My Soul Thirsts

You can open your Bibles to Psalm chapter 63, and I would like to read the first four verses of this Psalm, including the superscript. Some of the Psalms are prefaced with a historical note, and sometimes these historical notes tell us when or how or why this particular Psalm was composed, and Bible publishers don't always quite know where to put the superscript. Should we include it in verse one or put it before verse one? Whatever the case, though. It's the Word of God. It's part of the inspired Word of God and provides the proper framing for the Psalm. Psalm 63 has a superscript that is a historical note. It says a Psalm of David, and this is important, when he was in the wilderness of Judah, so when he was in the desert. When was David in the wilderness of Judah or in the desert? He was in the desert of Judah when his son, his disloyal son, Absalom, used an arm guard and

disloyal men close to David to unseat David, his father from the throne, and David and those loyal to him had to flee for their lives into the desert in hopes that the new king wouldn't pursue them there. That's when this Psalm was written, oh God, thou art my God. Early will I seek thee, my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land where no water is. To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary, you wouldn't expect a man whose face the worst moment of his life right now to say what he says next, but here it is, because thy loving kindness is better than life. My lips shall praise thee, thus will I bless thee while I live. I'll lift up my hands in thy name. I'd like to speak this evening on our thirst for God, our thirst for God. Father, in the name of Jesus, I

pray you would help me to teach faithfully tonight, and may I have, would you grant me just a little, the inspiration that moved David's pen in Jesus' name, we pray, amen. You can be seated, thank you for standing. Great pleasure and great privilege to be with you here in Maline. It's very good to be with my friends, the Levines, the family, the kids, and it's wonderful to see the growth in this church, and I'm so thankful to be able to teach scripture and there be interest enough to listen to what I have to say for however long it takes me to say it. I really, in my heart, I want to go 30 to 35 minutes, and you remember what Mike Tyson said when he and a reporter informed him that his upcoming opponent had developed a new strategy for beating Mike Tyson, and you know what Mike Tyson said, every fighter has a plan until I hit him in the face, and

I kind of feel that in reverse once I get started. I have a plan, the good that I would do, I find that there is another law within my members, but thank you for your devotion to scripture, and I say that sincerely. It's not just conventional to say that, but there's a love of the word of God here, and I feel it when I'm standing here. I don't take that for granted anymore. I just don't because I've been in too many places where it's not the case, and it's really difficult to do this. David says that his soul thirsts for God. What he's saying beyond merely saying that he desires fellowship with God is that his soul's desire for God is, it's a thirst. It's a thirst. A fundamental need, a thirst is a fundamental need. It's not a want. As the body thirsts for water, the soul thirsts for God. In the heart of every man, no matter how depraved and sinful,

there's a deep, unreachable, irreducible, unremovable, unextractable desire for God. There is a scratch that is so deep we could never possibly itch that scratch, although we try. We have no idea how deep our desire for God is. But it manifests itself in so many ways. There is within every human heart, there is a deep seated awe, a desire for the divine, a desire for the glory of God to see the glory of God. God has planted within our hearts the goal of one day seeing the glory of God. That is the North Star, to which the compass of your heart is always pointing. And oftentimes your flesh will try to find that glory in other places through less rigorous means, to take shortcuts to find that glory, to behold that glory. But you will never be satisfied, ever, until you see it. Your soul can no more live without God than your body can live without water. With every breath you take, you

emit water that has to be replenished. That's true in the body. Every beat of the heart requires water. Your body is, it's about 60% water. Water keeps your organs alive. Water lubricates your joints and muscles and makes movement possible. Water keeps your brain alive. It enables you to think and plan and talk. Your body was built around the need for water. No movement, no thought, no planning, no functions. It's possible without water. The body can live for weeks, or even a month, without food. But you only have about two days without water. Along with oxygen, it's the most fundamental need the body has. There could be no greater need for the physical body. There's also no alternative to water. There was a comedian 30 years ago or so from Boston. His name was Stephen Wright. I don't know if a lot of people knew who he was. I didn't know who he was until about 10 years ago. But I caught up with

some of his clips because he has a very strange sense of humor. And I remember him. One of his bits was he would just say one line and just leave it right there and expect you to think about it and then get it. And then he would already be moving on to the next thing. And he said, you know, I went to the store and he's spoken this voice right here with the Boston accent. Went to the store, bought one walkie talkie. That's it. But my favorite one, I think, was I went to the store and I bought some powdered water. And it said, just add water. First time I really thought for a second about, oh, there's no alternative to water. I remember when my little brother was just a little kid. One of my little brothers was a little kid. He said, mom said that there wasn't any water. Something was wrong with the city's water. And my little brother said,

