"A Loving God"

We have all faced it. When it comes, we can do nothing other than gritting our teeth and force ourselves to get up and greet it. Though we may try to resist, it comes with regularity and faithfulness beyond our control. “What is it?” you ask?

It is Monday. It is a day. It is any day. It is every day.

And whether we have already or are still coming to terms with it, tomorrow is closer now than it was when we started. It will be soon staring you in the face in whatever way that you go about starting your day. And these brief moments together, these moments where the people of God gather to praise and worship the risen King Jesus, well they will fall back into our memories. They become the one thing we did this week that is the exception to everything else that our lives involve. It may leave some this morning thinking, “I wish every day were Sunday.”

On Sundays, we gather with friends who have become family because the Father in Heaven has adopted us as his children by the precious blood of his Son. We have become spiritual brothers and sisters, made to be a spiritual family. For some of us, there is an even sweeter joy in worshipping with our natural family. For some of us, when we leave church on Sunday, we find that our spirits have been uplifted through song. For others of us, when we leave church on Sunday, we find direction when we sense that God was speaking directly to us, though the preacher never called anyone out by name.

I would hope we each know that the Lord is with us this morning, that he has been walking the aisles of this church as we have showered him with the praises we have lifted in song. I would hope we each know that the Lord is speaking this morning, not because my mouth is moving, but because we have our Bibles open as we come together under the reading and preaching of his Word.

Tension

But I think that there is a dilemma among us, a dilemma within us, that far too often, we are afraid to admit. We long for Sunday. We long for the exception to the week. In our own ways, that longing for Sunday to be every day is rooted in our experience. We got that pick-me-up or we got that direction and we say to ourselves, “praise the Lord!” the rest of the day on Sunday. Then Monday comes. Then after that, Tuesday. And fast-forward to Sunday morning when sometimes we feel like what the cat drug in, though we managed to cover it up by dressing our best. The service starts, we get our fix, but with time, the effects don’t seem to last as long.

I know this to be true because I’ll get the end-of-week text message that says something on the order of, “Give it to us this week, preacher. Work us up into a lather.” Do you know what’s really being said to me? “My hit of that Sunday drug isn’t giving me a sense of euphoria for as long as it used to. Do you think you can give me a bigger dose?” And a bigger dose might mean for one person one certain style of worship music or for another that I raise my voice louder or maybe even get loose with my finger and instead of pointing upward with emphasis, rather, I’d point at you.

That’ll strengthen some weakened spiritual conditions for a while, but the day will come when the regular music and preaching aren’t enough and though our momentum keeps us in the pattern of coming to hear God’s truth, internally we’re running from it.

What we do when we gather on Sunday is of great importance. Since the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Christians have gathered together to worship the Lord. To praise the One who saves souls from eternities spent in hell. To give glory to the King who has won for men the forgiveness of God. But, how we see ourselves as participants therein is in question this morning. Is Sunday to be just a positive spiritual experience for us among seven days worth of experiences that are strung together in what we know as life? Is Sunday just a positive experience? Is what happens here contained to here?

I wonder, have we put our finger on what church is actually about? Or better yet, how well do we know the character of the One who church is about?

Truth

Context

Like you and I will at some point in the course of our lives, the writer of our Psalm has found himself in a terrible place. He’s having the Monday of Mondays. And maybe worse than that. Just as was the case in the Psalm we considered last week, the author of this Psalm from which we read minutes ago is David. Much has changed for David since he penned the Psalm we studied last Sunday.

If you recall David’s story, though God had given to David the kingdom of Israel to rule, there was still King Saul to deal with who threatened his existence in every sense of the imagination. As we have pressed on in our readings of the Bible, which incidentally, I pray you’re finding fruitful as you become more familiar with the progression of God’s revealing of himself and his plan of salvation in and throughout time. But as we have continued to read the accounts of the life of David with great intrigue, we would recall that by the time 1 Samuel concludes, Saul has been removed from center stage and David has taken a prominent place. We find that under David, the kingdom of Israel had never experienced such stability and wealth before David’s leadership.

