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Bible preaching from the pulpit of Choice Hills Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina
All right, we're going to be tonight in Psalm number 42.
Psalm 42.
We're actually, we'll read the whole psalm, but we're going to be only in two verses.
Verses 1 and 2 tonight.
Let's read Psalm 42, starting in verse number 1.
The title says,
The title says, My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God?
When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me, for I had gone with the multitude.
I went with them to the house of God with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holy day.
Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me?
Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance.
O my God, my soul is cast down within me. Therefore will I remember thee from the land of Jordan and of the Hermonites from the hill Mizar.
Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy water spouts. The Lord says, I will say unto God my rock, why hast thou forgotten me? Why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?
As with a sword in my bones, mine enemies reproach me.
While they say daily unto me, where is thy God?
Why art thou cast down, O my soul?
And why art thou disquieted within me?
Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise him
who is the health of my countenance and my God.
Let's pray together.
Our Father in heaven, we thank you for the word.
Thank you for the encouragement, the challenge, Lord, that your word gives to us.
And Lord, we come to your word not receiving it as just the word of men or as the word of David only,
but as it is in truth, the word of God.
Lord, would you please strengthen and help and encourage and challenge your people tonight
as we look at these couple of verses in Psalm 42.
Lord, be our teacher, be our instructor.
We need you, Lord.
I pray that you would give us, truly give us a thirst
for you. Let us not serve. Let us not work for anything except for you, for yourself, for your
person. Help us, Lord. Give us this hunger and thirst that we need. In Jesus' name, amen.
So as we continue our study through the book of Psalms,
the heart of the Bible, we see another example of David expressing his heart.
Now, this is in a good way.
This psalm actually has good and bad elements in it.
This is another one of those ups and downs of David
that we constantly see in the book of Psalms,
but is encouraging to us because it reminds us of our own ups and downs.
And verse number one and verse number two is what we're going to look at tonight.
The Bible says, as the heart, heart is just a male deer,
that's all that refers to,
as the heart panteth after the water brooks,
so panteth my soul after thee, O God.
My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?
Now we have to remember something,
when we see this idea of thirst,
of course the writer here we assume is David.
It's not actually labeled as David.
But we can see that David or the writer, the psalmist, is someone who is obviously a believer.
And you see in this a believer who is thirsting after God.
And that just speaks of his desire.
He compares it to maybe a deer that's been running through the forest,
and he's out of breath, it's hot, he's tired,
and he comes to a brook, and he's panting because he's thirsty.
And this is the description David gives of himself.
But when we think of someone thirsting after God, we have to remember that it is not
natural. It is not natural for a man to thirst after God. In fact, it's the opposite. It's the
very opposite. We see it in the scripture, but we have to remember we're dealing with people. When
you see somebody like David, when you see somebody like the psalmist, you're dealing with a believer
who is under the influence of God's power and work and grace in his life.
Without that, there would be no hunger or thirst after God at all.
There would be none of that.
And we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that there is this
in unbelievers because it's not there. You know, this I know as a missionary, one thing that,
you know, that in mission conferences you go around and everybody wants to, the missionaries,
whether it's true or not is kind of irrelevant. They want to present a certain thing about their
mission field. And you get this presentation of these teeming masses that are just waiting for the gospel and that doesn't exist.
I don't know of any place that that exists in those terms. Certainly there are places
where the Lord is at work, but naturally man is not looking for God. Man is not thirsty
for God at all. Does that come to a surprise to any of us?
It shouldn't.
It should not come as a surprise to any of us.
Look if you would at Psalm 53,
a few pages over.
Psalm 53 verse 1.
You've read these verses before in the New Testament.
Psalm 53 verse 1 says,
The fool has said in his heart,
There is no God.
Corrupt are they and have done abominable iniquity. There is none that doeth good.
This is from Romans chapter 3, of course. God looked down from heaven upon the children of men.
So there's no distinction here made. We've already covered this in Psalm 14 because this overlaps in these two Psalms, but we saw that the
children of men is a word that doesn't describe Israel or Gentiles. It is just, you're born of Adam.
It's all encompassing of humanity. And it says this, God looked down from heaven upon the children
of men to see if there were any that did understand that did seek God. Every one of them, notice the individual language, every one of them
is gone back. They are altogether become filthy. There is none that doeth good, no, not one. And if
you look in Romans, the parallel passage in the New Testament, Paul goes on to say,
there is none that seeketh after God. And of course, that's the description of man in his natural state without any influence of God in his life.
