Your Unfailing Love

May 3, 2017

Your Unfailing Love

Your unfailing love is better than life itself;

    how I praise you!

Psalm 63:3

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 who 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).

Corrie ten Boom 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

<><  <><  <><  <><

(Selah is a word that appears in the Book of Psalms that I often use as the Complimentary Closing in my correspondence. Its meaning, as I use the word, is to pause and think about these things.)

These meditations are written by Alex M. Knight as he seeks the life in Christ as his way of life.  The meditations are published on the BLOG, http://seekingthelifeinchrist.blogspot.com/ and they are also distributed on the Constant Contact email server. You may subscribe to this email service by sending an email to: amkrom812@gmail.com.

Publications by Alex M. Knight:

·        Seeking the Life in Christ, Meditations on the New Testament and Psalms has been published and is now available at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle.

·        The second edition of  First Think – Then Pray is available on Amazon Kindle.

·        Meditations on The Story of My Life as told by Jesus Christ has been released as an e-book on Amazon Kindle.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.