there a pattern
of sin in my life
that we haven't confessed yet?
Because sin is the great
appetite suppressant.
It is eating sweets all day
and not wanting your dinner.
The very thing
that is so good for you
is dinner,
the vegetables at dinner,
but you eat sweets all day
and sometimes God puts you
into the wilderness experience
to awaken to that
and then that draws you
back into sweeter communion,
deeper communion with God.
Another wilderness experience
that is pointed out
by some of the authors
is just the wilderness
of the heart.
So you may say,
look, I don't have
any obvious patterns
of sin in my life
that I could point to
in some extreme way
and I'm not going
through bad circumstances,
but I am just walking
through the wilderness
of the drought.
I just don't care.
I have apathy.
I just don't feel like
seeking after God at all
and there's all sorts
of things we can do,
but let me give you
two things you can do
according to David here.
Of course,
we need to self-examine.
Of course,
we need to ask,
are there patterns of sin
in my life
that I'm not even aware of?
All of those things,
but let me give you
the two main things
David gives you
from the psalm
very briefly
and here's the first.
Notice,
in this prayer,
he does not ask
for his circumstances
to change.
Not yet, at least,
and instead,
what David does here
is he gives you
a very particular
type of prayer
and so you can see it.
It's almost chiastic.
It moves in and out.
In verse 3,
he says that
my lips will praise you.
In verse 4,
he says,
I will bless you
as long as I live.
In your name,
I'll lift up my hands.
That's a reference
to worship.
In verse 5,
my mouth will praise you
with joyful lips.
Back to lips.
He's talking about
worship and praise
through the lens
of a specific type of prayer
and that's the prayer
of adoration.
So,
if you read the Psalms,
you'll see all types
of prayers,
adoration and confession,
thanksgiving,
petition,
and if you look
at our order of service
here at St. C's,
you will see that we try
to do every type of prayer.
We begin with a prayer
of adoration,
we move to a prayer
of confession,
then a prayer of thanksgiving,
and then a prayer
of petition.
And you'll see all this
throughout the Bible,
but the most important
type of prayer is what?
Adoration.
It's the beginning
of every other type
of prayer.
And what David here
is in the midst of this,
he just starts praying
about God's beauty
in the midst of
pretty terrible circumstances.
He doesn't say,
Lord, give me.
He says,
Lord, I adore you.
Now, he's going to come later
to, Lord, give me.
I need.
But he begins with,
Lord, I adore you.
And we're being,
you're being invited here
to see something
that's very simple,
but just that prayers
of adoration to God,
contemplating through prayer
on God's sweetness,
His beauty,
His attributes,
is really the key
in the Psalms
to sweeter and deeper communion,
to every other type of prayer.
That if you reflect
on God's power
in all of Him
and His beauty
and His infinite majesty,
that leads you
towards prayers
of confession.
And that's exactly
what David shows us here.
He gives this whole person
into adoration
and praise
as the primary response
to His circumstance.
The second thing
is that prayer
of adoration here
leads to what we call
Christian meditation.
Okay.
The Psalms are prayers,
but often,
if you read them carefully,
the Psalms are not prayers.
They are meditations.
And that's slightly different.
So what are meditations?
You can see one
at the bottom of this Psalm,
verse 9 to 11,
when he turns away
from prayer
and he says,
but those who seek
to destroy my life
will go down
into the depths.
He's not talking
to God there.
He's turned to just
talking to himself.
That's a meditation.
Of course,
he's talking there
about the circumstances
and so his great friend
Ahithophel,
who ate dinner with him
almost every single night,
has been the main partner
with his son Absalom
in plotting
his assassination and coup.
And so very probably
when he says,
those who seek
to destroy my life
shall go down
to the depths of the earth,
he's thinking of
the treachery
of his friend Ahithophel here.
He's talking very specifically
about the circumstance,
but that's a meditation.
Look at verse 6.
He says it outright.
He says,
when I remember you
upon my bed
and meditate on you
in the watches of the night.
So there it is,
meditation.
The Old Testament
in the time of Jesus,
we looked at this
in the series we did
in June on Luke 24,
is divided into three sections.
The books of Moses,
what's called the prophets,
but the prophets
actually begin with Joshua,
the history books,
and then the Psalms
are the writings,
which starts with the Psalms.
So you've got
the first five books
of the Bible
and then section two
of the Old Testament,
Joshua,
section three
of the Old Testament,
Psalms.