What do you find?
You find men do not seek God.
They do not thirst after God.
They do not want God interrupting their life of sin.
They don't want it.
They don't want it.
And you see it, if you look back to Genesis real quick to chapter 3,
this is the first mention of mankind in sin.
In Genesis chapter 3 verse 8, notice what it says.
Genesis 3 verse 8, after Adam and Eve have sinned,
the Bible says,
And they heard the voice of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day.
And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God
amongst the trees of the garden.
And the Lord God called unto Adam and said unto him,
Where art thou?
And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden,
and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.
You want to know what mankind is doing?
They're not thirsting after God.
They've been doing what they've been doing since the garden.
They're running away from God.
They're avoiding God.
They're avoiding Him.
So go back to Psalm 42.
When we see Psalm 42 and we see a man who is thirsting after God,
I just want you to contrast the two.
God says, no man, there is none that seeketh after God.
We saw Psalm 53.
We saw the example of it, the first example of it in Genesis 3.
What is the difference?
Why is the psalmist seeking and thirsting?
He has an inward desire for God.
Where did that come from?
It did not come naturally.
When we see a man that's thirsting after God like this,
we know, because of what God has told us about man,
that God has been at work in this man.
has told us about man, that God has been at work in this man.
And when we look at ourselves,
and when we see any thirst that we have for God,
any desire toward Him,
you know it is a product of the grace of God at work in your life.
Let me ask you a question.
Do you have a thirst for God? I don't want you to think about how much, how often.
Is there any time in your life when you have had a true thirst for God himself?
That was the product and the influence of nothing more or less than the grace of God.
Period.
That's the only reason it's there.
This is why we have no room to boast.
If God left us alone, if God left us alone,
we would run as far and as fast from God as possible.
But because of God's grace and his work in us,
we do have a thirst for Him.
Now, it might not be what it should be, but indeed it's there.
And I'll go a little bit further because there's plenty of people, and I'll cover this in a minute,
but there's plenty of people in churches that have never, listen, please listen,
that have never at any time in their life thirsted for God.
People who sit in churches that have not one time in their life had a true inward thirst for God himself.
That person, that person is unconverted.
That person is in a natural state
because that is the natural state.
Because every person that has been influenced by the grace of God,
every person that has been under the influence of the grace of God,
God has put that in them.
Because if He didn't, they wouldn't have it.
You see what I'm saying?
If He didn't, there would be no seeking God at all.
And I fear that there are a lot of people
who sit in churches that never have had that.
Never have had that.
I was that guy.
I remember as a teenager, as a young kid,
I can't remember one time in my life
that I had a true thirst after God.
Church, perhaps.
Youth group, perhaps.
Other things related, maybe.
But not God himself.
Not one time.
Until the night, the very night that I got saved.
That night, God put something in my heart by His grace that had never been there before.
And that was a thirst for Him.
Notice, I want you to see verse 1 again.
As the heart panteth after the water books, so panteth my soul after, notice it, thee, O God.
My soul thirsteth for God.
And lest we somehow skip that
and didn't fully understand what he says,
he goes on and reiterates, for the living God.
So let me ask you a question,
and I'm not trying to be cute here.
For what is the psalmist thirsting?
He's thirsting for God himself.
Now, I want to make a point here.
What we see here is the psalmist thirsts after God himself,
not after something that I call God adjacent.
What do I mean by that?
Something that is God adjacent. What do I mean by that? Something that is God adjacent.
Something that is God adjacent is everything that is associated with God,
or you might say religion, Christianity, whatever you want to say.
All the things around the Lord, but not the Lord himself.
It could be things like church or acts of service
or it's just any number of things.
It could be things, even things like prayer or the Bible.
The psalmist doesn't say that.
He says he has a thirst for God.
And a lot of people get this confused.
thirst for God. And a lot of people, a lot of people get this, get this confused, get this confused.
You see, there are many, there's, we see this all the time. Religious people indeed often have a longing and sometimes even a great desire for God adjacent things. You see what I'm saying? For God adjacent things. There are plenty of people that go to the Mormon church that are super excited to be there.
There are plenty of people who go to the Catholic church
that are super excited to be there.
Right?
They're happy to see everybody
and they have fellowships
and they like the fellowships
and they want to go
and they look forward to it.
So it's not uncommon to see a religious person who has a hunger and a thirst for things that
are adjacent to God.