well, I'm not concerned about that at all. I only drink coke. There's an old Twilight Zone episode about two men found a treasure trove of gold, heavy bars of gold, sacks of it. They carried those sacks, but they were in the desert. And one of them got the idea that he was going to leave all of the gold. He wasn't going to carry any gold. He's in the desert. He's going to carry as many canteens of water as he possibly can. And the men who decided to keep the gold laughed at him. You fool. You never have to work the rest of your life. He said, well, we'll see. So they walked through the desert to try to get to the other side. And you know what happened, right? Yeah. Pretty soon that man's dropping the gold and begging for water. When water is depleted, we're depleted. The loss of water has to be replenished exactly to the degree it's depleted. David in

the text that we've read is saying that the soul needs God just like that. We were made by God and for God. There was never any alternative in mind when we were created. Our very being was built around this need for God. We can't exist without him. And I don't mean merely in some sort of emotional way. Every single day with every breath we take, our soul is crying out. And there are no godless hours of our lives from moment to moment as our soul awaits the next moment. God must replenish our souls for our souls to live from moment to moment. We are not clocks that were set in motion by a clockmaker and then left alone. At every moment, God's word is upholding every part of the universe. In pagan lands, this thirst for God infused life and culture with the divine, even though the pagan typically followed false conceptions of God. The pagans built temples and altars everywhere they went.

They named their cities after their gods. And we find this to be true even among people who have been divided by oceans. Oceans, you'll find temples and languages and cities built around the idea of God or the gods in South America and on the African continent. Everywhere you go in the universe, everywhere you go in the world, rather, long before man could sail over oceans. He could separate man in space and time, but his needs remain the same. Everywhere you go, you find evidence of this. Every well of water in the ancient world was associated with nymphs. Every forest was haunted by dyads. Every mountain was a throne for the divine. Every hill was the home of gods. The wind was thought to be a god. The sea was thought to be a god. The moon was a goddess. The sky was named after a god. The land was the land of a god. You couldn't take a step in the ancient pagan

world without tripping over some idea of the divine. And in the land of Israel, things weren't that much different so far as there was this prevalence of the divine. Once all was said, O Lord, Thou hast searched me and known me. Thou knowest my down-sitting and my uprising. Thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassed my path and my lying down and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but lo, O Lord, Thou knowest it already altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before and laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It's high. I cannot attain unto it. Whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall uphold me. Where can I go from your presence? But in the early 1900s, scientists in the West began announcing that we'd arrived in an age of reason, that science had demystified the world. They said that people had turned to religion in the past only because they didn't understand the world, they didn't understand reality. But since science had discovered the keys to reality, religion was now obsolete, no longer necessary. It was just a scaffolding upon which civilization was built, and then once we reach a certain point where civilization is built, you tear down the scaffolding. Even if there's something we don't understand yet, the scientists said, we now know the process by which to discover any truth, any truth. Once you do imagine for a moment a primitive tribe in the early 1900s, one of the last uncontacted tribes was discovered in Papua New Guinea. There was high mountains there, high mountains

that rose straight up almost out of the sea in one particular set of islands, and no one from the Western world had ever climbed to the top of that mountain and looked to see what was on the other side inside the ring of mountains that surrounded this island. They thought it was too high and that no one, no civilization, no tribes, no people could possibly live on the other side of it. But finally, in the early 1900s, a few explorers did indeed climb the peak of that mountain and they looked down and then it was coming close to evening and they saw something that absolutely terrified them. They saw torches down in the valley, fire. They knew there was civilization down there, so they went and they made contact with these people. Imagine meeting them and then being invited like they were to one of their religious rituals where they'd attempt to find out whether or not it would rain tomorrow. One particular

ceremony they had was to try to contact their dead ancestors. They did something like start a fire and boil water and then throw, they would throw a lock of a child's hair into the brew, the venom of a snake, and then a few stones that they regarded as magical. But then imagine taking out your iPhones, if this were to happen today, and then opening your weather app and telling these tribes that it won't just rain tomorrow, it's actually going to hail. And then imagine sending one of the tribesmen to the other side of the camp and having them FaceTime each other. They'd ask you, like the people of Papua New Guinea asked when they saw their technology, what ritual do you perform? What are the ingredients that produce this magic? And our answer today would be much like the Westerners' answer back then. Maybe you'd open up your your phone and show them the wires and the batteries and metals and glass and

