Of David. To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul; 2 in you I trust, O my God. Do not let me be put to shame, nor let my enemies triumph over me. 3 No one who waits for you will ever be put to shame, but they will be put to shame who are treacherous without excuse.
4 Show me your ways, O LORD, teach me your paths; 5 guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and I wait for you all day long.
6 Remember, O LORD, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old. 7 Remember not the sins of my youth and my rebellious ways; according to your love remember me, for you are good, O LORD.
8 Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in his ways. 9 He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way. 10 All the ways of the LORD are loving and faithful for those who keep the demands of his covenant. 11 For the sake of your name, O LORD, forgive my iniquity, though it is great.
12 Who, then, is the man that fears the LORD? He will instruct him in the way chosen for him. 13 He will spend his days in prosperity, and his descendants will inherit the land. 14 The LORD confides in those who fear him; he makes his covenant known to them.
15 My eyes are ever on the LORD, for only he will release my feet from the snare. 16 Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. 17 The troubles of my heart have multiplied; free me from my anguish. 18 Look upon my affliction and my distress and take away all my sins. 19 See how my enemies have increased and how fiercely they hate me! 20 Guard my life and rescue me; let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in you. 20 May integrity and uprightness protect me, because my hope is in you. 22 Redeem Israel, O God, from all their troubles!
Review: Desiring, trusting, and waiting on God as a refuge
David wrote this psalm in a time when seemingly every part of his life was unraveling, and he was under attack from every direction. And the model God gave us in the psalm shows us that when that kind of thing happens in your life – troubles on top of troubles, the thing to do is to fix your gaze upon the attributes of God. Focus on what God is like, and then respond with the same three-fold response David’s heart had to God’s attributes. He lifted his soul to God (making God the only object of his desire). He latched on to the great and precious promises that are implied by the attributes, and trusted in those. He waited on God – eagerly anticipating the grace that was coming, and refusing to accept any substitute or alternative.
And we found last time that in this psalm David zeros in on three categories of attributes. Last time we focused on the first one – God as a refuge. We found that it is wrong to look to anything in this world as a refuge. God is the only refuge there is. It is fine to delight in the temporal means God uses to provide His refuge, but we have to realize that the protection and relief that comes from those things (like your parents or spouse or insurance or house or storm shelter or paycheck or doctor or vacation or video game), whatever protection and relief you get comes from God and not from that earthly tool God is using. If you utilize those things as means of fellowship with God, that is good. But if you start preferring those things over fellowship with God as your refuge, that is idolatry and unfaithfulness to God.
Enjoying God as your only refuge is a delightful way to live, because God is always the solution to all your problems. And no one on earth has the power to block your access to God’s presence; and all the effort you put into the solution to your problems will be nothing but the pursuit of grace from God. And that is the best thing you could possibly be doing with your time and energy.
Mercy
The second category of God’s attributes in this psalm is God’s mercy. I have really lumped a lot of things together under the huge category of “mercy.” So it might take us a couple weeks to get through them. We will start in verse 16.
Gracious Looking
Presence & Favor
16 Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.
The word “turn” is just the Hebrew word for “face.” And it is the most common word to refer to God’s presence. So the idea is for God to come and be present with David, and turn His face toward David. The word translated “gracious” means to show favor.
In some ways David was a pretty simple guy. Once in a while you will hear someone say, “I am a complicated person.” Usually what that means is, “I am impossible to please” (because of discontent). David was not complicated. There was always something that would please him. His outlook was very simple. If the problem is enemies attacking you, the solution is favor from God – just to experience God’s presence and have Him look at you in a favorable way. If the problem is painful, difficult circumstances in life, the solution is favor from God. If the problem is overwhelming guilt from your sin, the solution is favor from God. If the problem is loneliness, the solution is not making friends, getting out more, or dating or getting married; the solution to loneliness is the presence of God.
16 “Turn to me … because I am lonely”
If the problem is affliction, the solution is favor from God – any kind of favor, delivered in any way through any means. When we dictate to God what form His favor has to take (“God, I won’t be happy unless you give me favor in this particular form”), we prove that our desire is really for that form, not for God’s favor itself.
Mercy
But David wanted nothing but God’s favor.
6 Remember, O LORD, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old.
The word translated “mercy” is the word for pity. It is the emotion you feel when your heart is touched by someone who is in trouble that moves you to help him. Last week we learned how to take delight in the fact that God is our refuge. For a refuge to be a good refuge it has to be both strong and merciful. If someone is the strongest person in the world, but he does not care about your plight, he is not going to use his strength on your behalf.