We also discover quite quickly the picture painted of a man who is far from perfect. Chief among this is the evidence that David’s heart leads him into adultery and murder. David the king took for himself another man’s wife and then sent that very same man to the front lines of a battle with the certainty he would be killed. That man demonstrated loyalty to his king, David, that David himself did not demonstrate to the one who had called him and equipped him.

Despite this, we read on and discover more about how David’s family blossomed. Children all over the place. Means beyond compare. None could rival him, that is until one of his sons coveted what was not his. Like father, like son, David’s son Absalom rebelled against his father in an attempt to become king himself. Absalom was cunning and could stir the hearts of men to forget all that had been accomplished for the nation and the kingdom under his father’s reign so that the men of Israel would follow him.

This is worse than the sunshine fans of our day. Sunshine fans are folks who have no true loyalty to anyone, they just follow the person or team who are still in contention. Sunshine fans go to their closets to hang up the jersey they were wearing because the team lost only to return from the closet wearing the jersey of the team who won. What Absalom does is far worse than that sort of disloyalty we see in our every day. What Absalom does is treasonous betrayal. He’s the child you raised to be a fan of the Cowboys who goes off to college and returns a diehard fan of the Eagles. Or bringing this closer home, it’s akin to our Warhorses and Arabians becoming Owls. Betrayal of the highest order!

Text

And with the similarity of Absalom repeating the sin of his father in coveting after what wasn’t his, so too we see a return in David’s circumstances. With Saul and now with Absalom’s raising of an army, David is forced to flee Jerusalem. If you’re wanting to follow along with the events known as Absalom’s Rebellion, you’ll find the beginning in 2 Samuel 15.

David is on the run and at the point in time that we find him coming before the Lord in this prayer, all that he has known and all that he has amassed have been undone. As we read this Psalm, we shouldn’t have a sense that he has more to his name than the shirt on his back. He’s not run to a place of luxury to spend the rest of his days in comfort. He’s been forced into a temporary exile in one of the driest places on all the earth. As dry as we are in South Texas? Worse. Meet the desert of Judah where David fled to.

And the Psalm begins with David’s waking moments…we know those first few seconds of not being certain of where we are when we awake. David wasn’t sure if he had only dreamt of sleeping in the desert until he looks out and stares into nothingness. It’s in that vast sea of rolling emptiness that David stares blankly across, none different than when you or I look out upon the waves of an ocean or when we look into the flames of a fire, never fixing our eye on a particular object but consumed by the endlessness of it all. For David, maybe the seeming endlessness of challengers for the throne that God had given to him. For you and I, the endless reminders of life’s choices and their aftermath.

As we stare out upon that barren, unending landscape, our heart’s desire is to escape. Oh Lord, get me out of here. Save me from this. I want to escape back to the joy of Sunday. Our thoughts would be in line with David’s. Psalm 63:2 “2 So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory.” David recalls what it was like to be in the presence of God in the sanctuary, to worship the Lord. To have a sense that he’s Psalm 63:7 “...in the shadow of your [the Lord’s] wings...” as he remembers back to the cherubim that flanked either end of the ark of the covenant. But as David awakens to the harsh reality of his circumstances, this prayer carries a different sense than someone who just desires to escape.

The desert is hot and dry with no sources of water from which to wet his tongue or cool his brow. Neither is there life to hunt to provide food for his belly. And on this morning, for the first time in likely a very long time, the king thirsts and hungers without recourse. Yet it’s not his physical condition that he brings before the Lord in prayer, but the desert conditions he’s awakened in have revealed the desert condition of his being. David declares that it is his soul that thirsts and his body that faints for the Lord and as he starts his day, he does so on the lookout for God.

And something not natural occurs in this desert of Judah. Though he lacks, though all he’s known has been taken, he prays with confidence of satisfaction in his soul (Psalm 63:5) and with expectation in Psalm 63:9-10 for Absalom and his men to be blotted out, in other words, for God to do justice on behalf of David.