conductors and electricity. They wouldn't suddenly though quit believing in their magical world. They'd simply adapt this new information to their old beliefs and say, well, our snake venom and locks of hair weren't the right ingredients. We need instead to use metal and batteries and glass and copper wires and use them in the right proportion. And they'd be essentially correct. Science and magic aren't two different things. Science is just magic that works. Magic that uses the right ingredients and mathematical formulas and has discovered the correct ritual of placing this metal here and starting the fire there and touching the glass here and joining the wires there. But the modern scientist doesn't see things this way. They tend to believe that science and magic are completely different things. Magic is pure fantasy, the product of primitive superstition, while science is pure rationality. Religion is no longer necessary. Science has all the answers, there's faith, and then there's reason. It was hard not to believe the

scientist's gospel either. They discovered the atom and unlocked the most fundamental building block in the universe. Science has found a way to split the atom and unlock its hidden power. Whole cities, whole countries could be set on fire simultaneously and instantaneously as God had visited 10 plagues on Egypt, making the sky dark in the middle of the day and turning rivers into blood and parting the Red Sea to demonstrate his awesome power. Science demonstrated its power in the inferno of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The whole world was warned on that day that we were now at the mercy of science. May it have loving kindness and tender mercies. But science wasn't done flexing its muscle. It planted a flag on the moon and discovered the theoretical components of a thinking machine, what we would one day call a computer. Science seemed to have also a benevolent side. Science, all but eradicated diseases that had plagued children for thousands of years like polio. Science put

a stop to typhoid and scarlet fever. Science had seemed to demystify the world. We discovered that we're not subject to mysterious forces that you couldn't control. No divine invisible will is out there commanding our obedience. We don't have a God or gods to placate or to please. What seemed mysterious before, the lightning before the thunder, stars falling in the sky, green lights dancing in the northern night sky, the storm upon the sea, the wisdom and loyalty of a horse. There was no mystery anymore. These were all completely predictable causes and effects, chemical reactions, atomic collisions. The literature of the time started to reflect this discovery or this theory. You go all the way back really to the time of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He is highly informed on the latest mathematical and scientific theories, and he set down one day to write a detective story. The first detective story was written, if I recall, in 1848. It's a brand new genre. It was

created really by Edgar Allen Poe. I think he called it the mystery in the Rue Morgue, something like that. Generation later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle thought he would create a detective that had a keen eye and who understood that the world was not controlled by mysterious forces that you had to pray to, but rather everything had a reason, everything had a place. There was an explanation, a visible physical manifestation or cause for everything that happened. It was just a matter of being able to identify it even if you needed to bring along a magnifying glass, so be it. And so what was mysterious to everybody else in the story? How in the world is that woman lying dead in her bed obviously murdered? But she's on the eighth floor of an impossibly high window where no one could have gotten in and the doors are locked and the windows are locked from the inside. How in the world did this happen and everyone

else is afraid that some kind of ghost has visited, some kind of curse has been visited upon this woman and everyone's afraid, everyone's scared, everyone is looking for the witch doctor or some kind of priest to help explain, but they summon Sherlock Holmes and he with his magnifying glass crawls around upon the floor. He just happens to see what no one else can see, the very visible to his eye cause for this effect. All of these stories or almost all of them, Sherlock Holmes stories revolve around this kind of plot where most of the folks think there's some kind of mysterious force out there, but he has an eye to show you that there's a very human explanation for everything, everything. The literature is not creating this idea. Literature is a reflection, a mirror of what's going on in culture and it has, he had his finger on the pulse of society. He knew what was going on and this was a kind

of, this was a kind of a product, a story that met this kind of cultural desire and it became extraordinarily popular, Sherlock Holmes did. This kind of thing followed all the way into the 1950s and maybe even the early 1960s in some ways and you really can't draw hard lines in culture between one age and another because there's always a little cultural overlap, but in the 1960s something probably a little more familiar to you than Sherlock Holmes. You probably know about Scooby-Doo of course. Don't those stories always revolve around them going out to investigate? They've seen a ghost out there upon the moor and Shaggy and Scooby are scared to death and they shake and they jitter, but Thelma and the other level-headed ones find out that it was just a contractor who was dressing up as a ghost trying to scare everyone away so that he could buy this valuable piece of property. That's every single Scooby-Doo episode. My kids call it,

