Introduction:
Therefore, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.
1 Corinthians x.31
The last few times we’ve been together, we’ve looked at several stories of men that God killed. Two of the four were directly related to the glory of God. Jehoram, in 2 Chronicles 21, led the people of God to worship idols, not glorifying God as God. And Herod, in Acts 12, did not give God glory but kept it for himself. The other two were indirectly about the glory of God. Uzzah, in 1 Chronicles 13, touching the Arc as the nation worshiped the way they wanted to rather than how God had instructed. The whole scene was an implicit denial of the glory of God. And finally Nabal, in 1 Samuel 25, where we saw the glory of God as the just and true Judge of all the earth.
This morning, we’re going to take up this topic of the glory of God and ask the question: How can we glorify God in all things?
The command to do so is right there in 1 Corinthians x.31
Therefore, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.
1 Corinthians x.31
There is no sacred/secular divide in this verse. “All things” means all things: church things and the ordinary things of life, worship on Sunday morning and drinking a glass of water on Monday afternoon. We are to glorify God in all things.
The question is: How do we glorify God in all things? We’re going to turn to David for an answer, and our text today is found in Psalm 63.
Text:
Psalm 63
Summary of the Text:
David wrote this psalm during a time when he was on the run, hiding out in the wilderness, his life hanging by a thread. It was probably during that period of time when king Saul was hunting him and he had his conflict with Nabal.
David is not riding high at this point. He’s on the run, living in caves, it’s a desperate situation. Things could definitely be better. Yet, he rejoices in God, in the midst of this dire situation. His desire is to see God glorified.
So let’s look at what David says in this psalm, and see if we can identify the keys to his desire for God and God’s glory, so that we might stir up a similar desire in our own hearts.
1. Claiming God
David begins by claiming God.
O God, thou art my God;
This is personal. He doesn’t say “O God, You are God” but rather, “You are my God”. Meus Deus, my God.
The atheist says, “There is no god.” [Ps 14:1]
The pagan says, “There are many gods.” [Judges 10:6]
But the Christian says, “There is one God, and He is my God!”
And as Charles Spurgeon said, “possession breeds desire”.
This is our God, and we are His people. This is personal! When we get to seeking God, in a few moments, realize that you will not be motivated to seek another man’s God, He must be your God if you will be motivated to seek Him.
You must claim Him as your own. This is one reason that Baptist churches have, historically at least, been hesitant to baptize young children, preferring to delay baptism until the person is old enough to begin identifying themselves independently. We want to be certain that the profession of faith they make prior to baptism, is their own, and not a parroting of the faith of their parents.
God is not a Father. He is our Father. Christ is not a savior. He is our savior, my savior. Christianity is not a religion of generics, but of particulars. Our baptist forefathers were known as Particular Baptists because of their belief in the doctrine of election, that God has chosen particular people for salvation, and those people are known by Him, and shall all know Him.
When the prophet Jeremiah described the New Covenant, the distinguishing feature that set it apart from the Old Covenant was the fact that every member of the New Covenant would know God personally, for themselves.
Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah—not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the LORD.But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, “Know the LORD,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.
Jeremiah xxxi.31-34
To be a Christian, a member of the New Covenant, even to be baptized and admitted to church membership (visible membership in the New Covenant), you must be able to say with David,
O God, Thou art my God;
2. Thirsting for God
Let’s skip over the second phrase of verse 1 for a moment. We’ll come back to it soon. But look at the following lines.
My soul thirsts for You;
My flesh longs for You
In a dry and thirsty land
Where there is no water.
Thirst is one of the most primitive and primal desires we can have as creatures of flesh. Water is essential to life. And when we have not consumed enough water, we begin to thirst for it, to crave it.
David says he thirsts for God the way we would thirst for water if we were in a dry and parched land, the desert, where there is no water. I don’t know about you, but I’ve not spent a lot of time in the desert. I’ve been thirsty before. I’ve worked outside in the heat and been really thirsty. But I’ve never spent a day in the desert without water. I can only imagine that the desire for water would be overwhelming.
It would be something like how addicts describe the desire for whatever they are addicted to. It would be consuming, the only thing you could think about, the largest idea in your mind, pushing all other concerns to the background and drowning them out by the sheer volume of the desire for water.
This is the language David uses. David is addicted to God.
