The Sustenance of the Seeker

From Psalm 63 1 O God, You are my God;
Early will I seek You;
My soul thirsts for You;
My flesh longs for You
In a dry and thirsty land
Where there is no water.
2 So I have looked for You in the sanctuary,
To see Your power and Your glory.

3 Because Your lovingkindness is better than life,
My lips shall praise You.
4 Thus I will bless You while I live;
I will lift up my hands in Your name.
5 My soul shall be satisfied as with [a]marrow and [b]fatness,
And my mouth shall praise You with joyful lips.

"I want to cross the borderline," All Things New pleads with the Lord in "Borderline," "between Your heart and mine, where Heaven and Earth collide."

Psalm 63 from a more ancient songster expresses much the same longing for continuity. The first borderline he would cross is a less intimate sense of God's Presence he would exchange for a more immediate sense. We notice that both All Things New and our Psalmist are resolved in the beginning. There seems to be a seasoned nature to their faith which could inspire us in our more estranged or weary moments. The Psalmist already has on his agenda to seek God early. He knows drift in a fallen world is normal. All Things New would anchor their experience from drifting too far with an audacious "I want" anchored by faith.

Only with that resolution establish does the Psalmist look around at his earthly condition to get his bearings. There is no water where he is that will satisfy his soul, so he selectively seeks the sanctuary. By grace, he can cross some of that borderline with his own two feet. The soul can indeed, to some degree, Emily Dickinson, first by verbalizing her own deepest desire for the Lord, then by selecting environment and company which draw us nearest to Him. Thus, knowing ultimate fulfillment awaits only in God's ultimate presence in the Hereafter, the Psalmist and we with him go sluicing for fragmentary clues to God's glory which He has purposed to survive the impact of the planet's fall.

This discipline, beforehand and along the way, animates our earthly motions. They may only be pantomimes, types and shadows, of the eternal experience with Him for which our souls long, yet we willingly offer what we have. These lips are only lips, painfully inarticulate to express all that He is, yet we use them gratefully. These hands, so often used amiss or proved weak to accomplish the sanctified purposes we would, are only hands. Yet, invigorated by a resolute heart after Him, we will use them gratefully. Even as we admit with Tim Keller in Songs of Jesus that we find the transitions from setting to setting exhausting, what we find of our Maker and Life-giver affirms that He is our dwelling place and renewal.

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