Repairing A Damaged Spiritual Appetite - Psalm 63:1 Part 7 Series

Psalm 63:1 O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you. My soul thirsts for you. My body longs for you in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

Review

We are studying 7 ways to intensify our love for God from Ps.63. The first of those 7 was resolve - resolve to prefer God over sin and the world. And for that to last it requires a careful counting of the cost.

Another step was hungering and thirsting for God. Thirst for God is a figure of speech that refers to a desire to be satisfied by a mystical fellowship with God through direct, personal experience of His attributes.

You can never make any progress spiritually unless you find a way to increase your desire (thirst) for God. And one way to do that is by taking advantage of the thirst-intensifying effect of suffering.

If you do not have any real suffering going on but you want to work at intensifying your hunger and thirst for God, one great way to do that is by fasting – especially fasting during times when you have a lot of exposure to food. When I first started working at Dominos my favorite part was all the free pizza. Whenever there was a bad order or a mistake, that pizza would get set out and the employees could eat it. And after a while I realized that after every single run the first place my eyes would go would be to that area where the crew pizzas would be, to see if there was anything there.

So for a while I decided I would fast every Monday until the end of my shift. So every time I got back from a run my eyes would go to that area to see if there were any pizzas, and then I would be reminded, “Oh yeah – I am fasting.” And I would use that as a memory cue to remind me to think about hungering and thirsting for God.

Every morning in my devotions I pick a new attribute of God to focus on that day. So if that day’s attribute was, say, God’s mercy, each time I remembered I would think about hungering and thirsting for an experience of God’s mercy: If my eyes were opened to all that is wonderful about God’s mercy, and if I experienced that ray of His glory, my soul would be filled with joy and greatly satisfied. If I went on 30 runs in a shift, then in just the space of a few hours I would have thought about how hungering and thirsting for God’s mercy 30 times. (On other days when I did not do that I might go the whole shift and only think about it one or two times.) By the end of the shift I would have a longing and desire for God’s mercy way beyond what I had before.

And then at the end of the shift I would eat. And my mind would be so thoroughly focused on hungering and thirsting for an experience of God’s mercy… , that my enjoyment of the food I was eating would remind me in very vivid ways how satisfying it was going to be when I finally did feast on an experience of His mercy. So if you use fasting in that way it can be a great substitute for suffering.

Then last week we talked about waiting on the Lord. Waiting on God involves both the eager anticipation of fellowship with Him and the decision not to seek any substitute. Suffering is wasted if it is not turned to waiting.

Next we began to look at the concept of seeking God. Seeking God means making an effort to fulfill your longing for God. We found that satisfying fellowship with God is always available, but not easy to attain. It requires earnest seeking – even for people like David. Idolaters seek maximum enjoyment of people, things and activities. Christian idolaters use God to maximize their enjoyment of people, things and activities. True worshippers seek only to maximize their enjoyment of God.

God is the joy of all rejoicing, the source of all fullness. If you enjoy something in the creation as an expression of His love, that is worship. If you enjoy something in the creation without reference to Him, that is idolatry. All pleasures are like a mailman, or an engagement ring. If you are interested in the mailman itself, you are an adulterer. If you are interested in the ring and not what it means, you are an idolater.

The things that will keep you out of heaven

As we learn the truths about idolatry in Scripture, and we begin to see how prevalent idolatry is in the life of every believer, it is crucial that we not conclude from that that it is not a serious issue. God regards the idolatry of enjoying the creation without reference to Him just as seriously as He regarded Israel’s bowing down to false gods in the OT.