I read a book last year by a neuroscientist and professor of developmental psychology, who happens to be a former drug addict. The author, whose name is Marc Lewis, is a neuroscientist. He’s not a Christian and wasn’t intentionally talking about how to glorify God. But he had some good insights. The book is titled, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is not a Disease. It is a study of how the brain works, specifically, how addiction develops. His premise is that desire is what leads to addiction, but desire is also the key to breaking addiction, to rewiring the brain.
Notice the similarity between what he said and what Saint Augustine says in his Confessions.
The desire for happiness is not in myself alone or in a few friends, but is found in everybody.…Even if one person pursues it in one way, and another in a different way, yet there is one goal which all are striving to attain, namely to experience joy.…Those who think that the happy life is found elsewhere, pursue another joy and not the true one. Nevertheless their will remains drawn towards some image of the true joy.
Augustine, Confessions, book X, par. 31,32
Augustine is saying the same thing the neuroscientist is saying, that we are all driven by desire. Augustine identifies it as a desire for happiness or joy, that can only be truly satisfied in God, yet we seek it in other, lesser things.
Lewis goes on to make the point that our brains are biologically designed to be addicted. Addiction frees our minds from constant calculation, thought, and decision making, much like a habit only more deeply ingrained. So addiction isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The only question is WHAT will you be addicted to? Will it be harmful substances or behaviors, or helpful ones. Regardless, we are all addicts. That’s just how our brains work. To break a harmful addiction, he says, you must develop a greater desire for something else that competes with the addictive behavior.
Now, he’s sounding an awful lot like another preacher, named Thomas Chalmers, a Scottish pastor who ministered during the first part of the 19th century. You may know nothing about him, but it’s possible you may have heard the title of one of his sermons. It’s called: The Expulsive Power of a New Affection
In that sermon, Chalmers speaks a lot about desire, and at one point he says,
[The heart’s] desire for one particular object may be conquered; but as to its desire for having some one object or other, this is unconquerable. Its adhesion to that on which it has fastened the preference of its regards, cannot willingly be overcome by the rending away of a simple separation. It can be done only by the application of something else, to which it may feel the adhesion of a still stronger and more powerful preference. Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart, that it must have a something to lay hold of – and which, if wrested away without the substitution of another something in its place, would leave a void and vacancy as painful to the mind, as hunger is to the natural system…The heart must have something to cling to…
Chalmers is talking about addiction without using the word, and he was saying the same thing Marc Lewis is saying. Our hearts and minds are wired for addiction. You will be addicted to something. Chalmers’ point is that a Christian should be addicted to God rather than things of this world, and that an addiction, or greater affection, for God is what frees our hearts from their addiction to sin.
Now back to our text, notice the language David uses. He says in one line “my soul” and in the next “my flesh”. Our flesh, that is our sinful human nature, normally tugs in the other direction. I don’t think David is saying otherwise here. He’s not saying his old man has no inclination toward sin. He’s not teaching complete sanctification. I think all he is saying is that he is longing for God with his whole self: heart, soul, mind, and strength.
With his whole man, David is addicted to God, so that his desire for God pushes all other desires aside.
He doesn’t thirst for vengeance on those who have wronged him. He thirsts for God.
He doesn’t thirst for the praise of men. He thirsts for God.
He doesn’t thirst for his own way of doing things. He thirsts for God.
He doesn’t thirst for acceptance by the world. He thirsts for God.
He doesn’t thirst for prosperity. He thirsts for God.
He doesn’t thirst for deliverance from the desert. He thirsts for God.
He doesn’t thirst for comfort. He thirsts for God.
Do you see my point? His one and only desire is for God. That desire is all consuming, superseding all other desires. He feels it in every fiber of his being. The thirst is insatiable. He can’t get enough. He wants more.
And when we see this in David, the question we’re faced with is: What am I thirsting for deep in my soul?
But you don’t normally develop an addiction to something you’ve never had. You don’t get addicted to drugs if you don’t do drugs. That’s why we “Just say NO!” If you don’t try them, you won’t get addicted.
So then, how can we develop this kind of addiction to God?
As David says in another Psalm:
O taste and see that the Lord is good:
Psalm xxxiv.8
3. Seeking for God
Ok, but how do you do that? How do you taste the Lord?
David begins with seeking.
O God, thou art my God;
Early will I seek thee;
When to seek God
The first thing we’re told about how David seeks God, is that he seeks “early”. We could take from this several things.
Seeking God in the AM
First, he seeks God early in respect to time. He rises first thing in the morning, thirsty for God.
