You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land where there is no water. I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory. Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands. I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you. On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night. Because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings. I cling to you; your right hand upholds me. (Psalm 63:1-8)
Generation on fire, I greet you in the name of Christ the one who we love because He loved us first.
Have you ever reflected on your journey to Christ? Have you pondered what sparked your interest or what prompted your curiosity? Perhaps you grew up in a believing home but when did you start to seek out Christ for yourself? Maybe you didn’t grow up in the faith, but an inner restlessness led you to the church, how do you reckon this restlessness came about? The answer to this and much more is that God in His infinite mercy ordained it. John 6:44 reads “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” It is confirmation that we did not just stumble upon this relationship by accident but a question then remains – what do we do with this relationship? King David in this word and frankly the whole book of Psalms answers this.
“I cling to you; your right hand upholds me” is a realization that the prompting to seek the face of God originates from God himself and all the time we are pursuing Him, we are already in His hands. Many powerful prophets, apostles and disciples are profiled in the bible, some have called down fire from heaven and others have been raptured in heavenly chariots but only a select few have enjoyed designations such as “man after my own heart” as God declared of David. Pursuing the one who first pursued us is how we earn such designations as “friend of God.” David’s life and relationship with God exposes God’s hunger for man to know Him as He knows man. It gives us the blueprint for the relationship we should be seeking with our Maker.
Ephesians 1:4-6 says “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love He predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will — to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.” This verse highlights the complex and at times head scratching biblical doctrine of election. It tells us that God chooses us to be justified by faith and adopted by grace, but some others are left to their own desires (Romans 1:24). It brings to mind Exodus 33:19 where God says to Moses “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” This explains why many believers have found Christ, not to their credit but to God’s divine mercy and compassion. The problem today is that many believers stop there and go no further. Election of the Saints, justification by faith and concurrent adoption by grace lays the foundation for us but it does not build the house in which we shelter and wait for eternity. A.W. Tozer summarizes it perfectly; “The whole transaction of religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless. Faith may now be exercised without jar to the moral life and without embarrassment to the Adamic ego. Christ may be “received” without any special love for Him in the spirit of the receiver. The man is “saved” but he is not hungry or thirsty after God. In fact, he is specifically taught to be satisfied and encouraged to content with little.”
The greatest threat to faith and consequently eternity is a lukewarm approach to a relationship with God. In Revelations 3, Christ warns as much to the church of the Laodiceans. He says “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” Too many of us have been trapped in clutches of the false gospel that insists since we have found Christ, there is no longer a need to seek Him. To adopt this doctrine is to toss the mercy and compassion of God into an incinerator. “Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock” (Matthew 7:24); To have found Christ and to refuse to grow in intimacy with him through passionate pursuit is the equivalent of having found the solid rock and refusing to gather the building materials to construct the house. This would undoubtedly be the greatest tragedy to befall any believer, it would be better to not have received Christ at all than to receive this precious relationship and refuse to cultivate it.
The solution to this ever-lurking threat is to return to our origin story as David did throughout his life. David knew that everything he was originated from God. He understood that God was the author of the glorious relationship where he found freedom and safety. David marveled at God's omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. He acknowledged that God created him in his mother's womb (Psalm 139:13) and called him into a warm embrace. David's response to this realization is to seek God diligently and to pursue Him with a passion that can only be described as fiery. “You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1). “As the deer pants for water, so I long for you, O God. I thirst for God, the living God. Where can I find him to come and stand before him?” (Psalm 42:1-2). At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push into conscious awareness of His presence and to respond with the same passion as He first created us and approached us.
For us God’s elect, there is only one response; You, God, are my God, earnestly I will seek you. Jeremiah 31:3-6 is the best example of God’s approach and His children’s response. “The Lord appeared to us in the past, saying: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness. I will build you up again, and you, Virgin Israel, will be rebuilt. Again, you will take up your timbrels and go out to dance with the joyful. Again, you will plant vineyards on the hills of Samaria; the farmers will plant them and enjoy their fruit. There will be a day when watchmen cry out on the hills of Ephraim, ‘Come, let us go up to Zion, to the Lord our God.’” Here we see that God appears to His elect first and professes His love. He rebuilds His children and bestows all of His blessings upon them which they enjoy greatly. However, this isn’t enough, their hunger is not quenched by the reaped fruits of the land and a day comes when they cry to meet God. For us believers, that day is today and every day until we see the face of God in eternity. We hunger and we thirst for God. We seek God, we ask for His presence and knock on the gates of heaven believing that He will reveal himself to us. We become the generation that seeks God to know Him not for the material things He offers. We burn passionately for Him and become the Generation on fire that he has ordained us to be.
Prayer
O God I have tasted your goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need for further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. Father, the Holy God, I want to want you. I long to be filled with longing. I thirst to be made thirstier still. Show me your glory, so I may know you intimately. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul – Rise up and follow me, then give me grace to rise up and follow you from where I have complacently wandered for so long.
In Jesus’ name, I pray. Amen.