Stoking The Fire: Keeping Your Passion For God Alive All Day Long - Psalm 63 Pt.9 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. 2 Therefore I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory. 3 Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.

6 On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.

8 My soul follows hard after you; your right hand upholds me.

Review

Step 1 in learning to love God is to resolve to prefer God over this world, after having counted the cost. Another step was hungering and thirsting for God - longing for mystical fellowship with God through direct experiences of His attributes. The effort to fulfill that longing is called “seeking.”

O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you

Seeking God should be a joyful, fulfilling process. Where there is little joy and little satisfaction of the thirst of the soul, there are at least three possibilities: Lack of faith (your soul is not really convinced that God’s oceans of delight will be enough to fill up your teaspoon of need), seeking that does not really have God as its object (seeking God means seeking His face; His favorable presence or smile, which is a relational seeking that works to erase the distance created by sin, neglect or ignorance) and lack of earnestness.

Seeking God requires earnestness: Be on fire for God in your prayer closet.

Earnestly I seek you.

The promises of success when it comes to seeking God are almost always accompanied by the condition that we seek earnestly.

Jer.29:13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

Dt.4:29 if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul.

Ps.119:2 Blessed are they who keep his statutes and seek him with all their heart.

10 I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands.

Seeking God is hard. Unless it is done eagerly with all your heart and all your soul, it does not work. Most Christians understand that zeal is required in serving God. When I was in high school we used to always talk about being on fire for God. But usually we thought of that in terms of serving Him, not seeking Him. We want pastors to be passionate when they preach. We want musicians to have passion when they sing. But more important than that is for you to have passion in your devotions, when you are seeking the presence of God. The most important place to be on fire for God is in your prayer closet.

This is not merely an Old Testament idea. We have much greater and more intimate knowledge of God and closeness to Him now than they did in the Old Testament, but that does not mean seeking God is no longer important or that it is no longer difficult. The New Testament affirms that we must still seek Him, and that we must still seek Him earnestly.

Heb.11:6 anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.

One advantage we have over Old Testament saints is that we now have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus. Furthermore, we have a great High Priest now over the whole house of God – the Lord Jesus Christ. So what conclusion should we draw? Does that mean we no longer need to put forth any effort to seek nearness to God? Does our standing in Christ and free access to the Most Holy Place mean we are so near to God that there is no longer a need for any seeking or effort to draw close to Him? No – just the opposite.

Heb.10:19-22 Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus,20 by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, 21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near to God

James 4:7-8 Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Come near to God and he will come near to you.

Notice the way David described his pursuit of God down in v.8. My soul clings to you. The word translated “clings” is DAVAK, and it is the word translated “cleave” in the KJV in Gn.2:24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. That word cleave refers to a very close union – like being glued together. That is the word translated clings in v.8. It means to stick to something. It is the word used to describe what happened to Eleazar’s hand when he defended the field all by himself against the Philistines.