My voice You shall hear in the morning, O LORD;
Psalm v.3
In the morning I will direct it to You,
And I will look up.
David seems to have cultivated a habit of rising early and seeking God. We see this habit in other men in the scripture as well: Moses [Ex xxiv.4], Gideon [Judges vi.38], Samuel’s parents [1 Sam i.19], Ezekiel [Ezek xii.8], Daniel [Daniel vi.10], Jesus [Mark i.35], and the Apostles [Acts v.21] all rose early in the morning to seek God.
Consider the example of Jesus himself.
Now in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, He went out and departed to a solitary place; and there He prayed.
Mark i.35
He’s up before dawn seeking God in prayer.
Or consider the Old Covenant manna, which is a type of Christ. Jesus tells us this in John 6 when he says,
Most assuredly, I say to you, Moses did not give you the bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world…I am the bread of life.
John vi.32-35
So the manna in the wilderness is a type of Christ. It was bread from heaven for the Israelites in the wilderness. Jesus is the bread of life come down from heaven for all who believe. Now, how did the Israelites collect the manna?
So they gathered it every morning, every man according to his need.
Exodus xiv.21
Likewise, David awakes with a thirst for God before all things. I encourage you to seek God in the morning, before you get distracted by the affairs of your day.
It is easy to get distracted and busy, lots of events and get togethers happen at night, and if you’re habit is to read your bible and pray in the evening, it will often get cut short or skipped entirely.
But if you cultivate a habit of rising early and seeking the Lord in the pages of scripture and in prayer, you can always do that before your day gets going and other people intrude.
I know we all have different personalities and different schedules, but in my experience, morning is an ideal time. I’m not naturally a morning person. I’d rather stay up than get up. But I discipline myself to get up at least one hour before anyone else in the house, which is difficult with Abigail around because she is a morning person!
My dad was a night owl. He loved to stay up late. But he used to commute 45 minutes to work in Kansas City. And to avoid rush hour he left the house at 6 AM. But he also insisted on family worship every morning. So for most of my childhood and teen years, he work us up at 4:30 AMfor an hour of family worship before breakfast. And the thing was, he was already wearing his suit and we knew he’d already spent time in prayer before he got us up.
He set a wonderful example of making time with God a priority.
Seeking God as a priority
And we could also understand David to be seeking God early in respect to priority. This is tied to time, but worth noting the difference. David has made God the first priority in his life. He seeks God before all others, in terms of priority.
This means planning for it. Going to bed on time because getting up is a priority. Planning for Sunday on Saturday so you can spend the day resting and worshiping. Maybe even saying NO to some things because they would interfere with your time alone with God.
Do you just fit God in when you can make room for Him in your busy schedule? Or do you prioritize your time with Him and schedule everything else accordingly?
Seeking God at your best
Finally, we could understand David to be seeking God early in respect to his energy. He invests not only his time, but his best time. He gives his most productive hours to seeking God, when his attention is single-minded and uninterrupted.
This follows from the other two. Seeking God early in respect to time and priority will naturally result in seeking Him when you are at your best. You may not think so if you’re not a morning person, but you really can focus better after a good night’s sleep than at the end of a busy day.
Even secular business and productivity experts will tell you to do your biggest and most important tasks first and not put them off, then fit your less important tasks in around them.
The point is, seek God before anything else, seek God above all else, and seek God with your best.
Where to seek God
Having answered the question of when to seek God, we now turn our attention to the question of where to seek God.
Throughout the psalms we see David delighting in God’s word, so it is clear that part of his daily seeking after God is seeking Him in the scripture. Jesus sought God in prayer early in the morning, so, again, that should be part of our daily seeking after God. But in verse 2, David highlights another place he seeks God.
So I have looked for You in the sanctuary,
Psalm lxiii.2
To see Your power and Your glory
English Puritan pastor John Angell James, who ministered in the early part of the 19th century, said this:
It is, or should be, the desire of every Christian to see and enjoy more and more of the glory of God. [And] the accomplishment of this design is to be sought by a devout and diligent attendance upon the worship of the sanctuary.
In other words, the best place to find God is in the church, in the gathered worship of God’s people.
David was looking for God when he attended worship with God’s people. And what he wanted of God was a sight of the power and glory of God he had previously seen in the sanctuary.
The difficulty is that it is quite possible to come to church and make it all about me and my glory.
When you sing, do you think about how YOU feel? Or do you think about the One about whom, and to whom, you are singing?
When you listen to the sermon, do you listen to hear something about yourself, or about God?