But deep within, let me just back up and say this one more, clarify it a little bit more,
is can a religious person have a thirst after things that are adjacent to God
and have no desire for God himself at the same time?
Yes.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Deep within an unconverted man,
even if he is a religious man,
is an aversion for God. He doesn't want God. He doesn't want God.
I might put it like this. Deep within an unconverted man, he is uncomfortable with God.
With God himself. Now, he might be comfortable in church. He might be comfortable with the Bible
even. He might be comfortable with religious people. He might be comfortable in church. He might be comfortable with the Bible even.
He might be comfortable with religious people.
He might be comfortable with, you know, working in the soup kitchen. Or he might even be comfortable at, you know, passing out a gospel tract or whatever.
Whatever acts of service that are adjacent.
And not all those things are bad.
In fact, none of them are bad.
But in himself, he has this kind of, he's not really comfortable with God himself.
You know why?
Because he has a conscience of sin.
That's how the Bible describes it.
Look, if you would, at Hebrews chapter 9.
We'll come back to Psalm in just a minute.
Hebrews chapter 9, verse 9.
It says this, Hebrews 9, 9, which was a figure for the time then present,
in which were offered both gifts and sacrifices
that could not make him that did the service perfect as pertaining to the conscience, In other words, he's saying, listen, he's saying,
none of the sacrifices could cleanse the conscience of sin.
None of the sacrifices in the Old Testament law
had the ability to give someone the assurance
that their record with God was clean.
In fact, the sacrifices themselves
reminded them every year
that they still had sin.
That's the whole point of this passage.
Verse 11, But Christ being come and high priest
of good things to come, by a
greater and more perfect tabernacle, not
made with hands, that is to say, not of this
building, neither by the blood of goats
and calves, but by his own
blood he entered in once into the
holy place, having obtained eternal
redemption for us. For
if the blood of bulls and of goats
and the ashes of an heifer,
sprinkling the unclean,
sanctify it to the purifying of the flesh,
how much more shall the blood of Christ,
listen to what it says,
who through the eternal spirit
offered himself without spot to God.
Here's what it does.
The blood of Christ purge your conscience
from dead works to serve the living God.
What does that mean?
That means before you had a conscience of sin.
That in the back of conscience just means with knowledge.
That's all it means.
It's the knowledge that you still have a problem between you and your God.
Your sin has not been fully removed.
The law could not do that.
But the blood of Christ can.
And so, Sister Karen, when you come to God,
you can come to God with, as Hebrews describes, boldness.
Because you know that because of the blood of Jesus,
your sins are forever gone.
You know what that produces?
It produces a relationship to God where you're no longer uncomfortable with Him.
You're not afraid of Him in that way.
You're not afraid of him in that way. You're not afraid of his judgment.
Because in our mind is the not the scriptural knowledge that our sins are gone by the blood of Christ. You see that? Look at chapter 10 verse 1. For law, having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things,
can never, with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually, make the comers thereunto perfect.
For then would they not have ceased to be offered, because that the worshipers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins.
It wasn't possible. should have had no more conscience of sins.
It wasn't possible.
They still had the knowledge of their sin.
Not so with the believer in the blood of Christ.
But see, with the unbelievers,
they're okay and they can have a desire and a thirst for things that are adjacent to God
but never quite comfortable with God Himself.
I've seen this personally.
I have in my own family.
I've seen it.
I've seen people go on and on and on about the church and this church and that
and they can talk about the rosary and they can talk about Mary
and they can talk about offering prayers and baptisms and ministries
and they can talk about everything under the sun.
But I have seen people shift in their chair
when Jesus is brought up.
The same people!
How can a person who goes to a Christian church
be uncomfortable with the God of Christianity?
But they are.
You know why? The conscience of Christianity. But they are. You know why?
The conscience of sin.
And you can,
they actually reveal it
because instead of referencing God,
the Lord God himself,
they reference every religious thing
except the Lord Himself.
Have you ever, just pay attention,
I just want you to pay attention
when you meet religious people.
And I'm just talking about,
I'm not trying to cast aspersions,
I'm just saying,
when you meet religious people,
what do they talk about?
Do they talk about religion
or do they talk about the Almighty?
Do they talk about Jesus?
Right?
I don't know about you,
but talking about God is like
the greatest subject you can talk about.
It's the greatest thing to
discuss, right?
