August 29th, 2024
1 As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?
The Bible often uses very compelling language in order to help us understand what a relationship with God looks like. In many instances we are led to think upon things we actually experience in life or perhaps things we might see in our day to day. This is why Jesus would frequently speak in parables to His followers in order for them to understand deep spiritual realities. Today our passage does something similar by painting a picture of what it means to yearn for and deeply desire a relationship with the Almighty God.
For many of us, it is hard to imagine how we might go about relating to an infinite being we cannot see. Therefore, we spend a majority of our lives focusing on the things that we physically see before us. It might be our spouses, our children, our jobs or the abundance of leisure activities we can actually put our hands on. However, when we make life only about these things, we dramatically slip away from meeting with God because we think it to be too difficult or unnecessary. We don't make time for prayer or reading our Bibles because life has become overly busy with every other thing. But the Psalmist writes to us from an entirely different perspective. He has nothing else on his mind but an earnest desire to meet with with the living God.
The question might be, how does one deeply yearn for a relationship with God? The Psalmist uses some imagery to help us. Just as the deer pants for streams of water, so our souls should long for the Lord, our God. This isn't difficult for us to immediately imagine. We could envision a deer in the wild under the scorching heat, after being on the move for a long while anxiously searching for a drink of water. And in the same way, we too can imagine ourselves as finite creatures who experience thirst on a daily basis desperately waiting for our next sip of water. It is a substance neither animal nor human can live without and our body actually sends to us signals reminding us that we are thirsty in need of a drink. So while you may not fully understand how to feel all the desires for God every day, all of us undoubtedly know what it's like to be thirsty. And if you know that physical feeling of being depleted and dehydrated, then you can for a moment visualize what it means to be spiritually thirsty for the living God.
To some of us, meeting with God isn't about quenching a deep thirst but rather about checking an item off our to-do list. How do we move beyond the religious nature of meeting with God? How do I change into the person that wakes up every new morning with an eager desire to talk with the Lord? The answer is simple: we must become so spiritually desperate and drained that we have no choice but to seek God with all our heart. The reason we rarely feel this way is because we have convinced ourselves that we aren't thirsty or we aren't in need of such a pursuit of God. We fill our cups with every other kind of drink and activity so as to avoid meeting with God as much as possible. Or we genuinely believe church on Sunday mornings is enough water in the glass to keep us quenched for the entire week. In reality, we will spend most of our days in search of temporary fixes to satisfy what only God can fill. In fact, Jesus Himself met a woman who was in the same predicament. And what He said to her is what we need to hear today. "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" (John 4:14).
We all must come to the realization that Christ isn't offering us one option of the many drinks you can find in this world. He is saying to us that there is no other option but Him. Just as the body cannot live without the substance of water, neither can our souls function without meeting with the living God every day. Therefore, none of us should ask how often or how much time is needed to meet with God. Each moment we take a sip of water we ought to remind ourselves of how desperately we need the Lord. There is no circumstance in life that rids us of this one need. The truth will always be that we need the Lord, Jesus Christ; every hour we need Him.