Psalm 63 - A Thirsty Soul
A Psalm Of David, When He Was In The Wilderness Of Judah
1 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;
2 To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary.
3 Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee.
4 Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in thy name.
5 My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips:
6 When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches.
7 Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.
8 My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me.
9 But those that seek my soul, to destroy it, shall go into the lower parts of the earth.
10 They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes.
11 But the king shall rejoice in God; every one that sweareth by him shall glory: but the mouth of them that speak lies shall be stopped.
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Matthew 5:6 — Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
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A couple of thoughts —
First:
It’s intriguing to me that right in the middle of the Beatitudes we’re faced with the concepts of hunger and thirst. I think, in part, it’s because in order to experience what comes before and after verse 6 we need to have at the center of it all a hunger and a thirst for righteousness. In other words, there’s to be an internal craving for God and all that He is as expressed in the word righteousness.
Second:
It’s also intriguing to me to read about David and the thirst he had for God. I think it says a lot about the man.
As we know, David wasn’t perfect. He did some severely awful things — things that most of us wouldn’t even contemplate doing. And yet, David did. Though he was a man after God’s own heart, he still battled with the realities of the flesh, as do we.
But …
The thing that is so encouraging is that, no matter what, David never fell away from his God. And I think, I wonder if it had to do with the first verse in Psalm 63. I think, actually, it might.
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David never got satisfied, satiated, in himself or in His personal fellowship/relationship with God. Whether in the heights of victory of in the depths of utter defeat … he always thirsted for God.
It wasn’t a superficial thirst though. It was a deep thirst. A thirst so deep and so intense that the Holy Spirit moved David to refer to it as a soul-thirst. David didn’t just thirst in order to quench the outer man and his needs. David thirsted with an artisan-well thirst that stemmed from the very core, the very depths of his whole being: his soul
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It would appear that to be a man after God’s own heart is to be a man with a soul-thirst for the essence of God and for the manifested works of God — as he goes on to say.
David thirsted for his inner spiritual longings to be met. For him that was the gateway, the beginning, of being able to open the windows of his comprehension to “see” in an internally deep way the magnificence of God through His works. He longed to see God’s power at work in his own life.
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I think, perhaps, we can all relate to what is often referred to as a “wilderness experience” with God. That is, times when everything seems dry: we’re dry, the Word is dry, fellowship is dry, life is dry. In a word, life and God at that moment have appeared to let us down.
Rather than experiencing a glorious expedition through life on the highroad with God, we’re entangled in the underbrush of the wilderness and about to be overcome. Yes, that may be over stating it for you at this moment, but I think I can be so bold as to say:
“Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.” (I Corinthians 10:12)
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If you’ve spent much time in the Bible you probably have noticed that God’s people spent a huge amount of time in wilderness experiences. And, it seems like God knows that it’s in the Wilderness where He can get our attention. And, it’s in the Wilderness where He can do in us what we won’t allow Him to do at other times.
The following verses always put me to caution:
Deuteronomy 8
1 All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the Lord sware unto your fathers.
2 And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.
3 And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live. —
God expressly used the Wilderness to work in and work out His purposes in and through His people. God did that to those that came out of Egypt then and … He’s still doing it to those that come out of “Egypt” now.
Praise God that He does. Otherwise, we’d never progress on our journey to The Celestial City (Pilgrim’s Progress). God wants us to realize a thirsty and barren soul so that we’ll turn to Him to quench it.
And …
II Chronicles 32:31 also gives a window into what it is to be in a wilderness experience:
“Howbeit in the business of the ambassadors of the princes of Babylon, who sent unto him to enquire of the wonder that was done in the land, God left him {Hezekiah}, to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart.”
God works in Kings and the average guy on the street the same way. No matter the status, we all have a soul-thirst for God. We just, at times, need God to bring us to the point where we can acknowledge that this world and all it offers is dry when compared to the quenched soul that is satisfied with God alone.
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A thirsty soul is not a bad thing … it’s a good thing … though it may seem at times like God is nowhere to be found, life is sucking the marrow out of you, and you can’t “see the forest for the trees”.
Take heart, David knew what a dry, barren wilderness experience was like … but …
He also knew where to find Living Water.
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So …
How thirsty is your soul-thirst for God? It’s worth asking yourself, isn’t it?
I know you trow so more than you wot not that it is so.
Remember:
“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.”