Psalm 63; Honest with God: A Psalm for the Thirsty

You have a copy of the Bible.

Please turn with me to Psalm 63.

If you've been visiting with us for a little while, we just go through books of the Bible.

If you wanted to sum up our church, particularly our worship, we make much of God's word.

We make make much of Jesus.

It really is that simple.

God's word is what we most need.

And through the word, we see Jesus.

And so we are studying.

We've taken a break from Romans.

We'll get back into that in the fall.

But now we're looking at different various psalms.

In our series, Honest with God this morning, we'll be looking at Psalm 63.

This is God's word.

Oh 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 your 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, and all who swear by him shall exult, for the mouth of liars will be stopped.

This is God's word.

Let's pray and let's ask for God to help us as we hear the word, but also as I preach the word.

Let's pray together.

Lord, uh, I really have two things I want to ask you for this morning.

One is that you'd be with me, that you would fill me with your spirit, so that I might proclaim your word clearly and boldly, but also humbly.

Help me to speak truth, but to do so in great love.

And then I also ask for those that are listening.

I pray, Lord, we're in lots of places on a Sunday morning, and I pray that you would make us alert, that you would eliminate distractions, that we would be on the edge of our seats waiting for you to speak.

And I pray that you would change us.

We don't want to go through the motions.

We want you to move and change and convict and challenge us and show us Jesus.

May we encounter Jesus through your word and through your spirit this morning.

In Christ's name I pray.

Amen.

Did you know that the human body can go three weeks without food?

Three weeks.

But the human body can only go three days without water.

You see, everything else is negotiable.

Water isn't.

That is why thirst feels different.

And if you've ever been dehydrated, it feels different than being hungry.

Hungry, you can push through.

Thirst is very, very different.

And it often, again, if you've ever been here, it comes on you very quickly and you're dehydrated.

And if you're severely dehydrated, you end up in the hospital.

Because thirst completely takes over.

David knew that thirst literally.

You would think he's running for his life.

You would think he would write the psalm out of fear or about fear.

But instead of writing a psalm about fear, he actually has every reason to be afraid.

But instead, he writes a psalm about thirst.

My God, my soul thirsts for you in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

Now, most of us have never been chased through a desert by an army or never survived or had to survive several days in the desert, but all of us know what it's like to feel dry, don't we?

To feel thin, to feel exhausted by life.

Maybe it's you this morning.

You're not doubting anything.

You uh are not in a crisis, you still believe, but you just feel flat, you feel dry, you feel like you're just going through the motion spiritually.

Or maybe you're a mom with three kids under five, you're running on little sleep, and when you really stop, you realize that you have not had a second to yourself, and you don't know how long.

And you're completely drained, and you have nothing else to give.

Or maybe it's the son or daughter caring for an aging parent.

You're traveling because they live out of town, you're driving them to appointments, you're managing medications, you're watching someone who used to take care of you slowly need to be taken care of themselves, and you are worn very thin, and no one else around you seems to notice or seems to care.

And here's one worth sitting with this morning.

Did you know that David is in this desert?

And it's not random.

You know why David's in this desert?

Well, because for years, years before this, David, because of his own failure and sin, has led him here into this place.

It can cause complete upheaval and complete chaos in our lives.

And I say that because sometimes our dryness is like that too.

It's not a result of our circumstances around us, it's a result of our doing and our sin.

And if that's where you are this morning, then this psalm is for you too.

See, we all have our deserts, don't we?

And what's interesting about this psalm is that the crisis, if you noticed at the end of the psalm, it doesn't get resolved here.

David doesn't get rescued.

He's still out there when the psalm ends, still being hunted, still thirsty, and that's the point.

Psalm 63 isn't showing us, oh, this is the way you escape a broken and fallen world.

It's showing us what it actually looks like to live out our faith, to seek God in the middle of our deserts and the dryness of our lives.

Main idea in Psalm 63 is that it teaches us that when we are parched by our sin and circumstances of life, there is a love that is better than life.

David found that in the desert.

And he invites all of us to find that too in the middle of our deserts this morning.

And so, how do we do that?

Well, we see it in this psalm.

We do it by first seeking God, secondly, by clinging to his love, lastly, by rejoicing in the desert.

Seeking God, clinging to his love, rejoicing in the desert.

Let's look at those in turn this morning.

Our first heading, seeking after God.

Look at verse one.

Notice a few things here.

Let me just point them out.

Obvious, but I think we can miss these things.

