My Soul Thirsts for God

As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? (Psalm 42:1–2)

What makes this so beautiful and so crucial for us is that he is not thirsting mainly for relief from his threatening circumstances. He is not thirsting mainly for escape from his enemies or for their destruction.

It’s not wrong to want relief, and to pray for it. It is sometimes right to pray for the defeat of enemies. But more important than any of that is God himself.

When we think and feel with God in the Psalms, this is the main result: We come to love God, and we want to see God and be with God and be satisfied in admiring and exulting in God.

A likely translation of the end of verse 2 is, “When will I come and see the face of God?” The final answer to that question was given in John 14:9 and 2 Corinthians 4:4. Jesus said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” And Paul said that when we are converted to Christ we see “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”

When we see the face of Christ, we see the face of God. And we see the glory of the face of Christ, Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:4 and 6, when we hear the story of the gospel of his death and resurrection. He calls it “the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” Or (verse 6): “the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

May the Lord increase your hunger and your thirst to see the face of God. And may he grant your desire, even today, through the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

John Piper 

Which grace do you need most today?

BIBLE MEDITATION:

As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. 1 Peter 4:10

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

The Bible speaks of the “manifold” grace of God. What does that mean? It means we can experience God’s grace in many ways. For instance, there is singing grace. When Paul and Silas were in prison, God gave them grace to sing (see Acts 16:25).

There is speaking grace. Colossians 4:6 says, “Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.” God will give you the ability to speak, even about your troubles, with His grace.

God also gives us strengthening grace. Timothy was often sick with many infirmities. Paul told him to “be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:1).

ACTION POINT:

Which do you need today? Singing grace? Speaking grace? Strengthening grace? All three? Spend time in the Word of God today and draw from the manifold grace of God.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

The Different Tenses of Grace

We always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Thessalonians 1:11–12)

Grace is not only God’s disposition to do good for us when we don’t deserve it — we call this “undeserved favor”; God’s grace is also a power from God that acts in our lives and makes good things happen in us and for us — which we also don’t deserve.

Paul said that we fulfill our resolves for good “by his power” (verse 11). And then he adds at the end of verse 12, “according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” The power that actually works in our lives to make Christ-exalting obedience possible is an exertion of the grace of God.

You can see this also in 1 Corinthians 15:10:

By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

So, grace is an active, present, transformative, obedience-enabling power.

Therefore, this grace, which moves in power from God to you at a point in time, is both past and future. It has already done something for you or in you and therefore is past. And it is about to do something in you and for you, and so it is future — both five seconds from now and five million years from now.

God’s grace is ever cascading over the waterfall of the present from the inexhaustible river of grace coming to us from the future into the ever-increasing reservoir of grace in the past. In the next five minutes, you will receive sustaining grace flowing to you from the future — in this you trust; and you will accumulate another five minutes worth of grace in the reservoir of the past — for this you give thanks.

John Piper 

You’ve got an inheritance that will never lose value

BIBLE MEDITATION:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to His abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in Heaven for you. 1 Peter 1:3-4

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

A man was sitting on a street corner, weeping. A friend saw him and asked, “Why are you crying?”

“Haven’t you read the papers? Rockefeller died.”

The friend responded, “Why are you crying? You were no kin of his!”

“That’s why I’m crying!”

You have an inheritance right now as a child of God. It is incorruptible. The foul breath of decay and gnawing tooth of time cannot take it away. It is undefiled. No high-powered lawyer can find a loophole. It will never fade away. 

ACTION POINT:

If you understood what you have in Jesus, you would never be jealous of anybody. Ezekiel 44:28 says that God is your inheritance. You have an inheritance that is faultless, flawless, fade-less, and reserved in heaven for you!

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Have Mercy on Me, O God

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. (Psalm 51:1)

Three times: “Have mercy,” “according to your steadfast love,” and “according to your abundant mercy.”

This is what God had promised in Exodus 34:6–7:

“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty.”

David knew that there were guilty who would not be forgiven. And there were guilty who by some mysterious work of redemption would not be counted as guilty, but would be forgiven. Psalm 51 is his way of laying hold on that mystery of mercy.

“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.” We know more of the mystery of this redemption than David did. We know Christ. But we lay hold of the mercy in the same way he did.

The decisive thing he does is turn, helpless, to the mercy and love of God. Today that means turning, helpless, to Christ, whose blood secures all the mercy we need.

John Piper 

We’re just passing through. Our real home is waiting.

BIBLE MEDITATION:

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul. 1 Peter 2:11

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

God saved you out of this world and sent you back into this world to tell the world that Jesus saves. He is scattering believers as precious seed, ambassadors upon foreign soil for the King of kings.

You are also scattered as a persevering saint. You are a foreigner in a land where you march to a different drummer. You don’t settle down in this world. It’s not your home; you’re only passing through.

ACTION POINT:

We should pray, “Lord, if I am building a nest in this world, put a thorn in it.” If you dabble and delight in this world, yet your citizenship is in heaven, you’re going to have one foot in the world and one in heaven—just enough “religion” in you to make you miserable in the world, and just enough of the world in you to make you miserable in your spiritual life.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

He takes our anxiety. We take His peace.

BIBLE MEDITATION:

But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint. Isaiah 40:31

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

What does it mean to “renew” your strength? It literally means “changed,” as if you changed clothes. You remove your rags of weakness and put on God’s royal robes of strength. God promises to exchange our strength with His strength.

You see, the Christian life is not just simply a changed life, it is an exchanged life.

God doesn’t just change us from what we were to something better. He exchanges His life with us.

He takes our sin. We take His holiness.

He takes our weakness. We take His strength.

He takes our anxiety. We take His peace.

Sounds great. But what’s the problem? We get tired of waiting for the change.

ACTION POINT:

Friend, don’t give up. The wait is never too long when God is in charge.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers