Spiritual Longing

The Book of Psalms has been described as “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul.” In the Psalms, nothing is hidden from us. Highs and lows are alike recorded. In the Psalms we see a description of our own experience.

But sometimes we also recognize a description of new experiences. Some psalms are really saying to us, “This is how God may work. Be prepared to recognize his hand in your life in similar ways.”

Such is the case with Psalms 42 and 43. They are unusually appropriate to our thinking about spiritual growth. Psalm 42 begins with this statement:

As the deer pants for streams of water,
     so my soul pants for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
     When can I go and meet with God?
            (Psalm 42:1-2 NIV)

Here is someone who is longing to know God! That is an essential part of all true spiritual growth. Being a Christian means knowing God. Growing as a Christian means increasing our desire to know God. This is the sum of the Christian life.

Jesus himself said, “This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God” (Jn. 17:3). The true men and women of faith are “the people who know their God” (Dan. 11:32). That is why, in the Old Testament, one of the anticipated blessings of the new age which the Messiah would inaugurate was that then men and women would “know the Lord” (Jer. 31:34).

Knowing God is the heart of the Christian life. It is fundamental to all spiritual growth. If we are not growing in the knowledge of God, we are not growing at all. Our greatest weakness today as Christians is that we do not really know God. At best we know about him.

The man who wrote Psalms 42 and 43 may once have been content with a similar level of spiritual experience. But then God began to order his circumstances in such a way that a new desire to grow spiritually filled his horizon. He began to long to know God. He describes his experience in three stages.

Longing

What is it like to have a desire to know God? These psalms indicate that it can be an exceedingly painful and disturbing thing.

This man felt he was cast down. He realized that he did not know God as he needed to:

Why are you downcast, O my soul?
     Why so disturbed within me?
                (Psa. 42:5)

Perhaps in his earlier days he had known the presence of God in powerful ways. But now his spirit felt barren and dry. It was parched, and he was crying out for the dew of God’s presence to come revive and restore him.

It is a great temptation, looking at this man’s condition, to say that he was simply a defeated and disobedient child of God—a backslider. Yet he makes no mention of repentance, or of any specific sin which is barring him from the presence of God. This is not a penitential psalm.

Indeed, in some ways the reverse is true, for here is a man who can address God as “my Rock” (v. 9). “At night,” he confesses, “his song is with me” (v. 8). Hardly the words of a backslider!

But God had begun to break up the fallow ground in his spirit. He plans to bring him on to a new stage of spiritual experience. As in ordinary life, so in spiritual life—we experience not only the traumas of birth, but the struggles of growing out of one stage into another stage of life.

But what were the means God employed in his life to bring about this new state of affairs?

Desire

There are three things which God began to use to awaken his spiritual desires:

1. Memories. As he called to God in his perplexity, he said, “These things I remember, as I pour out my soul.” What did he remember?

In his mind’s eye, he was back in Jerusalem. He saw the crowds of pilgrims at one of the great festival services: “I used to go with the multitude.” He remembered the atmosphere: “shouts of joy and thanksgiving.” He himself was at the head of the procession (v. 4). It all comes flooding back to him; yes, those were wonderful days!

He was remembering the grace and power of God’s presence with his people for a specific reason—to stir up his soul to long for and anticipate it again.

When Paul was concerned about the spiritual growth of his young friend Timothy, he encouraged him to use his memory. Remember the day we laid our hands on you, Paul said. Think of that occasion when the Holy Spirit set you apart through us. Do you not recall how God sealed your calling and wonderfully blessed you? Do you not remember how you gave yourself to the Lord out of a sense of his goodness to you? Remember that hour, Timothy, and let its memory stir you up to seek and to serve God now (see 2 Tim. 1:6-7; 1 Tim. 4:14).

Many of us have similar memories of times and places of unusual blessing in our lives. Do you have a memory of meeting with God? Then let your memory create in you a thirst, a longing, a fresh desire to know God and to sense his presence with you the way you did then.
   
2. Isolation. The reason the psalmist has only recollections is that he is now far away from the scenes of his former blessing. He is miles from Jerusalem, isolated in the highlands. He is cut off from the thriving fellowship of God’s people he once knew.

But the psalmist was not the last to go through such an acute sense of isolation. Any major change in our lives can have this effect of making us feel distanced, disorientated, useless, and purposeless in our Christian lives. A change of job, of house, of neighborhood can do this. Bereavement, children leaving home, retirement can all do the same.

What did God want to teach the psalmist through isolation? What does he want to teach us in similar situations? God wants to teach us lessons that we cannot learn in fellowship.

In our loneliness and separation, we learn to look to God, trust in God, desire God’s presence. We discover that in the past we have relied too much on the encouragement of others and insufficiently on the Lord himself. While before we knew God (quite legitimately) through the help of our fellow Christians, now we must learn to know him in isolation from them.

This is why the psalm is called a Maskil, that is, a song of instruction. The writer is saying to us, This is what God taught me through my experience; it is what he may want to teach you too.

