O 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 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.” (ESV)
Such beautiful words of worship! I want to pursue a heart like David’s here, “earnestly I seek You; my soul thirsts for you.” He is just engulfed in desire for God’s presence and overwhelmed with with an awareness of his need for it.
“as in a dry and weary land, where there is no water”: He compares his need for (and present lack of) God’s presence to dying of thirst in the desert. God’s presence is essential to his soul like water is to the body. But moreso, his spiritual need transfers also to a physical need, “my flesh faints.”
His praise of God is rooted in a history of God’s faithfulness.
“because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you”
The only way he could say that is if he experienced that love in the past, and it gives way to future worship; “my lips will praise you.”
“So,” — Therefore — on the basis of that confession of God’s steadfast love, he resolves to do something. Lifelong worship ensues. And not just quiet, inner, contemplative, unexpressed thankfulness, but public, body-involved, hand-raising, loud worship – “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”: This is my favorite verse here. He declares with such certainty the outcome of his disposition toward God, of his faith in and love for God: To paraphrase,“my soul will be satisfied, as with the best food in the universe, and it will bubble up out of me into praise!” Oh how I want to be that kind of worshiper! To be so consumed with Jesus, with gratitude for my salvation and awe at his glory that I can confidently proclaim that my soul is satisfied in him alone and finds rest and assurance nowhere else! Isn’t that the big problem with us as humans. We constantly scrape and yearn and desire something to satisfy our souls. We relentlessly, tirelessly set the hope of our souls on things that do not satisfy. They make us happy for weeks or months at best (but sometimes only minutes), but ultimately fail, fade and break—disappointing us at best and devastating us at worst. Isn’t God the only one who can satisfy? Wouldn’t we do well to seek having our hearts stirred up and our hopes and dreams met in Him? Yet, this isn’t something you can simply set your mind to do. You can’t demand that your soul be satisfied in and treasure God. It has to be rooted in something, some awareness of who He is for you, some certainty that he will be something for you.
That’s what we find in the gospel. God became a man—the God-Man, Jesus. He lived a perfect life and died a sacrificial death in our place and for our sin, and only belief in that history of his love, faithfulness, and devotion to you can save you. And this isn’t just some cognitive affirmation of historical facts, but a vigorous dependence on those historical facts, and a vigorous trust and hope that the same God who worked that in history will work it for your future.
David’s sentence didn’t stop with “my soul will be satisfied…” The structure of the whole sentence is this:
“My soul will be satisfied…and my mouth will praise you…when I remember you…FOR you have been my help“
And there is the ground for all this worship. It’s rooted in a history of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness in the past. John Piper calls this kind of future-affecting, faith-producing reflection on God’s faithfulness and goodness toward you in the past “Faith in Future Grace.” I think he’s on to something. This seems to be David’s way of stirring his affections up for the Lord, and I feel it must also be mine.
