MY SOUL PANTS FOR YOU, O LORD!

 ANCHOR OF LIFE DAILY DEVOTIONAL GUIDE For SUNDAY, 21ST MAY, 2023.

TOPIC: EXPOSITION OF PSALM 42 – Part 1

MY SOUL PANTS FOR YOU, O LORD!

MEMORIZE: “Because he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him; I will set him on high, because he has known My name.” Psalm 91:14.

SCRIPTURE READING: Psalm 42:1-2

“As the deer pants for the water brooks, 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?”

EXPOSITION:

If the book of Psalms be, as some have styled it, a mirror or looking-glass of pious and devout affections, this psalm in particular deserves, as much as any one psalm, to be so entitled, and is as proper as any to kindle and excite such in us: gracious desires are here strong and fervent; gracious hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, are here struggling, but the pleasing passion comes off a conqueror. Or we may take it for a conflict between sense and faith, sense objecting and faith answering. 

Holy love to God as the chief good and our felicity is the power of godliness, the very life and soul of religion, without which all external professions and performances are but a shell and carcase: now here we have some of the expressions of that love.

WHAT IS THE OBJECT OF HIS DESIRE AND WHAT IT IS HE THUS THIRSTS AFTER. 

(a.) He pants after God, he thirsts for God, not the ordinances themselves, but the God of the ordinances. A gracious soul can take little satisfaction in God's courts if it do not meet with God himself there: "O that I knew where I might find him! that I might have more of the tokens of his favour, the graces and comforts of his Spirit, and the earnests of his glory." 

 (b.) He has, herein, an eye to God as the living God, that has life in himself, and is the fountain of life and all happiness to those that are his, the living God, not only in opposition to dead idols, the works of men's hands, but to all the dying comforts of this world, which perish in the using. Living souls can never take up their rest any where short of a living God. 

 (c.) He longs to come and appear before God,--to make himself known to him, as being conscious to himself of his own sincerity,--to attend on him, as a servant appears before his master, to pay his respects to him and receive his commands,--to give an account to him, as one from whom our judgment proceeds. To appear before God is as much the desire of the upright as it is the dread of the hypocrite. The psalmist knew he could not come into God's courts without incurring expense, for so was the law, that none should appear before God empty; yet he longs to come, and will not grudge the charges. 

 

WHAT IS THE DEGREE OF THIS DESIRE. 

It is very importunate; it is his soul that pants, his soul that thirsts, which denotes not only the sincerity, but the strength, of his desire. His longing for the water of the well of Bethlehem was nothing to this. He compares it to the panting of a hart, or deer, which is naturally hot and dry, especially of a hunted buck, after the water-brooks. Thus earnestly does a gracious soul desire communion with God, thus impatient is it in the want of that communion, so impossible does it find it to be satisfied with anything short of that communion, and so insatiable is it in taking the pleasures of that communion when the opportunity of it returns, still thirsting after the full enjoyment of him in the heavenly kingdom.

PRAYER POINT: Lord, I Desire More Of You In My Life In Jesus Name. 

DAILY BIBLE READING IN A YEAR –  Job 22-24.