The woman who runs to the arms of her husband when there is trouble, or the child to the arms of his mother in a time of sorrow or fear, is a reflection of something very wonderful about God. A woman or child who does that has a desire to be engulfed by that stronger person’s embrace. But not just because of strength – they do not run to the arms of any strong person. It is the strength mixed with love and compassion. Sometimes a husband or mother cannot even do anything to help the problem. But the compassion of a greater strength is sought nonetheless. There is a comfort and strengthening that comes simply from the sympathy of one who loves them. It can fill you with courage that wasn’t there before.
The joy of being pitied
It feels good to be pitied. And I realize that for some of you that statement is a jolt to your system. And you are not sure you agree with it. There are many people who do not like pity. You hear that in the movies all the time – “I don’t want your pity!” When pride dominates our hearts, we tend to resist pity. We do not want people feeling sorry for us because if someone is pitying me, what does that make me? - Pitiful. If I am fit to be the object of people’s sympathy and empathy, by definition that makes me pathetic. And the last thing pride can handle is being exposed as pitiful or pathetic.
But the most pitiful and pathetic thing of all is the person who is pitiful and pathetic but who thinks he is not, and so he rejects pity and sympathy. It is okay to be sick if there is a doctor around with medicine. But if you are sick and you will not admit to yourself that you are sick, then you will refuse the medicine and you really will be sick. So the more pride you have in your heart the harder it is for you to enjoy pity.
But humble people are acutely aware of how pitiful and pathetic they are. And so for them, pity and sympathy are wonderful things. David was one of the most spectacularly strong and powerful and respected and intelligent and gifted and creative people on the planet. And yet he did not have any trouble at all realizing how pathetic and pitiful and needy he was before God. So he absolutely delighted in receiving God’s pity. He loved it. That is why he wants God to just look at his suffering.
18 Look upon my affliction and my distress
19 See how my enemies have increased
He just wants God to look at him and see his suffering, like a child who gets hurt and comes running to his mother to show her his wound. As soon as she sees it and does the universal sign of motherly compassion by kissing it, he is satisfied and runs off to play. The physical pain of the wound is exactly the same as it was a minute ago, but it is bearable to him now.
I think when we laugh at our kids for being that way, we laugh because we tend to think all there is to pain is the physical part. And it is silly to think a kiss can do anything to help the physical injury. But the physical part is not the only part – it is not even the main part of suffering. Young children understand something that a lot of adults do not. They understand the strengthening, courage-giving, healing power of pity. And pity is like Trix cereal – it is not just for kids.
If we could get past our pride and the ridiculous silliness of imagining that we have reserves of strength within ourselves and are not in need of God’s pity, we could enjoy the strengthening that little children enjoy from the kiss of compassion from their mothers. Let’s just admit it – none of us are strong enough to bear the suffering of life without grace from God. And one of the wonderful means by which God gives us that grace is through His pity. The compassion of God is a sweet, sweet thing. It feels really, really good. It fills you with strength. It empowers you and motivates you and enables you to endure anything – any torture, any beating, burning at the stake – anything. The writers of Scripture saw God’s pity as essential for their very life.
Ps.119:77 Let your pity come to me that I may live
Ps.40:11 Your pity and your truth always protect me.
Ps.103:4-5 [He] redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and pity
Lam.3:22-23 Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his pities never fail. 23 They are new every morning
The Father’s kiss of compassion feels so good and gives so much grace that it is probably better to suffer and experience His pity than to not suffer at all.
Whether we admit it or not, we all really do love pity. That is why you tell people when terrible things happen to you. When we have hardship, something in us just wants someone to know about it. But not just anyone - it has to be someone who loves you. You are not comforted at the thought of your enemies being aware of your suffering. It has to be someone who will have compassion for you.
That is not a bad thing. God made us to desire and enjoy compassion when we suffer. Do not let your pride keep you from enjoying one of the wonderful gifts God has given us. But be careful on the other side not to elevate compassion from people above compassion from God so that you turn it into an idol. If you find yourself wanting certain people to know how much you are suffering, but you don’t get much comfort from God’s knowing about your suffering, that’s not a good sign.
If you do not know how to enjoy God’s pity - if you do not know how to be truly and genuinely encouraged and strengthened by sensing and feeling His compassion for you when you suffer, then make it a high priority goal in your Christian life to work toward that, because that will increase your joy in God in great measure. One way to work toward that is this: Whenever you enjoy the compassion of the people who really love you, let that enjoyment teach your heart to crave God’s compassion. Because whatever enjoyment you get from that is only a tiny little emblem of the kind of joy you could get from God’s compassion. And whenever you are sad because people are not compassionate about your suffering – let that sadness teach you how much your heart craves pity, and let that increase your hunger and thirst and desire and longing for the presence of God, where you will find what you are craving.
Sometimes the reason we prefer human compassion to God’s is because people can be deceived. You get a cut that hardly hurts at all but that really looks bad, and you can milk that for all kinds of sympathy by pretending it really hurts. You cannot do that with God, because He knows exactly how you feel. But on the other side, God has compassion on you in times when no one else will. For example, on one of those days when you are especially tired and unmotivated and emotionally down in the dumps, it may be a considerable hardship for you to just get up out of bed. No one is going to feel sorry for you that you had to get out of bed (“Guess what – I had to get out of bed this morning”); no one is going to feel sorry for you for that – except God. He understands exactly how hard it is for you on that particular day. Jesus had days like that, and He remembers. Psalm five says He considers your sighs. When you go “Ughhhhhhh” – God considers that. He pays close attention to it. He knows all that is behind it and everything that is contributing to it. He knows how you feel when you don’t even understand how you feel. He has compassion on you when you feel oppressed and overloaded, even if you have no real reason to feel oppressed and overloaded. He’s not like your husband, who has to have a full explanation of exactly why you are justified in feeling oppressed and overloaded before he will give you an ounce of sympathy.
And the really great thing about God’s compassion is it always comes with grace. So often when we feel sorry for someone there is nothing we can do about it. But God never has that problem. God is so powerful, so merciful, so kind, so loving, so beneficent, that for Him to merely look in your direction results in great blessing.
And when you enjoy God’s compassion, enjoy it even more by becoming the agent through whom God’s compassion is delivered to others. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, men, if your children and your wife found in your arms what you find in God’s arms? Instead of being the source of most of Tracy’s troubles, I want to get to the place where my love is a haven of God’s refuge from her troubles. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of your kids having to worry about whether they are annoying you all the time, when they saw you they saw a paradise of God’s compassion? I want everyone around me to find me to be strength-giving and compassionate and safe and soothing and edifying and fortifying and courage-building, so that my little sphere becomes an outpost of the great refuge of our souls. None of that can happen until we learn to enjoy God’s pity in our lives. You cannot pass on what you are not even receiving yourself.
Love
The other word in verse six is translated “love.” That is the Hebrew word HESED. David uses that word three times in this psalm – in verses 6, 7, and 10. God’s HESED is the combination of His favorable disposition toward you and His kind actions toward you. It is because of that disposition and those actions that you can approach His presence.
Psalm 5:7 I, by your great HESED, will come into your house
That disposition and those actions make a worthless, rejected sinner acceptable in His presence. God’s HESED works in opposition to His wrath. (Psalm 106:43-45) His wrath and hatred of our sin is a giant, unbreachable iron door designed specifically to keep people like us out of His presence, and His HESED is the key that opens that door to us.
So often in Scripture the word HESED is modified by the word “great.”
Ps.51:1 according to your great HESED blot out my transgressions.
God’s anger is limited. His wrath and justice are kept within the bounds of exactly what is deserved – no more. His fury over sin is measured out in strict proportions. But His love is dumped and showered and lavished without measure in abundant, disproportionate overflow.
Psalm 30:5 [for the saints] his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime
The love of God is a treasure and a wonder beyond any other wonder. It is better than life at its best.
Psalm 63:3 Because your HESED is better than life, my lips will praise you.
There is no pleasure or thrill or satisfaction that can compare to the experience of God’s love. It is more satisfying to the soul than all the pleasures of life combined. It is more delightful than the most wonderful things in nature. Better than friends, better than family, better than the marriage bed,– better than any human love – better than life.
All His ways
Recently one of my children asked me if every single thing that happens to a Christian is ultimately good. Or are there some things God allows that are not ultimately for my good? The answer to that is in verse ten.
10 All the ways of the LORD are loving and faithful for those who keep the demands of his covenant.
God’s HESED characterizes all His ways – all His dealings with His people (not with unbelievers, but with us). And that includes the times when God deals roughly with us.
