Thirsting for God

We have been spending the last couple of weeks having the Psalms help us through our Lenten journey. They have been able to show us ways that God is at work while challenging us to become more like God.

We have seen how God shelters us and how he is the light of the world. You can find both of these sermons on our You Tube channel and Facebook page. This week we focus on what it means for us to “Thirst for God.” Our scripture comes from Psalm 63:1-8.

1 You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water. 2 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. 4 I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands. 5 I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you. 6 On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night. 7 Because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings. 8 I cling to you; your right hand upholds me.

Please pray with me…

I have heard of a story of a church that was having baptisms on a Sunday morning. The pastor showed up at his normal time and he noticed cars and trucks in the parking lot. It looked like a party was going on.

He got out of his car and approached the group and asked what was going on. He was told that they were tailgating before the baptisms. When he investigated further this is what he was told. “If we tailgate for a football game, why wouldn’t we celebrate something as life changing as a baptism the same way.”

These individuals understood what was happening that day at that church. People were going to publicly state that they are thirsting for God. They are wanting those around them to know that they have made a decision to become a follower of Jesus.

The decision to follow Jesus is one that should never be made lightly. When we make that decision, we are stating that we are going to live our lives differently than the rest of the world. We are going to put the ways of God first in our lives before all the rest of what is happening around us. We are going to thirst for God.

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What most if not all of us that are followers of Jesus know is that being a Christian does not always mean that we are always spending our time thirsting for God. We may find ourselves at times, in fact you may feel this way right now, wondering what happened to that relationship I used to have with God. Why am I not feeling as connected to God as I did before.

This church season of Lent can give us time to examine that question and decide if we are thirsting for God and if not, we can examine why not and what changes we may want to make in order to thirst for God once again.

This is where our Journey with Jesus enters into the equation. If you forgot or missed it, we have set up a way that we can view our journey with Jesus at The Church of the Good Shepherd. It begins with discover, followed by decide, and next is develop and then discern.

If you do not believe that you are currently thirsting for God, then you get to decide if you are going to do something about it. You get to decide if you want to take the steps necessary to develop into the person that God desires for you to be. God is waiting for your decision.

Let’s say that you and God are in a good place right now in your relationship and interaction with each other. What you should be considering doing is giving God the chance to help you discern if there is even more that he desires from you.

Once you begin that discerning process there is a very good possibility that God has bigger plans for you. That means that you then get to decide if you want to continue thirsting for God in a way that will allow you to fulfill what God desires for you and from you.

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Psalm 63, just like our previous Psalms in this series, is attributed to King David. We have him in this Psalm offer three ways that show we are thirsting for God. They are long for God, glorify God, and allow God to fully satisfy us.

We thirst for God when we long for God. The Psalmist uses the phrase “I earnestly seek you.” The Psalmist wants this deeper relationship with God. David desires to become closer to God then he was before.

We call this at Church of the Good Shepherd a desire to grow in our faith, and being we are a group of followers of Jesus we add the word together. We should become cheerleaders for each other.

We should be helping each other become closer to God. This desire to seek God should lead us towards spiritual exercises. These are regular ways that you can connect with God on a regular basis.

It may be reading the scripture and meditating regularly on what you have read. It could be listening to our devotional that you can find on our Facebook page every weekday. I know that some here use the You Version Bible app to find devotions that help strengthen their relationship with God.

If you have not already found the method that works best for you that becomes the first step. You can’t just attempt to connect with God the way someone else is.  You have to figure out for yourself and develop the way or ways that works best for you.

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You may want to find other believers to interact with to share your journey with Jesus. You may find it helpful to have others hold you accountable and check in on if you are staying connected to God the way that God desires for you to do so.

Quick side note, you may also have times that you forget, or you don’t feel as connected as you feel that you should. You have to be willing to also give yourself grace. You have to not allow guilt and shame to lead you into feeling bad when your journey does not go as planned.

God doesn’t want you to feel stressed or upset when you don’t follow him the way that you believe you should. God wants someone happy and willing to attempt to be the person that he desires for you to be. We are to have joy when we are spending time with God.

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The second aspect that David offers for us to consider regarding thirsting for God is a focus on a need to glorify God. This would be in reference to us recognizing who God is and who we are. Meaning, he is God, and we are not.

The psalmist puts his focus on the power and glory of God. This would be an acknowledgment of who created us and in the case of the Jewish people a recognition of the many messes that God helped them to survive.

