Psalm 63

David’s beautiful prose in Psalm 63 has been incorporated into popular praise and worship songs. It can be enjoyable singing phrases such as, “Your unfailing love is better than life,” but is that a reasonable expectation for our lives, or just the hyperbole of the poet? Did David really, “lie awake thinking of (God), meditating on (God) through the night?” (v.6a). While there is no way we can know whether David was prone to exaggeration in his prose, we do know that in the generations that have followed, countless souls have written of similar experiences with God. The writings of St. Paul, Brother Lawrence, Madame Guyon, Teresa of Avila, John Wesley, Gene Edwards, Brennan Manning, Billy Graham and Mother Teresa are just a few of the followers of Christ that will affirm with certainty that God’s “unfailing love is better than life” (v.3a). Even so, is this a relationship with God that all of His children can know? Yes.

The shortest distance between two objects may be a straight line, but there is no shortest distance to be found on our journey to seek the life in Christ as our way of life. There are no shortcuts for spiritual growth. The Life in Christ we seek is experienced only after we have come to the place in our lives when nothing, absolutely nothing, but the love of God in Christ Jesus, satisfies the longings of our soul. The only way we can come to that place, is to first experience that our efforts in the flesh to satisfy our longings for love, acceptance and worth do not bear lasting fruit. The Apostle Paul contrasts the flesh life with the life in Christ as the difference between night and day, as between death and life: “My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

Mother Teresa said, “You’ll never know Jesus is all you need, until Jesus is all you have.” Getting to the place where we are broken, clinging to nothing but Christ, is the work of our sovereign God, and God alone.  Most often, it is the circumstances of life we label as bad, such as King David being pursued through the desert by King Saul’s army, that God can use most effectively to bring us to a place of brokenness; and, it is in brokenness that we learn the greatest truth:

“Your unfailing love is better than life itself;”

“The sacrifice you desire is a broken spirit. You will not reject a broken and repentant heart, O God” (Psalm 51:17).

Sē’lah

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Reading for July 4, 2012            Psalm 64