Chris preached on Psalm 1
recently,
and you'll remember
that language,
meditate on the law
of the Lord
day and night
in Psalm 1.
He meditates.
Joshua 1,
in the second paragraph
of the opening
of that second section
of the Bible,
what does it say?
It says,
Joshua was given
the command,
meditate on God's law
day and night.
So at every section
of the Old Testament,
it opens by saying,
practice meditation.
What is this meditation?
We're told about it
right here,
and it's this.
It's contra mysticism,
contra Eastern religion
where you're invited
to empty your mind
of all concepts
and instead just experience
whatever you happen
to experience.
Instead,
Christian meditation
in the Psalms
is when you actually
fill your mind
with the beauty,
presence,
and truth of God
that you learn about
in the Bible
until God becomes
sweet to you.
So that's the practice
of Christian meditation.
Listen to Jonathan Edwards
talk about it.
He says,
it's when you take
a single spiritual truth
and you deeply digest it
until it moves
from a cold fact
in your brain
to a sweeter taste
in your heart.
There was a woman
named Ann Bradstreet.
She was a Puritan author
in New England,
and we have just a host
of her meditations
on God
that have been preserved,
and she's got,
they're really worth
looking at.
They're absolutely beautiful.
But this is what she,
she talks about
her practice of meditation
or contemplation on God,
and oftentimes
she would look at nature
as a mirror
like Psalm 19 does
and reflect on the sun
and the moon
and the trees,
and she says,
I don't just see
what's in front of me,
but I see the sun
and the moon
and the trees
as symbols or mirrors
pointing to God's
divine beauty
and His power
and His order
and His love.
And then she says,
she writes this
in one of her meditations.
Lord,
why should I doubt
any more
when you have given me
such assured pledges
of your love?
First,
I see you are my creator.
I see I am your creature.
You my master,
I your servant,
but my comfort arises
when I say this,
you are my father
and I am your child.
So there she's practicing
meditation,
leading into prayer,
and that's exactly
what we have
all throughout
the book of Psalms.
It's pursuing conversation
with God
through thinking about God
all the time
in the most ordinary
moments of your day.
There's another writer,
Brother Lawrence,
who Protestants
have sometimes pulled from
for some of the helpful bits.
You can't take everything
from Brother Lawrence.
You leave some stuff behind,
but Brother Lawrence
in his book,
Practicing the Presence of God,
he was a cook
at a monastery,
this guy,
and he says,
there is no manner
of life in the world
more sweet
or more delicious
than continual conversation
with God,
and Brother Lawrence
in his book
talks about how he
most communes with God,
most thinks about God,
most talks to God
when he is doing the dishes,
that that was
his favorite moment,
that he says,
the time of business
does not with me
differ from the time
of prayer.
And so this is the practice
of what Paul means
in the New Testament
when he says,
pray without ceasing.
It's learning to meditate
on the infinite beauty
of God
and let that draw you
into prayer
until your heart
feels sweet
with the reality
of who God is.
Sometimes
that takes 30 seconds,
and sometimes
that takes three years.
Sometimes
you don't arrive
at the sweetness
of the infinite beauty
of God's
very being,
meditating
and praying.
It doesn't really
get into your soul
until three years later.
And you might be
walking through
a 30-second season
or a three-year season
on this very day,
but the promise
is that God
will give you
that sweetness.
That's the promise
of Psalm 63.
Listen,
I'll move on
to the final
and very brief thing,
but let me give you
what Edwards says
about this experience.
He says,
I want,
he says,
excuse me,
he says,
in reading Scripture
I seemed often
to see so much light
that I could not
get along in my reading.
Almost every sentence
at times in my life
have seemed to me
to be so full of wonders.
I found from time to time
an inward sweetness
that used,
as it were,
to carry me away
into contemplation
about my God.
I felt alone,
sweetly conversing
with Christ,
wrapped up
and swallowed up in Him.
The sense I had
of divine things
would often,
of a sudden,
as it were,
kindle up a sweet
burning in my heart
and ardor of my soul
that I know not
how to express now
to you into words.
This is the experience
that David is having
in Psalm 63.
Now,
one application,
and it's this.
This is so important
for us
in a cerebral congregation
as we will tend to be
in our Presbyterian
theologically oriented
tradition
because it is my default.
I imagine it is
some of your default
to say,
when you are feeling
spiritually low,
to say,
I want a spiritual
pick-me-up,
so I am going to put
my favorite preacher
on my favorite Spotify app,
on the Spotify app,
into my ears
while I walk through the city
and dig in
to what he has
to say to me.
