The Thirsting Soul Satisfied in God - Psalm 63 & Making Good Choices - Purity 705
Purity 705 04/14/2022 Purity 705 Podcast
Good morning,
Today’s photo of a boardwalk pathway that leads through a tunnel
of foliage to the blue water of Indian River beyond comes to us from a friend
who captured this shot while strolling along “Riverview Drive” near Sebastian Florida,
through the “carnival for the senses” that was composed of the sounds of live
music, the smells of local food venders cooking their wares, and the beguiling
sights of things both crafted by man and made by our Heavenly Father.
When we walk through this world we will be drawn and attracted
to a variety of things by our senses but we have to be wise and discerning with
what we choose to indulge in and in what path we decided t follow.
My sister in-law, Megan, periodically prompts my niece and nephews to “make
good choices” and I find it amusing when she says it but that simple advice to
guide her children is pure wisdom and is a good piece of advice for children of
all ages as this world has a wide variety of choices and pathways through life
we can choose from that may not always be good for us and some that will lead
to pain, suffering, and death.
Well it’s Thursday again and as is my habit I share another
photo of a pathway as a reminder and an encouragement to make the most
excellent choice to follow the pathway of Christian Discipleship.
On Thursdays, I facilitate a Men’s Freedom in Christ
Discipleship Course on Zoom and even though I am the facilitator I find the
course material, that teaches us how to apply the truth’s of who we are in
Christ to our lives, to be a great
reminder to myself of the “good” choice I made when I put my faith in Jesus
Christ as my Lord and Savior and chose to follow Him in the ways I live my life. Christian Discipleship is really just trying
to progressively live according to God’s wisdom and ways rather than our own
and I have found that it leads to a life of abundant living that is defined by
the fruit of the Spirit.
Part of that commitment to follow the Lord includes a decision
to read the Bible on a daily basis to renew my mind and to hear God’s voice
through His word. Some morning Bible
studies are better than others, but I can honestly say that there is always
something good to take from every session of Bible Study because the Bible
contains the wisdom of “living water” that can quench our thirsts and the spiritual
“food” and that can satisfy our souls!
Currently I am reading
through the NASB and in this version Psalm 63 has the heading “The Thirsting
Soul Satisfied in God” and I thought
that it was so absolutely true and fitting for Psalm 63 that I thought I would include
it in today’s blog and recite it on the podcast.
The Thirsting Soul Satisfied in God
Psalm 63:1-11 (NKJV)
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 marrow and fatness,
And my mouth shall praise You with joyful lips.
6
When
I remember You on my bed,
I meditate on You in the night watches.
7
Because
You have been my help,
Therefore in the shadow of Your wings I will rejoice.
8
My
soul follows close behind You;
Your right hand upholds me.
9
But
those who seek my life, to destroy it,
Shall go into the lower parts of the earth.
10
They
shall fall by the sword;
They shall be a portion for jackals.
11
But
the king shall rejoice in God;
Everyone who swears by Him shall glory;
But the mouth of those who speak lies shall be stopped.
One day all those who speak lies will have to admit the truth. One
day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
Psalm 63 is an anthem for Christian Discipleship that speaks
of deep love we can have for the God who loved us enough to die for us. It also
speaks of the fully engaged life of someone who is continually seeking the Lord’s
presence and seeking to apply His truth to every aspect of his life.
This is “the good choice” we need to make, every day. We need to choose Jesus as our Lord and Savior
and continuously choose to follow God’s will for our lives.
So make that good choice to keep walking and talking with God,
every day. When you walk in the Spirit and put forth your best effort to
represent God’s kingdom here on earth, you will see that your “good choice”
leads to a life of peace, love, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness,
patience, self-control, and joy!
______________________________________________________________
Today’s Bible verses comes to us from “The NLT Bible Promise
Book for Men”.
This
morning’s meditation verses are:
John 11:25-26 (NLT2)
25 Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me
will live, even after dying.
26 Everyone
who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die. Do you believe this,
Martha?”
Today’s Bible verses, are a personal favorite of mine and contain what I consider to be the
definitive question for all mankind to consider. “Do you believe this?”
Christ couldn’t be more plan here guys.
Jesus tells Martha and all of us: I am the resurrection and the life.
Anyone who believe in me will live, even after dying. Everyone, who lives in me and believes in me
will never ever die. Do you believe this…”
Notice here Jesus is talking about a commitment that goes beyond “just believing”
in Him, Jesus says “Everyone who lives in me”.
That points to a life in Christ, a life of following Jesus.
So do you believe this?
The implication is clear. IF we believe, and live in, Christ, we will “never
ever die”.
As we walk through Holy Week these verses couldn’t come at a better
time. As we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection Sunday this weekend, let’s be true
to our decision to “believe this” by encouraging ourselves and others to “live
in Christ” every day.
