Don't sit down yet.

I want us to stand as we read the word of God.

I'm going to be preaching this morning from Psalm 63.

It's like my fave.

I love it.

And so as I read it, just stand with me.

You don't have to read it with me together.

I'm just going to read it and you guys stand.

Cool?

David says, God, you are my God.

I eagerly seek you.

 I thirst for you.

My body faints for you in a land that is dry, desolate, and without water.

So I gaze on you in the sanctuary to see your strength and your glory.

My lips will glorify you because your faithful love is better than life.

So I will bless you as long as I live.

At your name, I will lift up my hands.

 You satisfy me as with rich food.

My mouth will praise you with joyful lips.

When I think of you as I lie on my bed, I meditate on you during the night watches because you are my helper.

I will rejoice in the shadow of your wings.

I follow close to you.

Your right hand holds on to me.

Father, do that in us.

Do that in us this morning in the name of Jesus.

Bring us to that place.

Bring us there in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You can be seated.

 Amen.

This psalm has done a lot for me in my spiritual life.

I come back to it a lot.

You'll even hear, I pray that verse three all the time from stage all the time.

I always come back to that language.

Your faithful love is better than life.

 This psalm, like, lives in my head rent-free.

I can't get over it.

It's one of my favorites.

And I think the psalms are really special because it's poetry, and poetry is emotive inherently.

It's rich with feelings.

And I like that, and that's not bad, actually.

When you grow up, like, in youth group, they just want you to get it just in your head as deep as you can, that it's not about feelings.

Like, that's totally true, but it's a little bit about feelings.

Um...

 And so we see in Psalm 63, David, as he often does, talking about his feelings, how he feels about God.

It's not surprising in the Psalms, once you've read them, to find David being really expressive and maybe even a little bit dramatic.

And he was good at writing and he leaned into this poet identity.

So every time he was going through something or things were going well,

 He had lots of amazing words to say about it.

What strikes me about this psalm is that David is writing from the wilderness of Judah.

We don't know the exact context, which time he was hiding in the wilderness, what was going on.

Most likely when Saul chased him out of the kingdom and he was literally living as a refugee for somewhere between 10 to 15 years.

 So he wrote that most likely somewhere in that window, going through this like tremendously painful situation.

And he stops to write a psalm, not saying, God, you know, come help me.

But God, I really want you.

You know, during this like crazy time of his life, all he can think about is how much more he wants God.

 Some fun facts for you about this psalm.

The ancient church apparently made it their tradition to sing this psalm, in particular Psalm 63, at the beginning of every single one of their Sunday services.

So every time they gathered to worship the Lord on Sundays, this was called the morning hymn.

This is what they began their meetings with.

They would sing this psalm.

St.

John Chrysostom, who wrote in the 4th century, records this.

He says, It was decreed and ordained by the primitive fathers, listen to this, that no day should pass without the public singing of this psalm.

 So this is like a really, really important psalm in the history of our faith.

Christians have been leaning into and depending upon this psalm and its words for a really long time.

Chrysostom also said that this psalm, the spirit and the soul of the whole book of Psalms is contracted into this one.

 It's like this is what the Psalms are about.

So let me just read it to you again with that angle, okay?

God, you are my God.

I eagerly seek you.

I thirst for you.

My body faints for you.

 in a land that is dry, desolate, and without water.

So I gaze on you.

Do you understand the irony of what David just said?

Hey God, I'm in a land that is dry, desolate, without water.

There's no food or drink here, but God, I'm hungry and I'm thirsty for you.

That's striking.

So I gaze on you in the sanctuary to see your strength and your glory.

God, my lips will glorify you because your faithful love is better than life.

That's amazing.

So I will bless you as long as I live.

At your name, I will lift up my hands.

You satisfy me as with rich food.

 My mouth will praise you with joyful lips.

When I think of you as I lie in my bed, I meditate on you during the night watches because you are my helper.

I will rejoice in the shadow of your wings.

I follow close to you.

Your right hand holds on to me.

So there's three feelings that David communicates in this psalm that I want to go through in order.

There's three themes that make it clear why the early church grabbed a hold of this psalm and attached themselves to it and revered it so deeply.

Those three themes are desperation,

 Delight and dependence.

And they're kind of all over the place, but I want to try my best to go chronologically through those.

So again, I think verse 1 and 2 are so insanely striking that David would say, God, I'm seeking for you.

I'm thirsting for you.

My body is fainting for you.

He's literally expressing this spiritual weakness.

God, I feel like a shell of a man because I need you.

 right?

In this horribly, tremendously difficult situation, God, I really actually just want you.

This isn't some like sneaky roundabout way of saying, God, you know, I need you to resolve my issue.

The heart of David here is not to communicate worship and love for God so that God will be convinced to do the things that David wants him to do.

No, David just wants God.

There's not a shred of dishonesty in this writing.

This is David saying, God, no, I don't care where I am.

I don't care what's going on.

I want you.

 I mean, that blows my mind.

Of all the things that David could be concerned about, he is struck and stuck on this feeling of emptiness of God.

Feeling empty of God.

And for someone like, I'm like, man, what does this guy know that I don't know?

How is that even remotely possible that he could feel that way?

And I think verse 2 is our answer.

It's where he goes next and it's also, it's a big, he creates this sort of spiritual circle.

He says, so I gaze on you in the sanctuary to see your strength and your glory.

In other words, God, I've seen you.

 I've seen you.

I know you.

And I'm spoiled for everything else.

There's nothing else that I could possibly be hungry for now but you.

Now that I've seen you, I could never be the same.

I have to see you again.

I have to have you.

In the place where I'm most desperate, where I'm most lacking, God, I've seen you.

And I need to see that again.

Here's another way of saying it.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus.

 look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.

That's what David feels like.

That's, man, that hymn just, every time it gets me, I'm like, yeah!

Man, I want the things of earth to go strangely dim, because I'm so interested in them.

This is David saying, God, I've seen you before, and now I'm so overwhelmingly obsessed with you that despite the mess I'm in, there's nothing that I could possibly be more desperate for than more of you.

 God, I have to have you.

I have to have you.

And so the thing that drives the beauty and the drama of this psalm is that there are so many other things that David needs.

So many other things that he really needs to have, and he's just not paying attention to them.

Right?

Because he wants God.

There's one of my favorite writers in all of church history is a guy named Thomas Aquinas.

I googled this.

He is estimated to have written somewhere around 8 million words of theology.

All of it is about God.

8 million.

 He lived to around 50 years old.

So in the span of like 25 years, he wrote, and he wasn't just like up in a study writing all that.

He was a functioning priest, right?

Like he was living a full religious life and ministering to people and pastoring and all the things.

And he wrote, he found the time to write 8 million words about God.

 And so there's this story where one of the guys that was studying underneath him was spying on him kind of.

He was like up in this chapel praying and he was kind of hidden away and Thomas didn't know that he was there.

And he comes in and he describes this event that plays out where Thomas comes and he's bowed before this cross and he's praying.

And then this friar says, and I heard Christ speak to Thomas audibly.

He said to Thomas, you have written well of me, Thomas.

What reward will you receive from me for your labor?

And this is my favorite.

 This blows my mind every time.

Thomas responded, five simple words.

Sorry, four.

I can count.

Domine non nisite.

Lord, nothing except you.

 So awesome, dude.

That's so incredible.

That blows my... Dude, 8 million words.

8 million words.

A life completely dedicated to nothing but Jesus.

And Jesus is like, Thomas, what... Whoa, actually, that makes sense.

Right?

That shouldn't be shocking.

What is somebody who's given their life to... Why are they doing that?

It's not because of... Because the output is because I need God.

Because I'm obsessed with God.

You don't write 8 million words about God for the fun of it.

It's because he was obsessed with Jesus.

 There's literally no other response that would make sense.

And I'm like, man, I just want that heart.

And so I want to come to David's place of spiritual desperation.

That, Lord, nothing except you.

That, Lord, I thirst for you.

My body faints for you in a land that is dry, desolate, without water.

And I think there's only one way to get to that place, and that's to put an end to our spiritual hoarding.

 Our spiritual lives are cluttered.

And so you're forced.

That's what this psalm does to me.

It gets in my face and confronts me and forces me to take a step back and realize all the other things that are taking up and consuming my spiritual appetite that my spiritual stomach is so full of.

I wrote this down.

You tell me if this makes sense.

I think we are all forced by a psalm like this to get off of the proverbial Adderall that we all take so that we can have undivided attention upon ourselves and our own concerns without realizing that that comes at the high cost of spiritual appetite suppressant.

 That's a good analogy.

It feels like it.

Our addiction to ourselves and our own lives and our own concerns comes at the cost of an addiction to God.

Right?

You only get to have one God.

And so most people's gods are themselves.

That's where we naturally flow to.

That's where we naturally go.

I'm going to worship me.

 David saw God.

He knew something about God that brought him to a different place.

That self-worship died.

And in the midst of the time where it's like, yeah, I want to be focused on nobody but me right now.

I'm getting chased out of the kingdom that I've been anointed to be king over by some crazy guy who's getting attacked by demons.