He doesn't say, Oh God, you are a God.

So he's not talking about some distant God or distant deity out there somewhere.

You are my God.

And I say that just to say that David's not approaching a stranger.

He is speaking to someone that he already knows and to whom he already belongs.

And then notice the verbs.

Do you think this is a passive psalm?

I don't think so.

Notice David doesn't say, God, I I wonder about you.

Or God, I I hope that you're near.

Or I hope you help me out in this desert.

No, look at what it earnestly.

I seek you.

Thirst doesn't sit still.

If you are dying of thirst, you do not calmly consider all of your options.

If you're dying of thirst, you go running for water with everything you have.

That is the posture David is seeking.

He's running after God.

The feel here is desperation.

Look at verse 2.

Very important.

So I have, not I will, I have looked upon you in the sanctuary.

The sanctuary is the place where God's presence is uniquely with his people.

He is beholding, it says, his power and his glory.

He's remembering.

He's remembering something real.

He has tasted it.

He has tasted the presence of God before.

He knows what it's like.

And he knows exactly what he is thirsty for.

He says, in the middle of this thirst and in the wilderness, he says, I know what I want.

I want that.

I want God.

I need him more than anything else.

And here's why that matters.

Because that kind of knowing, and you know this in your own life, when you've tasted something, when you know something, when you've experienced something and been changed by something, that kind of knowing changes what can fool you.

There's a phenomenon, desert dwellers and travelers have named this thing that really torments them the most in the desert.

And it's called the Mirage.

Maybe you're familiar with this, but it's an optical illusion that you have.

And the thing to compare it to is if you're driving down a paved road in Alabama in 95 degree heat, if you look ahead of you, you ever seen that kind of shimmering coming off of the pavement?

Well, that happens in the desert on a hot summer day.

Heat rises off the sand and it bends the light, and your eyes see exactly what you are desperate for.

Your eyes think you're seeing water shimmering on the horizon.

And here's the thing: it only fools the thirsty.

And by the time that you reach it, your hands close around it, and you finally get there only to find dust and heat.

I watched a documentary recently on Joe Flacco.

He's an NFL Super Bowl winning quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens in 2013.

He actually won the MVP.

So he got the ring, he got the MVP trophy, he got a brand new Corvette as a result of winning the MVP trophy.

He got everything the culture says.

You get this, and it will satisfy you.

And in the documentary, he holds up the actual trophy.

And he holds up the ring, and the camera pans to it, and you're like, wait, what is that?

And it's unrecognizable almost because it is so severely tarnished.

Because it had been sitting in his dad's house for over a decade, untouched, gathering dust.

And the person doing the interview said, Sh, let's see the Corvette.

They go out to this one-car garage, he opens the core the door to the garage, and it is so dirty and so dusty, you cannot even see inside the windows.

It's just sitting there.

And the person again says, Let's start it up.

He doesn't even know where the key is.

He later says and admits that he thought those things would matter to him.

And they just don't.

Think about that.

The greatest achievement in a professional career is sitting tarnished on a shelf.

And it's not a story of an ungrateful man, it's the mirage.

That's the story.

He had been running hard for years towards something that looked like water.

It looked like life and satisfaction.

He got it.

And it's tarnished.

It did not satisfy the way that he thought it would.

What are you running towards this morning?

Everybody's thirsty.

That's how you were made as a human being.

All of us are thirsty.

We're all running.

Where are you running?

More often than not, God hasn't moved.

We have.

A little at a time without even noticing, it's not because we've renounced anything, but it's because we've said yes to everything else around us.

The job has completely eaten out every margin you have in your week.

Your travel schedule, your traveling on the weekends has completely eaten everything out of your life.

The calendar that is so full of good things, and there are good things.

But there's never a good time to stop.

You see, we didn't walk away from him.

We just never learned to say no to anything.

And guess who gets the leftovers?

Not us.

God gets the leftovers.

And you don't notice it when it's happening in the moment.

No one does.

You wake up one day and you realize your soul is parched and it is thirsty.

You realize that you've been running on fumes and empty longer than you ever knew.

There's lots of things, of course, that can kind of eat out and eat away at our relationship with God.

But could it be this morning that your busyness is the reason for your spiritual dryness?

Could it be the reason that you're in the desert and that you feel so dry?

Whatever the reason, that thirst is doing something.

If you're hearing that this morning and it does something inside of you, creating a longing, that is a good thing.

Except here's what most of us do in that moment.

We feel the longing, and instead of letting it drive us to God, we go back to the mirage.

Back to the trophy on the shelf, back to the next promotion, back to numbing, uh, the scrolling through, numbing ourselves out on Instagram, or we run back to a relationship.

The ache is real.

The problem is we keep running to water that is never actually there to begin with.

And why do we do that?

Well, it's not because we don't know any better.

We all know better.

So why do we keep doing that?

I'm sure there are other reasons, but I think one of the reasons is that uh what we seek feels far more real than what we should be seeking.

Meaning, God's love is often harder for us to see and experience, and it's not something you can all the time get your hands around and hold.

And so we drift towards things that we can actually touch and see, even when we know we really know that they will not satisfy.

And David, he felt the same ache, and he runs to the place he knew was real.

I have seen it, I have experienced it in the sanctuary, not running on willpower, he's running on memory.

He knew where the water was because he tasted it before.

Are you dry this morning?

Are you dying of thirst?

David looked back at the sanctuary.

Did you know we have something far better?

Not a place.

We have a person.

God came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ.

We have a person.

The mirage will dehydrate you.

Only Jesus, and we'll get there.

But only Jesus can give you water that will satisfy your soul.

And that will last forever.

Secondly, cling to God's love in the desert.

Look at verse three.

Man, I love this verse.

Because your love, your steadfast love, is better than life.

The word there for steadfast love is covenant love.

It's God's loyal, promised love.

God's love that will not quit on you, no matter what.

And David compares it to the one thing, think about this, that every human being instinctively protects above everything else.

And what is that?

Our life.

And think about the context here.

The psalm shows us that he's not saying this like and he's sitting in his palace.

No, he doesn't know if he's going to live.

He is has his life, that is a real danger, and he says in the middle of that if I have that, if I have God's covenant love, I'm not worried about dying.

Because it is so good.

And it is better than life itself.

That's challenging.

Look at what it does to you.

Look at verses four through seven.

When we experience the thing that every single person in this room, isn't that what you want?

To be loved like this with a love that will never quit on you.

And when we experience that, what does it do?

Well, gratitude.

Look at verses four through seven.

You throw up your hands in worship.

He's satisfied as with fat and rich food.

The satisfaction, notice it doesn't come in the sanctuary or the mountaintop.

It comes in the middle of the night.

The unguarded ordinary moments of life.

And even there, alone in the dark, still being hunted, he said, God, you've been my help.

I hide under the shadow of your wings.

I will sing for joy.

So it makes you sing, it makes you throw your hands up in worship.

It satisfies you.

God's covenant love.

Then look at verse 8.

I love this picture.

My soul clings to you.

Your right hand upholds me.

Notice two things there that are happening at the same time: clinging and holding.

Here's the picture: a small child with her father.

They're walking hand in hand.

She is definitely gripping the father's hand and she is holding on.

But if you look closely at what's happening at that grip and you look at their hands closely, who's really holding who?

Where's the security coming from?

From the father's grip, not from the child's.

If her hand loosens, and you've maybe experienced this, if she tried, she could not pull away if she wanted to.

Because of the hand and the grip that is holding her.

That's verse 8.

David is clinging, so again, active, actively holding on, but the whole weight of the security is not resting on his grip, it is resting on the God who is holding him.

And that is really good news, isn't it?

And so then here's the question and if God's the one holding us with a love that we cannot lose, that will not let us go, then why do we keep holding on so tightly to this life instead of trusting that God's love is actually better than this life?

Well, C.S.

Lewis in The Wave of Glory describes us as being far too easily pleased.

And he has this little illustration about a child playing with mud pies in the slum, perfectly content because they have no idea that they're being offered a holiday at the sea.

It's not that the child wants too much, is they want far too little because they can't imagine anything bigger and better.

What are your mud pies?

Look at your mud pies.

Maybe it's comfort and possessions.

You look at those things and say, no, they're actually better than God's love.

Maybe it's approval, maybe it's success, maybe it's being needed or controlled.

None of those things are evil.

They're just mud.

And we keep settling for them, settling for mud pies instead of believing that there is really a holiday at the beach.

Believing that God's love is so much better.

David has tasted the love of God so deeply that it changed what he wanted in life.

That's my prayer for us.

It's my prayer for my own life, for my family, for your family, for our church family, that we would take this invitation that David is giving us.

And it's an invitation to taste and see just how good and rich the love of God is in such a way that we experience it so that it starts to change what we want in this life.

