Psalm 63:1-8

I had the privilege of spending Monday to Thursday last week at a Prayer Summit for pastors and people in ministry at Harvey Cedars (on LBI). This was my 11^th prayer summit, and each one has been a special time of renewal and ‘realignment’. Again this year, about 60 men and women of different denominations, locations, races, nationalities, ages, and temperaments opened our hearts together to God’s gentle probing through prayer, Scripture, silence and song. 

I look at this time like a sailing ship – every once in a while you need to get a ship out of the water; put it in dry dock, put it up on blocks, so to speak, so you can get under there and scrape away the barnacles, fill in the cracks and stop the leaks. Then it will be safe to put back into the water! So these prayer summits for me are like a time of Spiritual dry dock, and I greatly appreciate the opportunity. 

We had a number of folks from FUMC that went along once again this year – Karen Murray, Sue Harris, and Betsy Heinz have been going for a number of years now, and Brad Kenney experienced his first Summit. (Make sure you ask him how it was for him!) 

One of the first things we did this year was to ‘center in’ by focusing on Psalm 63: 1 - 8. The summit moved on to some other areas as the week progressed, but I found myself continually going back to that Psalm throughout the week. So I thought that today I would share some of the new things (for me) that I saw in Psalm 63 as I had this wonderful opportunity to spend a lot of quiet time before God. 

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So first, just a few general comments about the Psalm itself, and then I’d like to take a look at some important words that we find in it (actually, I want to talk about grammar – surprise!) 

If you followed along in your Bible as I read the Psalm today, you may have noticed in the accompanying note, (the ‘title’) that this is a Psalm of David. According to tradition, it was written while David was ‘in the wilderness of Judah’. These notes are not part of the inspired text, (they were added later) but most scholars consider them reliable. This Psalm was likely written after David became the king of Israel, and that means that this would have been at least the second time in his life that David found himself hiding in the desert from someone who was attempting to kill him. Can you imagine? 

It was bad enough when King Saul was chasing him, back when he was a younger man…but this time it was his own ‘blood’… his son, Absalom, was in the midst of a Palace rebellion. So here’s David, the king of Israel, hiding from his own son out in a desert! And in this place, as David reflects on his life, because of the circumstances that brought him there, and what he was seeing as he looked around him (essentially nothing but rock -  dry rock, and gravel) his vision is clarified; and he gets down to the most basic things in his life; namely, knowing that it’s just him and God out here. 

And in this powerful description of that relationship, in a dry spell in his life, this dry place where he is becomes a metaphor of his entire existence – it is life boiled down to it’s essence. See, he can see clearly out here in the dry desert. And so he begins… 

       You, O 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. 

In this description of David’s desert experience, believers for many generations have found a traveling companion in their own journeys. Perhaps we too, will recognize some familiar ground here ourselves… 

I couldn’t help but notice as I read this Psalm over and over this week, that there is a rather unusual thing happening with the verbs in it.  This is a personal Psalm (like most of them) and so it has a lot of clauses with ‘I’ as the subject followed by some verb, just as we would expect (I this, I that). But the interesting thing (and you really notice this when you read a more literal translation, so I’m reading today from Today’s New International Version) is that the verbs are in all difference tenses. Some are present, some are past, and some are future.

Now, I think, considering where David is – remember, he’s in the wilderness – and what is happening in his life – being hunted by his own son – that this is a significant, and intentional, thing. So, we’re going to look at those statements in their contexts, as from this dry place David talks about the present, the past, and the future; or, What Is, What Was, & What Will Be… 

We’ve already read most of the present tense verses. Right in the beginning David says, “You are my God.”  That’s present. It’s right now. We could spend the entire sermon time just on that sentence. What does that mean? “My” God? The word ‘my’ typically denotes possession, indicating that we own something. Obviously that can’t be the case here!  We have no claim on God! 

“My God” is not the same use of the word as talking about “My coat, or my car”… or even “My family.”  In fact it means just the opposite, doesn’t it?  To talk about “My God” means that of all the possibilities in this world (real or false) that David has chosen to recognize Jehovah as ‘his God’.  So, David is making a statement of ownership here, but in the opposite direction. David’s allegiance, is to this God. David belongs to God! David’s devotion, his service, his trust is in Yahweh. This is, then, the starting point for everything else in his life. Now, this is important. 

We do essentially the same thing, whenever we declare ourselves as followers of God. Many people have pointed out that the nature of human beings, finite creatures that we are, is to lock on to one thing around which we will orient our lives. It’s our nature. It’s how we’re wired. To find one thing that defines everything else for us. Just one thing that drives us, motivates us, centers us, one thing we turn to when we’re stressed. One thing that defines success or failure to ourselves. David says, “For me, that is Yahweh”. So he writes: “Earnestly I seek you (my God); I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you (my God).” 

At the end of the Psalm David uses some other present tense verbs that explain further what it is to have God at the center of our being:

I remember you on my bed
I think of you through the watches of the night
I sing in the shadow of your wings
I cling to you

What is it that you think of as you lay in your bed in the wee hours of the morning? What is it that you cling to, where do you look for hope, and purpose, and meaning in your life? What is your heart song about? The answer to that will tell you who (or what) is your ‘God’ (or god).  And you know, there’s a lot of pretenders to that throne! 

Scripture and history are full of examples of people who have chosen poorly in this regard.

People who have chosen to center their lives and serve something that is limited, finite, and ultimately unsatisfying – based on money, power, fame, knowledge, possessions, success, pleasure, even family or good deeds. Good things, bad things, they are finite things, and they don’t do as the center of our being. 