News

This is pretty bold stuff, isn’t it? I mean, consider what I reminded us all of concerning the person of David. This is an adulterer. This is a murderer. This is a derelict and desensitized man, often preferring at times to follow the lusts of his own heart than the Lord God. This is bold stuff! It’s bold because here is David, lifting a prayer out of his lament for everything that has gone wrong in his life and everything that he’s lost. David’s remembering back to encountering God and somehow, he’s confident of what God is going to do to strengthen him spiritually.

How does he get there? On what basis does he get away with saying this stuff? It’s a valid question because out in the streets of Devine if someone is telling you about how they’ve come to be in dire straights, how often have you heard that person add, “…but, I guess that’s what I deserve! I’ve done horrible things and maybe this is just karma coming around to take a bite out of my backside.”?

That’s the thought process of so many, but not of David in this Psalm. How does David start from despair to such confidence and praise?

Psalm 63:3 ESV

3 Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.

God’s steadfast love. You’re going to see references all throughout the Psalms which refer to God’s steadfast love. The Hebrew word here for steadfast love is hesed. Hesed love is God’s love that God has promised to give. It’s the covenantal love of God that God will not withhold nor will he take away. It’s a love that God has signed and sealed and delivered in his own name.

God’s steadfast love is what gives David the confidence of knowing that his soul will be nourished by God. Even as David searches for God in the barren desert of Judah having lost it all, it isn’t physical food or water that David needs. As God has created David both physically and spiritually, it is the totality of his being that longs for a fresh outpouring of the steadfast love of God. It’s God’s steadfast love that is loyal, unwavering, and unfailing. It is love that is not a feeling, but it is love that is an action. It is love that intervenes on behalf of someone and comes to their rescue.

How nice it must be to be David, right? A man after God’s own heart, as the narrator of the books of Samuel reminds us from time to time. How fortunate David is to receive such love to satisfy the thirst of one’s soul even despite his disloyalty to God and disobedience to his word.

We’re a few months from reading this, but in John’s gospel, we find John recording an encounter between Jesus and a woman of Samaria. As we read about her in John 4, we find that the world of sinners that is loved by God that Jesus explained to Nicodemus in John 3 isn’t limited to religious insiders like Nicodemus who were seeking truth, but that God also loves the broken outsiders who are running from the truth. The woman of Samaria is a sinner who is not beyond the need of God’s grace and we will find later this year, she is also a woman who is not beyond the reach of God’s grace. In their interchange alongside a well, Jesus asks her to draw him a cup of water and then tells her that he can offer to her living water, from which if she drank, she John 4:14 “...will never be thirsty again. The water that [Jesus] will give him [her] will become in him [her] a spring of water welling up to eternal life.””

What’s happening alongside that well is God in the Second Person of the Trinity is revealing the hesed love of God to a woman of Samaria and it’s the same hesed love that David earnestly searched for. It’s the same steadfast love that comforted him in the most uncomfortable of circumstances. It’s the steadfast love of God that shows us that eternal life isn’t just about our life in heaven when we die; it is also about the life of heaven “welling up” (v. 14) in us while we live. It’s the life of heaven that satisfies David’s soul Psalm 63:5 “...as with fat and rich food...” and when heaven wells up within him, it makes him praise the Lord in the middle of the desert.

Imagine David rolling up his version of a sleeping bag and he’s singing at the top of his lungs: “I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever, I will sing, I will sing...” and someone in his camp who had a rough night hears this and is kinda mad. Kinda mad because his experience camping out in Judah’s desert doesn’t match the Airbnb listing. And they interrupt, “Good morning, my king. I wonder, what mercy is there you sing of? There’s sand in all the wrong places. And if you haven’t noticed, we haven’t much to our name.” David responds, “I’ve got the love of God welling up within me and I can do nothing other than sing!”

Application

Friends, when tomorrow comes, what will well up within you? Will you find that welling up within you is the life of heaven or will you simply long for the experience that takes place here? Is the God whom we worship in this sanctuary limited to this place? Is the God whom you meet week after week in this room a prisoner to this place?