I've been nothing but faithful to him.

His son is my best friend.

He gave me his daughter as his wife.

This guy is the worst person on planet Earth.

He's so prideful.

He's totally in the wrong.

I've had several opportunities to kill him, and yet still I'm living as a refugee in another land.

God, I need you.

 It's not, no, God, take me back to Jerusalem.

God, give me the throne that's rightfully mine.

No, God, I thirst for you.

And so Psalm 63 exists as this reminder that you can get so full of the world that you end up starving.

That's never the way that we think that equation is going to go, but it's always where it leads.

 Verses 3 through 5.

Let me read these.

My lips will glorify you.

Oh, dude.

Read this with me.

Because your faithful love is better than life.

Oh, man, that's not hyperbole.

That's not exaggeration.

That's not poetic drama.

That's the way that David feels.

And you would know that that's the way that David feels if you really met God.

 If you really experience God and you experience His love, yeah, we're pretty forgetful.

I'm quite forgetful that that's the case.

But the moment, oh man, I'm a dweeb.

I'm experiencing the love of God again.

I go, oh, David was right.

David was right.

This is better than life itself.

Everything else that's ever been offered to me, this is better.

This supersedes all of that.

That's a crazy thing for someone to say who knows the God that you and I, who knows Yahweh, but doesn't know anything about the cross.

You understand that?

 So as we're spending this season in our church, focusing on the gospel, on the cross of Jesus Christ, well, David was fully convinced of the love of God and its being very better than life itself before revelation of the cross ever came.

David doesn't get the incarnation.

He doesn't get to look and go, oh, God humbles himself and comes in a man and suffers a criminal's death and gets on a cross and is executed and brutally dies and rises again three days later to atone for all of our sins and make us right with God.

David knows nothing of that.

 Jesus says something.

He says, to those whom much is given, much will be required.

So here's David saying, the faithful love of the Lord is better than life.

You have been given a greater revelation of God than David.

By virtue of you knowing about the cross, you know more about God.

God has been more clearly revealed to you than he was to David.

David was guessing in areas that we don't have to guess.

 Right?

David can fill in the blanks and realize this God, His love is better than life.

Paul says something similar in the book of Philippians.

He says basically that each of us should live up to the level of knowledge that we have.

So there's a higher standard expected of the people of God who know that this God came into the world and died for our sins.

Yeah?

Then he says in verse 5, You satisfy me as with rich food.

My mouth will praise you with joyful lips.

 Question is, how does that work with verse one, right?

So verse one, God, I'm starving.

Verse five, God, I'm full.

I'm full of you.

I'm satisfied.

It's like, how are these things working together?

So here's basically how this works.

So number one, you were made first and foremost to have God completely.

God designed you to have all of himself.

So what that means is that you have an infinite God-shaped vacuum in you.

God intended to fill us with all of himself.

And so therefore, by nature, you desire God.

And God is infinite.

Right?

 So because of that, because the object of the desire that you were made for is infinite and limitless, therefore your appetite, your ability to desire, must also be limitless and infinite.

We've got infinite spiritual stomachs.

We never run out of room for desire.

We can always be desiring more.

And the problem is we go searching in all the wrong places to fulfill that desire.

Augustine said, he said, seek what you seek, but it is not where you seek it.

I've heard it said that when a man knocks on the door of a brothel, he's actually looking for a cathedral.

 We go looking to fulfill this infinite desire in all the wrong places.

So here's the very simple problem.

Finite things cannot satiate an infinite appetite.

You have an infinite appetite.

 But we've basically all got finite cookbooks.

And we're just like coming up with things that are gonna make us feel filled and satisfied and not hungry.

And so this is my long convoluted way of theologizing David's feelings.

It's like, God, I'm starving for more of you because I have an infinite appetite, but I'm experiencing the infinite God.

And so I feel full and more satisfied than I've ever been before.

It's like both of these things are happening.

He's living in that tension.

God, I'm so satisfied.

God, you satisfy me as with rich food.

Like I lack nothing.

Having you, God, I feel so full and yet I'm so thirsty.

 for more of you.

Because I was given, I was born with an infinite appetite, an infinite desire.

When we go looking at it in all the wrong places, we fill up these stomachs and we lose our appetite for God.

And so this is God saying, or David saying, God, I'm so full, I'm so satisfied, and yet I don't feel gross.

I don't feel empty and I don't feel disappointed.

 You know, he is scarfing down and there's no tummy ache after, right?

He's like, I just feel good.

And I don't, I don't, I don't, and you know, I spent my whole life consuming and consuming and consuming and still feeling empty.