If these verses don’t present the truth of who Christ is to you, nothing will. But if you can “believe this”, please choose to “live this” life in Christ and share the truth that leads to everlasting life with everyone you encounter.
As always, I
invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I always share insights from prominent
Christian theologians and counselors to assist my brothers and sisters in
Christ with their walk.
Today we continue
sharing from John Piper’s “Don’t Waste Your Life” .
As
always, I share this information for educational purposes and encourage all to
purchase John Pipers’ books for your own private study and to
support his work. This resource is available on many websites for
less than $5.00.
2
Breakthrough—the Beauty of Christ, My Joy
In
1968 I had no idea what it would mean for me to be a minister of the Word.
Being a pastor was as far from my expectations as being a pastor’s wife was
from Noël’s. What then? Would it mean being a teacher, a missionary, a writer,
maybe a professor of literature with good theology? All I knew was that
ultimate Reality had suddenly centered for me on the Word of God. The great
Point and Purpose and Essence that I longed to link up with was now connected
unbreakably with the Bible. The mandate was clear: “Do your best to present
yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (2
Timothy 2:15). For me, that meant seminary, with a focus on understanding and
rightly handling the Bible.
Learning Not to Cut Off My Own Head
The battle to learn the
obvious continued. The modern assault on reality—that there exists a real
objective reality outside ourselves that can be truly known—had turned Bible
study into a swamp of subjectivity. You could see it in the church as small
groups shared their subjective impressions about what Bible texts meant “for
me” without an anchor in any original meaning. And you could see it in academic
books as creative scholars cut their own heads off by arguing that texts have
no objective meaning.
If
there is only one life to live in this world, and if it is not to be wasted,
nothing seemed more important to me than finding out what God really meant in
the Bible, since he inspired men to write it. If that was up for grabs, then no
one could tell which life is worthy and which life is wasted. I was stunned at
the gamesmanship in the scholarly world as authors used all their intellectual
powers to nullify what they themselves wrote! That is, they expressed theories
of meaning that argued there is no single, valid meaning in texts. Ordinary
people reading this book will (I hope) find this incredible. I don’t blame you.
It is. But the fact remains that to this day well-paid, well-fed professors use
tuition and tax dollars to argue that “since literature does not accurately
convey reality, literary interpretation need not accurately convey the reality which
is literature.”
In
other words, since we can’t know objective reality outside ourselves, there can
be no objective meaning in what we write either. So interpretation does not
mean trying to find any objective thing that an author put in a text, but simply
means that we express the ideas that enter our head as we read. Which doesn’t
really matter because when others read what we have written, they won’t have
any access to our intention either. It’s all a game. Only it is sinister,
because all these scholars (and small-group members) insist that their own love
letters and contracts be measured by one rule: what they intended to say. Any
mumbo-jumbo about creatively hearing “yes” when I wrote “no” will not go down
at the bank or the marriage counselor.
And
so it was that Existentialism came home to roost in the Bible: Existence
precedes essence. That is, I don’t find
meaning—I create it. The Bible is a
lump of clay, and I am the potter. Interpretation is creation. My existence as
a subject creates the “essence” of the object. Don’t laugh. They were serious.
They still are. Today it just has other names.
Defending the Brightness of the Broad-Day Sun
Into this morass of
subjectivity came a Professor of Literature from the University of Virginia, E.
D. Hirsch. Reading his book Validity in
Interpretation during my seminary years was like suddenly finding a rock
under my feet in the quicksand of contemporary concepts about meaning. Like
most of the guides God sent along my path, Hirsch defended the obvious. Yes, he
argued, there does exist an original
meaning that a writer had in his mind when he wrote. And yes, valid
interpretation seeks that intention in the text and gives good reasons for
claiming to see it. This seemed as obvious to me as the broad-day sun. It was
everybody’s assumption in daily life when they spoke or wrote.
Perhaps
even more important, it seemed courteous. None of us wants our notes and
letters and contracts interpreted differently than we intend them. Therefore,
common courtesy, or the Golden Rule, requires that we read others the way we
would be read. It seemed to me that much philosophical talk about meaning was
just plain hypocritical: At the university I undermine objective meaning, but
at home (and at the bank) I insist on it. I wanted no part of that game. It
looked like an utterly wasted life. If there is no valid interpretation based
on real objective, unchanging, original meaning, then my whole being said, “Let
us eat, drink, and be merry. But by no means let us treat scholarship as if it
really matters.”[1]
---------------------------more
tomorrow------------------------
Join
our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage Breaker”, "Freedom in
Christ" series of Discipleship Classes via the mt4christ247 podcast!
at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com, You can
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Email
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My
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Seek, and Knock on Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)
Encouragement for the Path of Christian Discipleship
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