I mean, we do cool things
at the church. We have fun. We have
fellowship. We do it. We love it. It's great.
We tell people, we do all kinds of things.
It's all great.
But like, talking about the Lord is the greatest thing that we do.
This is what I call things that are God adjacent.
You know, this is a trap into which believers can also fall.
We can fall and people do it.
Preachers do it badly.
And they crash and burn when they do.
Falling in love with the ministry rather than God.
Having a desire to preach rather than a thirst for God.
That's why Deuteronomy 6, 5, you know this verse,
and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.
You know, here's the thing, in the whole of the scripture,
in the Old and the New Testament, the focus is God himself.
It has always been that way, it always will be that way,
and when we get to heaven, all the attention and focus is not going to be about
crowns and streets and pearly gates.
It's not going to be any of that.
You know where the focus is all going to be?
It's all going to be upon God and the Lamb
who sits on the throne.
But is it not true? like going back to Psalm 42,
is it not true that Christians often do not share
this thirst that David describes?
How often have you not,
how often have I not had a thirst for God at all?
How often have you not, how often have I not had a thirst for God at all?
Every one of us in here knows that, knows what that's like.
Every one of us, you don't have to be saved five minutes and your thirst for God is gone.
What causes us to lose our thirst for God or to not have it?
Sometimes we're thirsty.
In fact, we might even say we're parched,
but we somehow still feel content.
We don't feel a need because what's thirst?
Thirst is a need for water, right?
And so at the core of this idea of thirst is the idea of need.
It's felt need, what we recognize that we need. And here's the core of this idea of thirst is the idea of need. It's felt need.
What we recognize that we need.
And here's the thing.
There are oftentimes things in our lives that trick us,
that dupe us into thinking that we don't have a need for this water.
God is the water.
And one of the primary things identified in scripture is abundance.
Abundance.
Let me show you a couple of verses on this.
Look at Revelation chapter three to begin
and then we'll go back to Hosea.
Revelation chapter three.
Revelation 3.
Just look at one verse here, verse 17,
to the church of Laodicea.
The Lord speaks and says to the church at Laodicea.
Now we know that Laodicea was lukewarm.
He says, verse 17, Because thou sayest, I am rich and increased with goods and have need of nothing.
Would you say they're thirsty or not?
No.
They don't feel thirsty.
They feel no need.
They feel no need for God.
And knowest not that thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.
But why do they feel that they don't need anything?
Why do they feel like they are not thirsty?
Because of their abundance.
That's what the verse says.
Look at Hosea chapter 4.
Hosea chapter 4, verse 7.
Hosea 4, verse 7. Hosea 4, verse 7. Now you know verse 6 is a pretty common verse in Hosea. My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also
reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me. Seeing thou hast forgotten the law Now notice verse 7 very carefully.
I could go into Amos 6, if you're writing these down.
Amos 6, if you're writing these down, Amos chapter 6,
verses 3 through 6. Abundance, abundance will kill our thirst for God. It doesn't mean that
abundance is necessarily evil. Actually, the Bible says the opposite. God often gives us abundance,
but it has the ability to kill our thirst for God because with abundance comes the
ability to play you know those of you nobody in our in our congregation that had went through the
depression all I think everyone here is past was born after the depression but one thing in the
depression is people had very little many people had very little abundance. Because the thing is, abundance gives you the power and the ability to play,
to indulge, to goof off, and to spend.
It goes into alcohol.
It goes into immorality of all different kinds.
You think of Las Vegas.
You know why Las Vegas exists?
It's because of American abundance.
People have enough money to burn at the casinos.
It is the quintessential
example of what I'm talking about.
And you go to Las Vegas,
those people, not the
people who live there, but those people
go to the, they do not go there thirsting
for God.
You see,
this kind of abundance
and these lusts
kills the desire for God in us.
And you know what?
When God finds us in this condition
where we have no thirst for God,
and it is a condition all of us fall into from time to time.
You know what He does?
He works in our lives in such a way
that He awakens in us.
He awakens, I should say, He awakens in us. He awakens, I should say,
He awakens us to the reality
that all of those things
that we have purchased with our abundance are empty.
And so finally we come to the point
where we start to get thirsty again.
It's kind of like when you drink,
you're thirsty.
Have you ever seen someone,
I met someone who says, oh, I'm so thirsty,
and they go into the store and buy a Coke?
I think maybe if you do that, maybe you need it.
We need to have a conversation after church.
Is it good, good, good, good?
