A THIRSTY LONGING

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In Christ, Mark

The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for You, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?

Psalm 42:1-2

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

As we go through life, we get to know a lot about our bodies, don’t we?

There’s almost like a language spoken, a different kind of “body language”, as we receive cues that indicate things that might be going wrong or things your body might need.

Try not eating for awhile. What happens? Doesn’t your stomach start to growl, sending a message to you to feed it? Mine does.

Or maybe your nose starts to run, you start to sneeze, and develop a slight cough. Does that not signal a cold coming on?

You stay up late at night watching something on television. You still have to be up early to go to work. As you wake up, you have a lot of trouble. You are groggy and yawning, something that continues through the work day as you increasingly feel more exhausted. Your body is trying to tell you that it needs more rest.

There are any number of other cues we get. I’m sure you could tell me of many more that could be added to this list. I’ll give you one more, one that I experience a lot.

For I don’t drink enough fluids sometimes. Most nutritionists would recommend we drink eight glasses of water a day. I don’t think I get there often enough. And when I work out, which I do regularly, it doesn’t take much for me to start to feel dehydrated, especially when I run three or four miles. My body is thirsting for the life sustaining quality of the water it needs to function.

Indeed, our bodies can’t survive without water anymore than our souls can survive without the Lord. As our bodies crave water, so too do our souls thirst for the Lord.

David emphasized this point as the 42nd Psalm opens. Look at his words:

As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for You, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?

When a deer pants, they are feeling a desperate need for a drink. Their tongues will hang out and they will literally pant, gasping air. Such is the depth of their thirst.

David used this analogy, of a deer deeply craving a drink from a stream, to describe his soul’s yearning for the Lord, for the living God. In fact, his desire was so deep that he craved the day when he could not just thirst for the Lord but meet with Him.

These opening verses of the psalm challenge us. They cause us to consider how much we crave the Lord in our lives. Do we find our souls aching for the living God who sustains and saves us? Or do we take Him for granted, our souls hungering more for the world’s offerings than for the Lord’s?

Where do you stand today?

Fortunately, this isn’t the first place where we find the Bible talking about thirsting for the Lord or having our thirst quenched by living water from the lining God.

As Jesus provided His first public teaching during the Sermon on the Mount, He offered this as one of what is known as the Beatitudes (or as I refer to them, the “Be-Attitudes”, the ways that Jesus wants is to be):

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” Matthew 5:6

We hunger and thirst for the Lord because we long for His Spirit to live and abide within us. And so we seek His wisdom and guidance through His word and our prayers, and in return, we receive instruction as to how to live like Jesus, instruction on how to live in righteousness. Jesus said that He was the Way and the Truth and the Life (John 14:6) and as we live more and more like He did, we will find ourselves living ever more in righteousness, filled to overflow by the Holy Spirit, the promised Counselor sent to us by Jesus.  Indeed, when we seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, He will fill us and provide what we thirst for.

Jesus had more to say about the living water only He could bring. Look at this passage as He met a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well:

Now He had to go through Samaria. So He came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as He was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked Him and He would have given you living water.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

The woman thought at first Jesus was talking about water that sustained the body. She had no idea she was speaking to the only One she could be saved by, the gift of God, not just to her but to all mankind.

Jesus realized she did not know Him for who He was for she would have been talking about more than just mere water if she had.

And so Jesus made sure she understood who He was and what she could gain from coming into a personal relationship with Him. For the water that she and others drank out of Jacob’s well would only last until the body used it for its sustenance and then more water would be needed. One would have to continue to go back to the well time and time again to continue to have their thirst quenched. But when it came to the spiritual well being of those people, they needed more than just regular well water. They needed the living water that would well up into a spring that led to eternal life. Jesus didn’t just quench the thirst of those who sought righteousness. He saved them into eternal life.

Friends, have you had your thirsty longing quenched yet? Have you found the only true Fount of perpetual satisfaction, the only One who can satisfy the panting of our souls?

If so, then you daily enjoy the spiritual spring that Jesus provides within you, a spring that is ever running toward a life forever with Jesus, a spring that always quenches our deepest thirst for righteousness.

If you don’t have Jesus in your life, if you find yourself empty and spiritually dehydrated, know that today you can make the choice the Samaritan woman made and ask Jesus to give you His living water so that you might never need to draw water from any other source to satisfy your soul.

My prayer is that you will receive Him and never thirst again.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

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