Ps.119:75 I know, O LORD, that your laws are righteous, and in faithfulness you have afflicted me.
When His ways include sickness, injury, loss, sorrow, suffering – still it is all loaded full of His HESED and His faithfulness. Which means every time I become aware of any kind of affliction in my life – from the least to the greatest, I can take delight in that and rejoice over the fact that at that moment I am experiencing the direct touch of the loving, faithful hand of God! And that is to be preferred over life at its best.
In other places Scripture speaks of a coming and going and ebbing and flowing of God’s love. That is why psalmists who already have it ask for it – they want more. But here we learn that all that ebbing and flowing takes place on top of a foundation of God’s love that is constant and unchanging. For His children there is a baseline minimum flow of His love; a level below which the expression of His HESED never drops. Even in the midst of our sins and rebellions and evil, it remains. It never leaves us. If it did we would experience catastrophe beyond imagination.
6 Remember, O LORD, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old
They are the ruts worn by God’s constantly taking that path in His dealings with us. Think of all the times in your life when you have been happy, or delighted, or excited about something. Think of all the thousands of times you have been encouraged, strengthened, emboldened, motivated. Think of all the good things that have happened to you - things that were not only good, but that God also granted along with the ability to enjoy them. (When God gives good things, but without the ability to enjoy them, it is miserable.) Every single one of those times, the enjoyment, happiness, strength, encouragement, motivation, joy, contentment, peace - it all came from God’s HESED. All of it – none of it came from any event or person. God’s love is so wonderful and so satisfying, that by itself it is enough to fill you full of inexpressible joy even if at that moment you happen to be experiencing intense, excruciating pain.
The three-fold response to God’s mercy
1) Soul Lifting
So that is an overview of these two categories of attributes of God: His pity and love. Now let’s talk about the three-fold response. The first of the responses is to lift up your soul to God with respect to that attribute. Remember, lifting up the soul to something means making that thing the object of your desires and the basis of your hope. So what does it look like to lift your soul to God’s favor? It just means to want it. It means to long for His favorable presence; to crave His nearness to you. Sometimes when you read about the fact that God has pity on you because of your suffering, it does nothing in your heart. It does not fill you with joy or encouragement or strengthening. It is just a Bible factoid. But other times it does fill you with courage and strength and comfort. To lift your soul to that simply means to really want that second experience. It means to have an appetite – a thirst in your soul, for fellowship with God.
It is amazing – the most precious, most costly, most valuable treasure in the entire universe is available, and all you have to do to get it is want it more than you want any other treasure.
The Logic of mercy
Several times in this psalm David resorts to what I call the “logic of mercy.” The logic of mercy is reasoning that works this way: “God, I am in need of something I don’t deserve, therefore give it to me on the basis of Your mercy.” It is the opposite of the logic of merit. The logic of merit says, “I have earned it, I deserve it, so give it to me.” The logic of mercy says, “I cannot earn it. But give it to me anyway just because You are so generous and because I’m so needy.” We see David use that logic in verse 16.
Psalm 25:16 Turn to me and be gracious to me, for (here comes the logic) I am alone and afflicted.
The basis upon which he asks for favor is his need. The logic of mercy is great news for people like us – people who keep on stumbling and keep on failing and keep on falling into sin after sin. As long as we are weak and undeserving and helpless we always have standing to come to God with our requests for more grace. One of the most extreme examples of the logic of mercy I’ve ever seen is in Ps.41, where David is writing from his sickbed.
Psalm 41:4 I said, "O LORD, have mercy on me; heal me (Why?) for I have sinned against you."
That’s the logic of mercy. The only requirement for grace is that you need grace and seek it from God.
Psalm 36:7-8 How priceless is your unfailing love! Both high and low among men find refuge in the shadow of your wings. 8 They feast on the abundance of your house; you give them drink from your river of delights.
The privilege of feasting on the abundance of God’s house and drinking from His river of delights is restricted to one certain group – the group of people who take refuge in God. Isaiah 55 gives us another way to think about it.
Isaiah 55:1 Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.
Water and milk and wine and food are symbols that point to that which satisfies the appetites of your soul. And it is all free, but only a select group of people get it. And that select group of people is the group that fulfills the one requirement in that verse. And the requirement is you have to come to Him, and you have to come thirsty and hungry for Him. That is the logic of mercy. You can enjoy God’s love if you only lift up your soul to Him and make His love the object of your desires. You glorify Him by receiving grace from Him.