David can look back at his ancestors and see the various ways that God helped them and supported them during their times of struggle. Looking back can lead him to glorify God and to trust that God is with him and will do the same for him if needed.

We should also be able to look back in the past at what God has done for us and is doing for us in our lives. We should also be able to discover ways that God has helped us through our times of trouble.

This should lead us to choose to glorify God. Not only as a part of a church service on a Sunday morning but each and every moment throughout the day. We have a God that deserves and has earned our praise.

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I believe it is also important for us to stop our lives on a Sunday morning to do the same. We are acknowledging to God that he is more important than that thing we could be doing or that event that we could be attending.

We also are allowing ourselves to become the support or to receive support from those around us. We become Jesus here on earth. We become the word that a person needs to hear. The prayer that a person needs to have lifted up.

This is why we have added to our service the opportunity to have Pastor Dale and Pastor Kay pray for you during our last hymn. We want to make sure that each person leaves this place refreshed and knowing that God is with them.

We want to be a place where we can hear the word of God, share the word of God, and receive the power of God. This church is here to prepare us to go out into the world. We should do so after being drenched by the power of the Holy Spirit in such a way that we leave thirsting for even more of God.

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The last aspect of thirsting for God offered by David is for us to allow God to fully satisfy us. I want to begin by focusing on the word “allow.” This signifies that we have a choice. We can turn our lives over to God and let him lead us or we can decide that we are able to make it part way or all the way without his help.

We find in our first reading Jesus is asked “what does God require from us?” We receive a very simple answer “believe.” We need to believe enough that we will allow God to fully satisfy us. We have to trust enough to believe that God will help us, lead us, and cares about us enough to be there for us.

God loves us enough that he allows us to decide how much that we want to allow him to be a part of our lives. He doesn’t force us to fully rely on him. He doesn’t make us fully follow him. We get to decide that we want to allow him to fully satisfy our needs.

We need to believe as our first reading tells us that God will satisfy our needs. God will never leave us and will continue to take care of us. I am not saying it is easy and that I always do a good job of it, but we need to allow God to fully satisfy us in order for us to be able to be the person that God desires for us to be.

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This idea of God fully satisfying us leads me back to the exodus. We have the people saying they are hungry and wanting to go back into captivity because they at least they had a meal to eat. We have God providing for them Manna or bread from Heaven.

Each household was given enough for them to live on for that day, if they tried to save some for the next day it would become uneatable. The exception was the day before the Sabbath when they would be able to collect enough and store enough to be able to be fed for two days.

They had to rely on God to fully satisfy their need for food. We find the same thing happening with water. They were thirsty so God provided for them. They got tired of eating the bread and cried out for meat. God once again provided for them.

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We pray as a part of The Lord’s Prayer “give us this day our daily bread.” We are asking for God to satisfy our needs. We are saying to God through that prayer, “I am asking for you to fully satisfy me.”

God will fully satisfy us if we are willing to allow him to give us what we need to survive and thrive in our lives. God desires to have you trust him enough in order to allow him to help you live out your greatest desires.

He doesn’t want you to go through life unsatisfied, doing work you don’t really want to do. Living a life, you aren’t happy with. God wants to help you become the person that he desires for you to be, but in order for that to be accomplished you need to allow him to fully satisfy you.

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It is also important that we as a church be thirsting for God. Meaning we need to decide if we are going to allow God to be our guide. We need to decide that we are willing to go all in and trust that he will help us on our journey as The Church of the Good Shepherd.

We as a church need to long for God. We need to be crying out for God. We need to be praying for God to help us discover how he desires for us to live out our lives not only individually but also as a church.

We need to be willing to ask him to help us. We need to be asking God how are we supposed to reach out into our communities? How are we supposed to show the love of God to all people? How does he desire for us to grow in faith together?

We need to be willing to let go and trust God enough to believe that he is on this journey with us individually and as a church. We need to allow for him to fully satisfy us in what we need from him to allow for us to become the church that God desires for us to be.

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I am not saying that it is easy individually and is probably even more difficult for us as a church to join together in thirsting for God and all of us going in the same direction. That is why this is the year of traction at The Church of the Good Shepherd.

We are attempting to have each of us working towards moving in the same direction. Each of us focusing on the same goal. All of us desiring to live out our mission in the same way. I know that God has plans for The Church of the Good Shepherd.

We have to discern what those plans are. We have to decide that we are going to live them out. We have to allow God to fully work within us, and through us, to have us become the church that he desires for us to be.

Let us pray…