And that's a very good thing.
I believe in preaching.
We're doing it today,
in fact.
And so,
don't not do that,
but we all know
that sometimes
going to our favorite preacher
because we like
the way they put things
can leave us
in front of our favorite preacher
because we like
the way they say things
and never taking
that next step,
which is to actually
meet with God.
So,
do you,
even today,
even as we sing,
even as we pray
in just a moment,
do you take the step
from saying,
I like the way
somebody may or may not
have put X, Y, Z
in a sermon
to actually saying,
I'm turning now
to speak and converse
with the living God
about what I've just
seen and heard and read.
That's the step
that we,
as theological Protestants,
often can miss.
And so,
we're being invited
in Psalm 63
to deeper communion
and meditation.
On what basis,
finally,
as we conclude
very shortly?
Luke 24 tells us
that Jesus
read the Psalms
and he taught
how they concerned
himself.
And that means here
that when you read
Psalm 63,
like the rest,
especially the Psalms
of David,
you have to say
that they are ultimately
about Jesus Christ.
You have to read them
in the light of him,
in the light of the gospel.
I don't think
it's coincidence at all
that when you read,
if you were to go read
2 Samuel 15 to 20,
the story of David
being run out
of the city
because of this
circumstance
of Absalom
that David goes
barefoot and weeping
out from the center
of Jerusalem
down through the Kidron Valley
up the Mount of Olives.
And there,
on the Mount of Olives,
he meditates
on the one
who ate dinner with him
yet betrayed him,
Ahithophel.
And it's there
that he starts to pen
the Psalms like these.
It's no coincidence.
That a great king
in the middle of history
would go up
the Mount of Olives
and pray a prayer
like this
on the basis
that the one
he had been eating
dinner with
had betrayed him.
And of course,
this Psalm
is far more
about the true
and better David
that we read about
in Matthew chapter 1
who went up
the Mount of Olives
and who stood
in Gethsemane
and who was betrayed
by the one
who had eaten dinner
with him
just that very night.
And he was
the true
and better king
that was being
exiled where
into the deep wilderness.
But there's a difference
and the difference
is this.
David here
in this Psalm
says,
I thirst for you,
God.
And God
comes to him
sweeter than honey.
But the true
and better David
said,
I thirst.
And in that moment
he wasn't just talking
about his lips,
his physical lips.
He was saying,
I thirst for communion
with my father
and he was nothing
but parched.
He was starved.
He was forsaken.
He was cast out.
And see,
David did not deserve
communion with God
and neither do we.
We are rebel sheep.
David does not deserve
this communion
but God gives David
this communion
on the basis
that one day
the true and better David
will say,
I thirst
and he will be
ultimately exiled
so that David
can know the grace
of the sweetness
of God's infinite presence
with him
in this very moment.
And that is the same
exact thing
that is true for you.
If you come today
and you say,
I'm struggling to pray,
I don't experience
this sweet communion
in my life right now,
let me add one
little facet
to the discipline
of meditation
and it's this.
Meditate,
as he says,
on the steadfast love
of the Lord
which is better than life.
But how do you meditate
on that?
You say this,
the steadfast love
of the Lord
expressed in Jesus Christ
hanging on the cross
for me,
that love
is better than life.
So you orient
your meditation
to the Christ
of the cross
and you say,
that's where I know
that his love for me
is better than life itself.
Your heart,
over time,
your heart over time
will start to see
that the greatest benefit
of prayers
of communion
with God
is not,
it's not Lord give me,
it's not in getting
whatever you're asking for,
but it is in
the very fact
that you get God himself.
that will grow
in your life.
Let us pray.
Father,
we want an experience
of God
even today,
even now,
and some of us
are there,
we're tasting
the honey
that is the infinite beauty
that is condescended
in your presence
with us
as you promise it.
And for many of us,
probably,
more of us,
we are feeling distant
and cold
and struggling
and saying,
yet I want this,
and so Lord,
first we ask
that you would assure us
that you are working
in our lives
if there's any hint
of desire in us
for knowing you more.
And then secondly,
we ask that you would
grant it to us even now.
So help us to turn away
from the meager words
of some sermon
from some guy
and instead,
Lord,
all of us help us now
to turn in prayer
and communion with you,
the living God.
So we ask for that
as we sing these words
of Be Thou My Vision.
In Christ's name,
we pray.
Amen.