Learn to interpret all the longings of your soul as what they are - longings for God. I think the most gullible thing in the world has to be the human soul. Satan will take some tired old earthly enticement that has never once satisfied your soul, and put some new kind of glitter on it, and present it to you as something that will fill up your life with happiness, and we fall for it every time. You see a commercial, or a thought just pops into your head about a vacation to some place you have always wanted to go, and you think, “Now that would satisfy the longings of my soul.” We are really no different from a little kid in the toy isle of a store. We walk through life thinking, “I want that. I want that. I want that. That would really make me happy. That would satisfy all my desires. That would fill me up with joy.” It can be anything from a two million dollar house to a Snickers bar at the gas station. It does not matter. Your soul will assure you that if you just get it, you will be happy.
And so the trick is to learn to take all those impulses and translate them into longings for the one thing that really can satisfy long term, and that really can fill you with a powerful enough joy that it can overpower the pain and sorrows of life. So you get in your old, piece of junk jalopy car and you see your neighbor’s nice, new car, and it just seems like life would be so wonderful if you had a decent car. Or you are in the mall and there is a clothing store (or sporting goods store), and your soul just insists that a few hundred dollars spent in that store, would put a smile on your face that would never come off. Or maybe there is a person that you think if you were just married to that person you would be happy; Or if the person you already married would change; Or if you could just get a decent job. Or if you just popped in a good DVD and relaxed on the couch for a couple hours all your troubles would just melt away.
Those are all really hunger pangs for the presence of God. There is a deep, powerful, thirst in the human soul for fellowship with God. And it is incessant and insistent and relentless. And the only way Satan can keep you from running after God with all your strength is by conning you into thinking that something else will satisfy that thirst. And so a good appetite in your soul comes out as an evil desire.
Success in the Christian life will come when we can train ourselves to reinterpret those hunger pangs for what they really are. So when you see an advertisement for some dream vacation, and your soul just longs to go, ask yourself – what is it that my soul wants to get from that vacation? Pleasure? Rest? Refuge from work? Rejuvenation? What is my soul hungering for? Whatever it is, imagine you wrote it down on a piece of paper – a list of all the appetites of the soul that you expect to be satisfied by this vacation (or this person you want to marry, or this shopping spree, or this remodeled kitchen, or this sinful activity, or this recreation). Now imagine God appeared in front of you and looked at the piece of paper. And then He looked you in the eye and said this: “I will make you a promise. I will give you everything you have written on this piece of paper. I will give you those things and keep giving you those things until your soul is satisfied. I might do it by means of a vacation, or I might choose some other means. I might give them to you in your own house while you are doing laundry; I might give them to you at work, I might give them to you at a soup kitchen while you are feeding the poor. But one way or another I promise I will give you all the things on this paper.” Then He goes on to say, “I can see the future, and I have seen that vacation you want to go on, and I assure you it does not have the ability to give you the things you have written on this piece of paper.”
Then He types up that promise that He just made to you – that He would give you everything on that paper, and prints out an official document on divine letterhead, and signs it, and sets the document down on the table. And right next to it He sets down some airline tickets and vouchers for an all-expense paid trip to wherever you were wanting to go. And He tells you you can pick one. What would you do?
That is not an imaginary scenario. It is exactly the choice we all face every single time we experience a desire. God is the only one who can satisfy the appetites of the soul. If you go on a vacation and come back feeling satisfied and full of joy it is not because of the vacation. It is only because God gave you some of His favor and mercy while you were on the vacation. If God had not done that then you would have come back from the vacation feeling empty and unsatisfied. But on the other hand if God decided to give you that same favor and mercy at home, you would feel just as joyful and happy and satisfied without even going on the vacation. And so the vacation is nothing and God’s favor is everything. And that goes for every desire your soul ever has.
That does not mean you never want to go on vacation. But it does mean that when you do go on vacation the reason you go is so you can receive a certain kind of expression of God’s favor. And it also means that if you ever have to choose between a vacation and a higher expression of God’s favor you will chose the latter in a heartbeat.
So we need to train ourselves to reinterpret the hunger pangs of the soul for what they really are. And the stronger the desire, the more helpful it is to teach you about how much your soul longs for the presence of God. So any time you have feelings of discontent, train your heart to understand that your soul is really hungry for fellowship with God.