Don't you want that?

Will you pray that for us as a church and for your family and into your own life?

I want that.

I want to be able to say, God, your love is better than this life.

How do we get there?

We'll look at verse uh uh number three rejoice in the desert.

This is interesting.

Need to lock in a little here, and I think this will open the passage up.

This is the thing that stuck with me the most uh this week, but it's really interesting.

You start reading uh and you're thinking, man, these first eight verses, we're we're cruising.

This is great, and you almost forget that David is actually being hunted, but he is.

You see that in verses 9 and 10.

You can look at that and see that named clearly there.

And then we get verse 11.

The king shall rejoice in God.

Notice a few things here.

He doesn't say, I will rejoice when this is all over, and I'm back in the kingdom, and I'm back on my throne.

No, he says, I will rejoice.

So his rejoicing never waits for resolution.

He rejoices and is calling us to rejoice, even in our deserts.

Now, you hear this rejoice in the middle of the crisis or the middle of your desert can sound like spiritual denial.

Let's just paste on a smile, let's fake it till we make it, while everything else in your life is falling apart.

That is not what David is doing.

Look very closely.

He calls himself what in this passage.

How does he refer himself in verse 11?

The king.

Wait.

What do you mean the king?

He actually has lost his throne at this moment because Absalom is sitting on the throne and it's taken Jerusalem.

And so why is he calling himself the king?

Well, because the kingship was never Absalom's to take to begin with.

That came from God.

That was settled before this scene in the desert started.

And the desert cannot unsettle what God has established first.

You see, that's the difference between denial and maintained identity.

One says, denial says, this is not happening, this is terrible.

The other one says, this is happening.

And I know who I am.

And I now know who God's made me to be.

You see, he calls himself the king, even though he's losing, because his kingship was something God gave him back in 1 Samuel.

Remember when he was a shepherd boy, and no one thought he was worth considering.

And David refused to let his desert and his circumstances get the final word because in the middle of it, he remembers who he is and he says, I'm the king.

What about you this morning?

Do you know who you are?

Do you know your identity in Christ?

You are a child of God.

You are adopted.

You have been bought with the price.

You're an image-bearer of God.

We could go on and on and on about who you are.

What would it look like this week, or whatever desert you find yourself in, to remember that?

Remember your identity in the midst of your desert in dryness.

David's desert eventually ended.

He got his throne back.

But what about Jesus?

Well, his desert led him to a cross where the identity as the Son of God that held him all the way through his entire ministry would be mocked one final time.

And in Matthew chapter 27, remember if you are the Son of God like you say you are, then come down.

Matthew 27 · chapter mention

And he refuses to come down.

And he stayed on the cross, and he says one thing that you never would expect the Son of God to say, and you remember what it was?

I thirst.

And unlike David, you see, there was no rescue for him.

There was no one to offer him water.

Instead, he got offered sour wine as a mockery.

Instead, Jesus, you see, gets the full desert.

Do you see it this morning?

You want an application?

Look at Jesus.

Look at the cross.

You want proof that God's love isn't a mirage?

You want proof that his grip is never going to loosen and never going to let you go?

Look at the cross.

If he held you through the cross when it cost him everything to keep holding on to you, he is not going to let you go in the desert of your life that you're experiencing right now.

And that's exactly why Jesus can say to the woman at the well, whoever drinks of this water will never thirst again.

That's why he can say at the feast, let anyone who is thirsty come.

Because I've got eternal and living water to offer them.

He can make that offer and mean it because he is the only one who walked all the way through the desert with no relief.

He died there, and three days later he walked out alive.

Every mirage that you have ever chased and that I have ever chased, and every mud pie that we've settled for, none of those things will ever satisfy us.

And you know why?

Because those things have never loved you enough to die for you.

You think about all the things we try to find life in, they just eat us alive, don't they?

They leave us empty.

They use us.

They destroy our soul.

Jesus doesn't.

Jesus is life.

Jesus' love is better than everything else.

It is better than life itself.

He proved it by giving up his own.

Jesus is better than you think.

And my hope this morning is that you've seen that and that you'll come to him now and find living water for the thirsty.

Let's pray.

Father, thank you for love that will not let us go, that is better than this life.

Would you help us to believe that, Holy Spirit?

Forgive us for running to so many other things.

Thank you for not letting us go and giving up on us.

Refresh our souls this morning through this table as we partake in the Lord's Supper.

Refresh our souls through the singing and worship.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.