David says, of all the possibilities that were his (even as a king): power, wealth, fame, all this stuff … out here in the desert, not only physically, but as a ‘picture’ of his whole life, David realizes once again: O God. You are my God. There is none like you. Nothing else really matters but You.  That’s the present. That’s what is.

And it is built on the past. 

David, looking back, says in verse 2,

I have seen you in the sanctuary… (I have) beheld your power and your glory. 

I think that David here is expressing one of those universal ‘spiritual principles’: our experiences of God in the past guide us in the present. I really like the image of the spiritual life as being a journey. In many ways, it truly is. And as a hiker, I’ve always pictured this journey as one through mountains! 

So, picture a person who is walking up a steep path. They’re sweating, and they’re hurting, carrying a large weight. They’re wondering where they are going, feeling miserable – and they finally get to the top, and they can see this incredible vista. In our journey to God, that first high summit might be our conversion (if we can remember exactly when that was) or some other mountaintop experience where we realized the truth about who God is, and who we are. There tends to be a moment in the beginning of our journeys where we ‘see’ as we’ve never seen before, (or we realize that we see!) a time/ place where God is ‘revealed’ to us, and it is not something that we’re likely to ever forget.

For me, that first ‘high peak’ was at a high school youth retreat at America’s Keswick in February of 1971. I had been on the journey before that, I just didn’t realize it – lot’s of people had been teaching me, leading me before then. God had been working in my life.  I didn’t realize it at the time, of course but God was using them all, a witness is never wasted; and then one night, it all came together. And I ‘saw’ the truth. My eyes were opened. And I stepped forward in response to an invitation, and said, “Lord, I believe! I’m going to follow you! I receive your grace.” Well, that was a mountaintop! A high peak. But every hiker knows you don’t camp on the mountaintops! You have to come down. 

Since then, there have been other special times on my journey. Not all of them were as ‘high’ as that first peak. Some have come close. The first prayer summit that I attended was a very high peak for me. It changed the course of my life, and my approach to ministry. There have been other high points as well. Lots of them… And a lot of valleys in between, and some of them have been pretty dry. But here’s my point – David had some of those high peaks in his life, too. And he remembered them, those moments when God ‘pulled back the curtain’ and allowed a glimpse of his glory, his wonder, his love. David saw it, and he never forgot. 

So even out here in the desert, even out here hiding from his son. Even out here where the thought had to have occurred to him, “What kind of king am I? What kind of father am I?” Out in this dry, barren place… still David remembers: “I have seen you in the sanctuary… (I have) beheld your power (I know what you can do) and your glory (I know who you are).” He may have been far out in the desert, but not so far that he could no longer see the snow covered peaks in the distance behind him! And he remembered who God is. 

It may have been dry as dust out there at that moment in his life, but David could never forget those precious glimpses, those moments when God had ‘showed himself’ to him. And those memories served to affirm God’s word, and God’s presence, God’s promises to David. They were enough for David to be reminded that this God that he served was real, and powerful, and worthy of his continued praise and adoration. David in the present, remembers the past, and he starts to use … future tense verbs. 

He tells of what he intends to do in the future. And packed away in this little list is a surprise. 

Basically, what David says he’s going to do, is that he is never going to stop praising God. He repeats this in a number of ways: My lips will glorify you, my mouth will praise you, I will praise you, I will lift up my hands in your name.  In remembering who God was, in remembering what God had done for him, what God had revealed to him in the past, David has all he needs to move forward. God’s mercy and glory in the past is going to guide him in setting his course towards the future. 

And he determines, like the prophet Habakkuk who would come along later, that no matter what the circumstances of his life were, no matter how dry the desert might be, he had staked his claim: Yahweh was his God, he was going to live that out forever. He would continue to worship. He would continue to praise God. No matter what. He would remember who it was that he served. And he would never forget. 

One of the things that we say as we gather around the communion table are the words that Jesus shared with his disciples as he broke the bread, as he passed the cup… “This is my body, broken for you; this is my blood poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in remembrance of me.”  Jesus knew that the more we remember who he is, the more we learn of him, the more we spend time with him, deepening our relationship, broadening our love, sharpening our awareness of him, the stronger our ability will be to carry on – even through the driest deserts. 

And tucked away in the middle of these future tense verbs, right there in a list of statements in which David is affirming his intention to remember and live in God’s presence; in this list of things that he intends to do, he lists one thing that he is just as sure that God will do for him: in verse 5, he writes “I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods.” 

That is not an action plan, it is a statement of faith. It is an acknowledgement of something that he is sure that God will do for him. I will be fully satisfied. I may not be there now… out here in this dusty, hot, lonely desert. I may not get there for awhile – I may not even get there in this life (but who knows?). Doesn’t matter. I know the character of God. I have seen him in the sanctuary. I have beheld his power and his glory. And I know I will get there. 

I will be fully satisfied, as with the richest of foods.

My friends, wherever you are on your journey this evening/ morning… whether you are on the way up a mountain, or the way down. Whether your on a high plateau, or in some dry desert, look back and remember those places where God has taken your hand in the past… those places where God has led you deeper into his character, his plan, his love. And know… know… like David, that no matter how elusive it may seem right now, how difficult the journey is, that one day, you will be fully satisfied, too. 

And for the three of or four of those here today who are not experiencing any trials or troubles in your lives(!), for those who are completely content, and well adjusted and at peace – listen – keep pressing into God. Don’t think that you’ve tapped out the blessings of God. It may be good now – and praise God when it is! –  but God has so much more for you, too! You may be satisfied right now, but a day is coming when you will be fully satisfied. 

So, let us all, like David, keep pressing into God. Let us say with him

You, O 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.