3. Hostility. The psalmist is like a deer roving over the crags and rocks in the height of summer, looking for water with which to slake his thirst. But he feels more than thirsty; he feels pursued:

As pants the hart for cooling streams,
     When heated in the chase,
So longs my soul, O God, for thee
     And thy refreshing grace.

There are several indications of hostile pressure in what he says. People say to him, “Where is your God?” (v. 3). He goes about mourning, “oppressed by the enemy” (v. 9). He prays to be rescued “from deceitful and wicked men” (Ps. 43:1).
 
No wonder he felt that God had cast him off (Ps. 43:2). He must have felt as though God were digging his spiritual grave and that he could not stand the pressure much longer. “Vindicate me, O God, and plead my cause,” he cried (Ps. 43:1).

What was happening to him? God was showing him how much he needed to depend on him for protection. Perhaps at an earlier stage in his experience, he felt that he could hold his own with anyone who opposed his faith. Now he was discovering how vulnerable he was.

Perhaps too he had taken an altogether too confident view of his own ability to stand firm against the forces of darkness. Now he was beginning to realize that belonging to the kingdom of God meant being a target for the attacks of the Devil. He needed help!

Yet none of this lay outside the control of God himself. While the psalmist felt that God was digging his grave, he was only partly right. In a sense he was. God was wanting him to come to an end of himself and his self-confidence. That is always the place where true knowledge of God begins.

But it was not really a grave God was digging at all. It was a well! For out of the depths of this experience would flow a river of spiritual blessing for him, and through him to others. Through it all he was coming to know God. No price was too great to pay for that.

The Other Side of Longing

In the midst of his longing, the psalmist prayed for spiritual satisfaction. In particular he focused his prayers on the Word of God and worship, the twin means by which God would bring joy into his life:

Send forth your light and your truth,
     let them guide me;
     let them bring me to your holy mountain,
     to the place where you dwell.
Then will I go to the altar of God,
     to God, my joy and my delight.
     I will praise you with the harp,
     O God, my God.
             (Ps. 43:3-4)



1. The Word. The psalmist prays for God’s light and truth. As a later psalm confesses,

The entrance of your words gives light;
     it gives understanding to the simple.
I open my mouth and pant,
     longing for your commands.
        (Ps. 119:130-131)

What does he mean? Of course he is missing the opportunity to read God’s Word with others. But he is wanting much more than the restoration of these lost opportunities. He is asking for God to send forth his light and truth. He is looking for “the entrance of your words.”

When we become Christians, we are brought out of darkness into God’s marvelous light (1 Pet. 2:9). One of the things which accompanies this is the penetration of God’s truth into our minds, consciences, and hearts. We see our lives in his light for the first time. We are brought to see the kingdom of God for the first time (Jn. 3:3), and we are given a radically new interpretation of our own lives. Illumination, enlightenment takes place (cf. Heb. 6:4).

It is common for young Christians to experience this effect of God’s Word regularly. There is so much that is new to learn. These new truths about our lives as Christians often come to us with unforgettable force.

Accompanying this illumination of the mind, there is deliverance and cleansing in our lives. Chains which formerly bound us, habits which we could not break, seem to be overwhelmed and defeated by God’s power. We are not yet perfect (far from it), but we have begun to taste the powers of the age to come (Heb. 6:5). We are new creatures.

But it is not only in the lives of recent converts that God is able to do this. He can speak with unusual power whenever he pleases. He can bring fresh illumination, delivering grace, strong assurance. The psalmist was praying for this. There are times in our experience when ordinary means of growth need to be accompanied by special illumination from God if we are ever to make any significant progress. It was such a time in this man’s life. It may be in our lives, also.

2. Worship. Having prayed for God to come to him, he vows that in response he will come to God. He will climb God’s “holy mountain” (v. 3). He will go to the altar of God. He will find God as “my joy and my delight” (v. 4).

He has now discovered that all the experiences of life are ordered by the Lord for one great purpose. Trials and difficulties especially have this purpose in view. It is that we should be brought into the presence of God, so that we worship him with all our hearts. That is an authentic sign of spiritual growth.

There is a special significance in the order of these words: he climbs the hill; he goes to the altar; he discovers God as his great joy. The order of spiritual experience has not changed since the psalmist’s day. We too need to go to the place where God has promised to meet with us. That is no longer in Jerusalem. It is in Christ.

What do we find there? We too find an altar, a place of sacrifice—the cross. We are called to present our bodies on the altar as thank-offerings for his sacrifice for us. This is our spiritual worship (see Rom. 12:1-2). Only then shall we discover God as our chief joy.

The first step forward in knowing God better is the awareness that you do not yet know him fully. It is “thirsting” for God. It is discovering that he has water which can satisfy our deepest longings. It is saying to him, “Lord, give me this water” (Jn. 4:15).



Adapted from Grow in Grace, copyright © 1989 by Sinclair B. Ferguson, published by The Banner of Truth Trust. Used by permission. All rights reserved.