And I don't feel that right now.

God, and I don't feel disappointed actually lived up to my expectations and well beyond them.

And somehow God, I'm still hungry.

Somehow I'm both of these things all at once.

It's basically equivalent to how like there's always room for dessert, you know, no matter how full you get, always real.

 And so each of us is required, and again, this is what this psalm does to me.

It gets in my face and reminds me that my appetite is infinite.

And so I have to surrender my expectations to find ultimate delight in things that just can't do that.

The things that by their very nature must run out eventually.

The things that we crave, the things that we want, the things that we hope will make us happy cannot do it.

They can't do it because you were made for infinite beatitude.

 And that's found only in God.

And so we bring ourselves into a lifestyle that just leads to a never-ending cycle of despair.

Instead, the expectation of God is that we put our hope in the faithful love that is better than life itself and never be found wanting.

And finally, in verse 6 through 8, and this is where David expresses his theme of dependence, the way that he feels about God.

Listen to this.

When I think of you, and band, you guys can come up.

That'd be great.

When I think of you as I lie in my bed, I meditate on you during the night watches because you're my helper.

 I love that language right there.

It's like, God, I'm dreaming of you before I'm even dreaming.

That's so cool.

God, you're just the object of all my desires.

Before I even get to sleep and see my dreams, man, I'm daydreaming about you from my pillow.

This is incredible.

And then he says, I will rejoice in the shadow of your wings.

You're my helper.

I want to rejoice in the shadow of your wings.

I'm going to follow close to you.

I'm depending on your right hand to hold on to me.

 God, thank you for being there for me.

Thank you for protecting me.

Thank you for leading the way and for never letting me go.

David is utterly dependent upon God.

I've been thinking about this a good bit the past couple weeks and this tendency that I have, and maybe you resonate with it, maybe not, but I have this tendency to want to try and outgrow my need for God and get to the point where I could get to the point of spiritual maturity where I could keep doing all of this whether God was a part of it or not.

And that would be a huge mistake.

 that would be taking the part that makes this good right out of it, you know?

That'd be taking the thing that makes this worth it right out.

And it would just leave us with a massive mess.

And so I look at these words, I'm like, man, I need this dynamic with God that David has.

Jesus says in Matthew 18, three, truly I tell you, unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

David sounds like that.

God, you're my helper.

God, I'm rejoicing in the shadow of your wings.

Like you're covering me, you're flying over top me and I'm just underneath.

 God, I'm following close to you.

Like God is leading the way through the treacherous land and David is just like holding on, you know, inching behind him.

God, your right hand holds on to me.

God is reaching back.

David, stop getting distracted.

Come with me.

Come with me this way.

I mean, that's a child.

Who behaves like that except for children, right?

So David is expressing this childlike need for God.

And that's what Jesus says.

If you want to follow me, if you want to be a part of my, you want to be in my kingdom of heaven.

He says, you will never enter my kingdom until you come and enter like a child.

 You know, there's a max height on this ride.

You got to shrink.

You have to shrink.

That's the only way to truly live with God.

So I look at these verses at the end and I see in them the prayer of someone who has essentially canned all of their backup plans.

 And is not interested in finding somewhere else to go.

This is someone who has recognized that God is the most fundamentally important thing about our world.

And has decided to live in response to that.

And in doing so found that they're really not very good at it.

That they really don't have everything that they need to do it.

And that they really don't have that much to offer.

This is a prayer of a person who decidedly has nowhere else to go but further into the will of God.

They're past the point of turning back.

 This is the prayer of someone, and this is the one I really want to emphasize.

This is the prayer of someone whose pride has genuinely been crushed, who learned the hard way that they simply cannot do this on their own.

That's the dependent heart of David.

You go through enough wilderness spells to go, you know what?

I just can't.

I just can't do this by myself.

We can imagine David did enough time in the wilderness crying out, God, fix this, to finally go, you know what?

 You know what I actually need?

You know what I've learned by experience that I genuinely need right now?

I just need God himself.

And if he'll just give me himself, I don't care how the situation spells out.

I don't care.

I'm totally interested, absolutely consumed with getting more of Jesus.

That's awesome.

You only get there by letting your pride get squished.

 so that you become totally dependent upon God.

He's looking for followers like that.

In fact, according to Jesus, in Matthew 18, 3, it doesn't work to follow him if you won't come to him that way.

We all have to spit out the poison of our self-reliance.

It has to go.

We've got to shrink.

We've got to get smaller.

We've got to let God be in charge.

 This is David essentially saying, God, I need you.

I need you.

God, I'm really hungry for you.

I want you.

God, I'm so glad that I have you.