Desire drives our actions. So when you come to church, what is it you are desiring? Are you seeking your own glory, your own affirmation, your own emotional experience, your own encouragement, your own well-being?
Or are you seeking God?
Are you craving a glimpse of His power and glory?
David was. That’s why he went to the sanctuary, because he was addicted to God and wanted another hit, just one glimpse of God’s power and glory present with His people, in the Word preached, in praise offered, in prayers poured out, in the Supper of the Lord (for David is was animal sacrifices, but for us it is a remembrance of the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ and His presence with us now).
That’s why we’re here! To worship the one true God! And God is seen and known, in and through the means He appointed for worship in His church.
Like I said, there are wrong reasons for wanting to gather with the church for worship, but…one’s desire, or lack of desire, to worship God with His people can serve as a sort of thermometer for the heat of your affection for God Himself.
By that measure, David seems to have a quite a fever.
4. Valuing God
What reason does David give for his singular focus, his insatiable thirst, his addiction to God?
Because Your lovingkindness is better than life,
Psalm lxiii.3
This is the grounds, or the reason, for what he said in verses 1 and 2, and it is the ground for what follows as well. Why does he long so deeply for God? God’s lovingkindness is better than life!
Some translations say “steadfast love”. This is God’s unfailing, covenant love for His people. Author Sally Lloyd-Jones calls it God’s,
Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.
To be loved by God – to know Him and be in relationship with Him is to be loved by Him – is better than life!
The reward of knowing God is better than anything else David could imagine.
The Apostle Paul puts it this way in Philippians iii.7-11,
But what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.
Philippians iii.7-11
The value of knowing God, by faith in Christ, is worth more than anything you could possibly gain in this life. It is worth more than life itself!
Think about what great extremes men go to, to save their life. What would you be willing to give up if it meant your life? Would you part with your money? Your house? Your reputation? Would you part with your hair? Even an arm or leg? If it meant your life? Of course you would! And people have.
But David and Paul both tell us that knowing God is of greater value than all that. It is of greater value than life itself.
Count it all loss! Consider it all rubbish compared to the value of knowing Christ!
This is why David and Paul have such a great desire for God, because they have seen with eyes of faith the great worth of God. Nothing compares to the value of knowing Him!
Remember, David wrote this while on the run for his life. He’s not living in American prosperity at this point. He is living in a cave, just trying to stay alive and God is his great desire and the joy of his lips.
This is no prosperity gospel, this is a deep soul thirst, an aching deep in the bones craving for God.
And don’t make the gnostic mistake of thinking this means life has no value, or the body has no value. Of course they do! How else could you compare? When Paul says he counts these things as loss, or as rubbish, compared to knowing Christ, that is meaningful to us because we know the value of these things. If they had no value, the comparison would be meaningless and would actually devalue Christ.
I’ll borrow an example from Voddie Baucham.
If a guy loves a girl, and he comes to her and gives her a rose and and ring, she can respond is several different ways.
She can respond like a gnostic and throw the rose and the ring to the dirt, trample on them, and say they have no value to her. What does that make of the value of the love of the giver of the rose and the ring?
Or she can respond like a materialist, take the rose and and the ring, treasure them, walk away, and never consider the one who gave them to her as a token of his love.
Or she can respond appropriately by treasuring the rose and the ring because they were given to her by one who loves her greatly. In this case, she sees them as having great value, not in themselves, but in relation to, and so far as they represent the love of the giver, which is of far greater value.
So when Paul says he counts all things as loss, or as rubbish, don’t mistake that for saying nothing has any value. Rather, understand that life and the body and all things, have value as long as they point us to the one who gave them to us, and represent his love. A love that is of such great value that these good gifts appear as rubbish by comparison.
So David desires God. He craves a sight of God’s glory like a thirsty man in the desert craves a drink of water.
Considering the idea that desire drives addiction, I think it is fair to say that David’s strong desire, his craving, indicates he is addicted to God.
5. Glorifying God
And what is the outcome of this God addiction of David’s?
Because Your lovingkindness is better than life,
Psalm xliii.3
My lips shall praise You.
In other words, he glorifies God, he sings His praises, he proclaims God’s great worth to anyone and everyone who will listen.
Have you ever been around someone that was excited about something and just wouldn’t stop talking about it? Whatever it is comes up in every conversation with them? You might even refer to them as an evangelist for the thing they are excited about.
You see, that kind of valuing, that kind of desire, is what creates evangelists.