And it quenches their thirst and masks the fact that they're thirsty, right?
The best way to make a man thirsty
is to take away the cheap and poor imitations of water,
and that's sometimes what the Lord does.
He makes us thirsty.
When you think about water,
when you think about water, you know, that's what we're talking about in Psalm 42. We're talking about the heart drinking the water, right?
Water, specifically. Because water is the substance that's more important than any other
substance to the human body.
You know, you could have your pantry stocked, your deep freezer, your refrigerator stocked to the gills with food.
You could have $500,000 in your bank.
You could own a grocery store.
And if you don't have water, none of that matters.
You know that? It is the single most important thing to your body, to the functioning of your body.
And so it is with the Lord.
He is the water.
And so He is the one truly essential thing.
The problem is we don't recognize that
because every shiny thing that we're able to buy with our abundance
deceives us into thinking we don't need the very thing that we need more than every other
thing. We have to recognize that the only thing that is essential is God Himself.
And then finally in verse number two,
the last thing I want to show you is this.
Now I talked about things that are God adjacent.
The temple is a good example.
The Pharisees, you think about the Pharisees.
Do you think they like going to the temple?
Of course they like going to the temple.
That's why they did it. They liked going to the temple. But were they going to the
temple for God? No. They were interested and they had a hunger and a thirst for
those things that were God adjacent. Like the temple and the sacrifices and all the
ritual and all of those things.
But look at verse 2. It's interesting. Verse 2 says this. My soul thirsteth for
God, for the living God.
And then he asks a question.
When shall I come and appear before God?
He mentions in verse 4, he mentions the temple directly.
The house of God.
So he speaks, the psalmist, obviously, he's saying,
I haven't been to the temple in a while.
I have a thirst for God, but I have a longing to go to the temple as well.
That's what he's saying.
You see, he remembered fondly
the times that he went to the temple in verse four.
He longed to go there.
So I want to make a point here.
When a person is thirsty for God,
the evidence of that thirst
is a desire for the things of God.
But you got to be careful.
You got to be careful and not to confuse the order.
Because the things of God, the temple, the sacrifice, the ritual, the holiday, the church
attendance, the special events, the fellowships, all those things that are kind of God adjacent,
those things are not a substitute for God himself.
But see, we get it switched.
And we think, well, if I do all of these things and I go to church or I go to the temple or whatever,
like the Pharisees thought, we think, well, then that means, that shows that I have a thirst for God.
But inwardly, there is none.
those that have a thirst for God,
but inwardly there is none.
But on the other hand,
when we do have a thirst for God,
like David or the psalmist has in this verse,
do you know what he desired?
He longed for the things of God.
He longed to go to the temple.
He longed, if you will, to go to the church.
We know the temple is not a church, but the application.
In other words, our desire for the things of God should come out of our thirst for God himself.
So if a person has a thirst for God,
I don't want to hear it.
I don't want to hear that.
I don't want to hear that that person's sitting at home,
just chilling and having no interaction with the things of God. I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear that that person's sitting at home just chilling and having no interaction with the things of God.
I don't believe it.
A thirst for God produces a desire to be involved in the things of God,
as you see here.
It produces a desire to pray, a desire to read the Scripture,
a desire to fellowship with God's people,
because all of those things are related to God,
and God is the object of our affection,
and He is the one after whom we thirst.
And so of course we want to be around His people.
Of course we want to be in the church.
Of course we want to serve Him in various ways.
That comes out of the thirst of God.
It can't replace thirst for God Himself,
but it grows out of it.
Things like church attendance, Sunday school,
giving out the gospel, serving in various capacities,
reading your Bible, praying,
all the other things come out of that thirst for God.
So the question I have is,
how are we doing on our desire for the Lord?
Do we really have a desire for Him?
Could we honestly say with the psalmist here, my soul thirsteth for God? I'll tell you something.
If that's true, it's evident.
It's evident.
It shows.
It shows. It shows.
But it is also just as easy
for us to be in a place
where we have no inward,
no real inward desire for God.
Maybe one day we did.
But through abundance,
playing games with our life,
through sin,
that thirst has been killed.
Maybe it was there.
If it's never been there, I have serious questions about the eternal life of that person.
But at one point it was there.
It was there because God put it there, right?
And then somehow it got squelched.
The Lord wants us to get it back.
He wants us to serve Him with a thirst for Him.
And that thirst has to be first.
Let's pray together.