What god have you met? See, what comforted David in the desert is knowing that he had a relationship with the living God. And David knows that while he met God in the sanctuary where God made his power and glory known to him, God was not and is not a prisoner of that sanctuary. David came to his version of church, if you will, and learned about God. He learned that God’s hesed love is better than life itself and because of that, he would rather die than live without God’s love. He could look out upon his bleak circumstances and praise the Lord because he knew that God’s love is better than life.

For you and for me, Sunday isn’t just an event among all of the events on our calendars. Right now if you look at my calendar, there are long days with commitments nearly every night of the week. I bet your calendars aren’t too different than mine. And here’s the interesting thing that I’ve learned… when what we do here becomes the center of our lives rather than just another event among all our other commitments, what we learn about God causes us to love him more and praise him more and to propel us into our tomorrows.

And as we learn about the Lord as David has, what the Lord has prepared for each of us is the richest of foods that have been laid out on the banquet table of our lives. That welling up of heaven within us is the truth that when God gives us his best, he gives us himself. Paraphrasing from Romans 8:32, the Father did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. God’s love is permanently and perfectly revealed in the cross of Jesus Christ. And here’s the thing, the love of God is not a prisoner of this place. There is nothing that can contain or imprison our God! God is neither the prisoner of the sanctuary nor the prisoner of the church. Nor is God a prisoner of death or the tomb.

Are you able to say like David, Psalm 63:1 “1 O God, you are my God.”? With the confidence of God’s love, I can assure you that if you come to him in faith and repentance, he will be your God and Lord, and Savior.

Maybe for others who have come to Christ in faith in their pasts but simply don’t feel a strong desire for the manifestation of the glory of God. It’s not because you have come to the Lord’s table and drunk deeply and are satisfied, but you have that lack of desire for the things of God because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things and there is no room for great. Almost everyone longs to say Psalm 63:1 “1 O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you...” If you do not hunger for God, it is not because God does not satisfy. Rather, it is because your heart is divided between the Lord and the desires of the world. My encouragement to you is to develop the discipline of fasting to deepen your desire for God.

Inspiration

When we live out a hungering for the love of God that is alone what satisfies us, there is a real change in our community. Right now with all the issues of our day… pre-marital sex, abortion, same-sex marriage, gender dysphoria, and so on… The people who are given to those sins are aware of how their lifestyles and decisions run counter to God. Whether we Christians have intended it or not, in the course of speaking into the lives of others, we have communicated God’s law and misrepresented God’s love.

There were two boys who were overheard by their father… One boy said to the other, “You must be good otherwise Father won’t love you.” Calling the boy to him, the father said, “Son, that isn’t really true.” “But you won’t love us if we are bad, will you?” the boy asked.

“Yes, I will love you whether you are good or bad,” the father explained. “But there will be a difference in my love. When you are good I will love you with a love that makes me glad, and when you are not good I will love you with a love that hurts me.”

Do you know what might happen if we spoke about a loving God who bled for whomsoever would trust upon the name of Jesus Christ?

Action

All the Godhead, Father, Son, and Spirt, loves you with a love that hurt him. He loves you with a love that compelled the Son to give his life for you. He loves you with a love that did what was necessary so you can be forgiven when you are bad because no one can be perfectly good. He loves you with a love that will rescue you today. He loves you with a love that will rescue you every day.

Did you know that there is nothing that can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus? Not the death that awaits us each. Not angels, not presidents, and not kings. Neither the return to glory of a nation nor its collapse. Neither how many companies men like Elon Musk can wield. Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Is it the love of God that your life is missing? Well, the answer is most certainly, yes. You come to this place to hear about that love, to learn about that love, to practice giving and receiving that love. But it is only when the Spirit of God opens your eyes to shine the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ that you can come to the cross today and every day with the certainty that he has raised you to new life, that you have been born again, and that in walking in the newness of life, the loving God who has redeemed you, has shown you that God’s love is better than life.

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