Have you ever wished you were a better evangelist for Christ? Then don’t try to be a better evangelist. Instead, try to see the unimaginable worth and value of Christ. And when you do, then you’ll be His evangelist.
You see, we praise what we love and are excited about. That could be the latest diet drink, health food product, exercise routine, sport franchise, or Christ.
Thus I will bless You while I live;
Psalm lxiii.4
I will lift up my hands in Your name.
David dedicates his life to praising God. He doesn’t just give lip service to the glory of God, he takes action, lifting his hands.
It’s easy to give lip service to the glory of God because we know that’s what we’re supposed to do as Christians. But to actually live your life for his glory is, sadly, not something we see a lot of in the church today. And I think that is because Christians, at least in America, have become addicted to the wrong things. We’ve become addicted to the gifts and not the giver.
We value material goods and prosperity more than knowing God.
We place greater importance on politics and winning elections than we do on knowing God.
We’re more concerned with our own reputation than we are with God’s.
We’re addicted to emotionalism and how church makes us feel, rather than being addicted to God himself.
Or perhaps, for those of us in Reformed churches, we can fall into the trap of becoming addicted to our own sense of superiority over other Christians who don’t share our commitment to doctrine and sound theology.
If we are addicted to any of these things rather than to God himself, then we have overvalued the rose and forgotten who gave it to us!
My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness,
Psalm lxiii.5
And my mouth shall praise You with joyful lips.
This is where David finds satisfaction for his soul thirst, by drinking deeply at the well of living water found in Christ alone.
We don’t really have time to cover the rest of the Psalm, which is mostly a continuation of this theme of rejoicing in and glorifying the Lord. But notice a couple of things quickly.
While David stressed seeking God early, he also speaks of meditating on God at night.
When I remember You on my bed,
Psalm lxiii.6
I meditate on You in the night watches
And in verse 8 there is a wonderful restatement of the desire he expressed in verse 1.
My soul follows close behind You;
Psalm lxiii.8
Your right hand upholds me.
He thirsts for God deep in his soul, so he follows hard after God. This is not a half-hearted faith that David has, but rather, this is what it looks like to,
…love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, with all thy soul, with all thy might.
Deuteronomy vi.5
And the result is that,
Therefore, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.
1 Corinthians x.31
Conclusion
If you want to be excited about Christ and be a better evangelist for Christ, then learn to love Christ above all else.
If you want to overcome the sin addiction in your life, whatever the specific sin is, cultivate a greater addiction to God who is greater than all your sin.
And David said the time to do that is early, first thing, make it a priority. And the place to do that is with the church.
To glorify God in all things, we must see God as the greatest good and desire Him above all else.
The Supper
As we come to seek God today in the midst of His church, we turn to the Lord’s Supper for a glimpse of His power and glory.
This is a means of grace ordained by God for use in His church.
We’ve already been told to eat and drink to the glory of God, but Paul likewise warns us,
Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
1 Corinthians xi.27,28
So do eat and drink to the glory of God, but don’t eat or drink in an unworthy manner. But we’re all unworthy. That’s the point of the gospel! Paul can’t possibly be saying that you must have behaved yourself good enough this week in order to partake. So what does Paul mean? He goes on to say this,
For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.
1 Corinthians xi.29
So eating and drinking in an unworthy manner is to not discern the Lord’s body. What does that mean?
If you discern something, you make a distinction between it and everything else, you recognize or identify it as separate or distinct. The interesting thing is, this is very closely related to the concept of holiness, the state of being set apart for God’s use, and sanctification, the process of being set apart, dedicated, or regarded as holy.
What Paul is telling us then is that we should see the unparalleled worth of Christ, as He is offered to us by God in the ordinance. The bread remains bread and the juice remains juice, but figuratively they represent to us the precious body and blood of our Savior.
If we then, by faith, receive the bread and juice, we inwardly receive and feed upon Christ to the satisfying of our soul thirst.
When your body is thirsty, you drink a glass of water.
When your soul is thirsty, you seek Christ, in the sanctuary. And this is one of God’s ordained means of grace, designed to feed our souls.
If then, you are in Christ, having been united to him by faith, this Supper is for you. A spiritual meal, to nourish your faith, by making known the glory of his grace.
*Note: This sermon was originally preached at Heritage Baptist Church in Worcester, MA on 3 June, 2018. It was the first in a series titled: Paul’s Doctrine-David’s Psalms.
Leave a Reply