2) Trust
Once you lift your soul to God’s mercy and grace and kindness and faithfulness and HESED, you latch on to His great and precious promises specifically about God’s love and cling to those for all your strength and encouragement. Last week we decided as a church to memorize 26 of God’s great and precious promises – one for each letter of the alphabet. Once you memorize those promises it is easy to think of promises about God’s love and mercy toward us. Use those to fight against sin.
You run into trouble in life – maybe some problems in some relationship, and you’re tempted to be discouraged over the fact that someone is not loving you like you want to be loved, and so you do what David did – fix your eyes on what God is like. And right away you see this attribute of God’s HESED. And you lift your soul to that – make that the object of your desires. You prefer the HESED and compassion of God over love from people. That is the first part of the three-fold response.
The second part is this: that you walk through the day trusting in God’s promises regarding His love. Satan tries to tell you that unless this person changes and starts loving you like you want to be loved, you will never be happy. And you respond by saying, “Never be happy? The word “be” reminds me of the letter B. And B is for ‘Better than life’.”
Ps.63:3 Your HESED is better than life
Even if my wife doesn’t love me like I want to be loved, and even if other people fail to love me, it doesn’t matter because God has promised to love me with a love that is better than the best life has to offer. Which means the experience of God’s love is even better than a perfect marriage.
And Satan comes back and says, “But that is not going to be enough to satisfy you. You need a human touch. You need it from your wife, and if she does not give you the kind of love you need, you are not going to be satisfied no matter what God does. Love from God alone is not going to be enough to satisfy you.”
And you respond by saying, “Speaking of the letter S and the word “satisfy,” when I approach the presence of God the promise is in Psalm 63:5.
Psalm 63:5 My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods.
And speaking of rich food, “rich” starts with R. And R is for River of Delights.
Psalm 36:8 They feast on the abundance of your house; you give them drink from your river of delights.
God’s love is a river, Satan – there is way more than enough to satisfy the little teaspoon of need in my soul. And Satan says, “That is only if God is pleased with you. But in your case God is mostly angry and disappointed because of all your sin.” And you say, “Nice try, but you’re forgetting about the letter Q.
Zephaniah 3:17 The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with shouts of joy!"
And Satan will say, “This is hopeless” and he will go find someone else to bother. That is what it means to walk by faith, and to overcome the sin of discontent by faith, and to use the shield of faith to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.
3) Wait
So when you face some trouble in life, you immediately turn to God and fix your attention on what He is like and His attributes. And your eye catches this huge, bright, brilliant ray of His glory called His love. And you lift your soul to that – making God’s love the object of the desires and longings of your soul. Then you start walking by faith – trusting in God’s great and precious promises about His love. And then the third part of the three-fold response: Wait for God. - Eagerly anticipate; - Refuse substitutes/alternatives. Don’t just tell yourself the abstract fact that God’s love is better than life and that it will be satisfying. Do the kinds of things you do when you want to make your soul eagerly anticipate something: Think about it. Imagine what it is going to feel like when God satisfies your soul with His love. Day dream about it.
And then refuse any alternatives or substitutes. Abraham did not wait for God to fulfill His promise of a son for Abraham in His way. Instead of waiting he opted for a substitute. He slept with Hagar to get a son through her. Hold your flesh back from pressuring you into accepting a substitute out of impatience. An example of a substitute would be if you strong-arm or nag your spouse into giving you what you want, or seeking it from some sinful means, or by placing your hope in some circumstance or person other than God.
This has some very practical applications. If the longings of my soul are going unsatisfied do I first go to people to get them to behave the way I want? Or if I first go into my prayer room and lock the door and refuse to come out until my soul has been satisfied by the presence of God?
That is not to say that I never talk to the person about changes that may need to be made. But that should come only after I have found all that I need in God alone. Then when I talk to the person I am free to concern myself mainly with his needs and desires; and when I do bring up my desires, if he wants to fulfill them fine, but now it is just a loving exchange of fellowship rather than me putting the massive burden of making me happy on their shoulders. Any time I put that responsibility on your shoulders I am going to end up angry at you, because no matter what they do they will not be able to satisfy the appetites of my soul for love.
Fix your eyes on the glory of God’s compassion and love. Make that the object of the desires of your soul. Latch on to the promises about His love and derive all your strength and joy from those. And wait. Eagerly anticipate the grace that will come from God, and accept no substitute.
Benediction: Eph 3:17-19 I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19and to know this love that surpasses knowledge-that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. 20Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, 21to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