And God, I really need you.

It's like all wrapped up in this one place.

That's a dynamic with God that I need to have.

And that's why the early church came back to this over and over and over and over and over again because it lays out such a beautiful, a beautiful demonstration of what life with God could and most importantly should be like.

 Man, I should know the faithful love of the Lord is better than life.

My lips should glorify him.

At his name, I should lift up my hands.

I should bless him as long as I live.

He should be praised with my mouth with joyful lips.

I should be satisfied as with rich food.

I should be hungry for him.

I should be starving for him.

My body should be fainting for him.

I should be gazing on him in the sanctuary with an obsession with seeing his strength and with his glory.

I should be holding on to his right hand.

I should be following close to him.

I should be absolutely obsessed and utterly dependent upon this God if he really is who he says he is.

 Let me leave you with this, Ephesians chapter 3, 17 through 19.

Paul says, I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God's love, and to know Christ's love that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

This is God's will for you, that you would live in His love and comprehend the extent of His love, and that you would know His love despite its inherent transcendent unknowableness.

 You would know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.

That's insane.

This thing that cannot, we can't possibly get to the end of it.

My prayer is that you would know it.

In order that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

And so David has given us in this psalm a really good model of avoiding the things that prohibit this in our spiritual life.

 We stop ourselves from experiencing and being filled with all the fullness of God when we lack desperation and hunger for Him because we're so full of other things, when we lack delight in Him because we're busy searching for it in all the wrong places.

And perhaps you never realized that you could experience total satisfaction in Jesus.

Or perhaps you've experienced that at a time and now you're running away from it and you need to come back to that place because you believe the lie of the serpent, that the fruit of the tree is good for eating and pleasing to the eye, and that you've taken a bite of it and you've decided to disobey what God wants for your life and now you've found yourself in a spiritual mess.

 You gotta come back to believing that God will give you himself, and that's the thing that you really want.

So when we lack desperation, when we lack the light in him, and when we lack dependence upon him, because we'd rather not be cornered into that kind of spiritual vulnerability.

I'd rather provide myself my own safety.

I just wanna give you the, can we all stand?

Thank you, Holy Spirit.

 I know this message is kind of all wrapped into one thing, but I want to just divide the three.

And I have a sense that maybe the Holy Spirit is drawing on your heart in one of these three areas really specifically.

So I just want to go through them and just give you a chance to acknowledge that.

If you're in that place where you're like, man, I actually lack desperation and hunger for God.

Because I'm...

 My spiritual appetite has been quenched.

I'm so full of other things.

And I actually really desperately want to be like David.

I really, really want to eagerly seek him and thirst for him and faint for him.

I really want to want God that way.

And I don't.

If that's you and you're like, that's how I feel, would you just raise your hand for me?

Amen.

Is there anybody else?

You can acknowledge.

It's like, man, I've stopped being hungry for God.

And I need to be hungry and starving for him again.

 Okay, the second one, perhaps maybe you're one of the people who really lacks delight in Him.

And that you can recognize that you've been searching all across the face of the earth as a restless wanderer, looking for something that's going to make you feel filled.

And you feel empty still.

Like, oh man, I've not put my delight primarily and absolutely in Christ.

It's actually kind of divided.

And I feel undelighted because of that.

 Maybe just like let verse three strike you in the heart.

I actually don't know if I believe that his faithful love is better than life.

If that's you and you want to experience that love, would you raise your hand?

You feel empty of God.

Okay, and the last one.

Your self-sufficiency is killing you and you lack dependence upon the Lord because you don't want to go there.

And you recognize that you actually, it's time, it's time to throw yourself back at his feet and really let him be in charge.

If that's you, would you raise your hand?

 Could you raise them real high?

Let me see them.

We're all following the same Jesus here.

He loves the hands.

Cool?

If that's you and you raise your hand for any of those three things, could you, anyone who raised their hand, would you raise them high up again for any of the three prompts?

If that's you, would you guys, can we come down to the front?

I want to give us the opportunity to actually like get at an altar where the Holy Spirit is blessed to fall on us and meet us and to, the invitation really simply is repentance.

 I want to invite each of you to repent.

And basically, here's the goal.

We've got a clear space in our hearts to make room for Jesus to reign, for God to fill us.

And so I just encourage you, if you need to get down on your knees, if you need to lay flat on your face, just do it.

But come to the Lord really honestly and really purely and lay down what needs to be laid down.

His faithful love is better than life.

There's nothing better than Jesus.

There's nothing better than Jesus.

So I want you to just trust this morning with faith.

 that as you come with this posture, the Holy Spirit's going to respond.