my grandkids call it Scooby-Doo-Bee-Doo. That's what they call it. That's every episode. No mystical forces. The world is completely explicable, but then this kind of literature it started running its course. It had a few more famous last gas like Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, the original series. It was usually again some form of that same plot. It's not a mystical force. It's an alien of some kind. There's on Star Trek movie. I think it was maybe it was the third film. I can't quite remember now. I just remember the story being about they believed they had found God where God was and so they flew in space through this galaxy and they went through this cosmic cloud and they knew they were about to come face to face with the divine that created the universe and everyone was scared to death sort of. But a couple of cool heads like Spock. No, he's not divine. It's just another explicable physical material being of some

kind. Sure enough, it turned out he was just an alien despot, but that story started to die. It lost its appeal to the wider culture. It was people started to get hungry again and they found that science was only leading them into further darkness. So science fiction story started being created right around the 1960s. One for instance, Frank Herbert created the Dune series and if you open up the first couple pages, you know, you think you've got starships and you've got you've got photons and you've got electrons and you've got all these devices and all this technology, but no, that's not really where it starts. It starts with mystical forces again. George Lucas comes along in the 1970s and what in the world would Star Wars be without the Jedi and the force and Darth Vader sitting at the table explaining to all these technocrats this great machine that you have cannot compare to the power of the force finger on the pulse

and this is part of a of a growing phenomenon in culture. Science is not enough. It's hollowed out the world. It's left us empty. My soul thirsts for thee. We chased God away, away from our consciences, away from our thoughts, away from our practices. We separated earth from sky. What was once called the heavens, we now called space, emptiness, darkness. Human life was once saturated in a sense of the divine. We named all our days of the week after divine beings, Odin's day, Wednesday, Thor's day, Thursday. We named our months after Roman gods like January and March and June. We used to refer to dates as BC and AD. Now we refer to it as BCE and CE before common era, common era. We used to think of even our emotions and personalities as being influenced by the divine. Being in love was the result of the influence of Venus or Mars. Being jovial was caused by Jove. Being angry was being under

the influence of Mars, the God of War. But once scientism began to take hold, we either dropped the supernatural from our language or we kept the language but forgot the original meaning. So we now have a language full of the forgotten dead metaphors of our former beliefs. We still refer to being able to owe someone money as credit, but we've forgotten that credit comes from the Latin credo, which means I believe or I trust. This is why our dollar says in God we trust because God is the basis of our whole financial system. Trust in God is what gives this paper meaning. We hold a mere piece of paper in our hands and have to trust that this paper has worth. I overheard a conversation a few months ago. There was a woman bragging to her friend and she said that she had scolded this stranger the other day who had unfortunately wished her to have a blessed day. She complained that this

is totally inappropriate. We shouldn't force our beliefs on people, she said. She said that woman should have just said instead, goodbye. I'd been grateful for just a goodbye, but little did this woman realize that the word goodbye is literally a rounding off and contraction and simplification of what used to be a whole phrase in English. God be with you, whether shall I go from thy presence if I make my bed in hell. You've heard, I'm sure, I'm sure of the scholar who had an apprentice and the apprentice asked him, master, why is his name Yahweh? The master didn't answer and so the apprentice asked again and he didn't answer but the master began to breathe more audibly. Apprentice started to hear but he figured that the answer was somehow being put on display here and so he listened a little more carefully and he suddenly heard the scholar breathing like this and the apprentice understood Yahweh means I am. God has signed his

name into the breath that gives us life from moment to moment. We say his name every moment we breathe. I am, I am, I am and even the atheist who uses his breath to deny the existence of God has to use his own name to deny it, whether shall I go from thy presence. The triumph of science has been really short-lived its confidence has been severely shaken and commentators in the mid 1900s said that religion was dying and would soon to be dead all together. They said we're going to see the disappearance of churches by the year 2000. Religions will be a thing of the past. Spiritual organizations, religious practices will all be replaced by rationality and reason and science. People are going to adopt a more rational way of life but just the opposite has happened. There was a biblical commentator I recall here and he said something along the lines. Our need for God was kind of like an underground geyser

and like old faithful in Yellowstone. You think you can put an end to the geyser by plugging it up and filling it with cement? What do you think is going to happen? Is that going to stop, put an end to it? No, no, no, no. What will it do? Old faithful will just find another path to the surface. That's a good way of explaining this desire for God, our thirst for God. If we try to cover it with cement and science and rationality, all we're doing is forcing our religious impulse, our desire for God to find other paths to the surface. Take stranger in stranger ways, stranger outlets. We're not going to get less belief when we get more science. We're going to get weirder belief. We found out that if you eliminate organized religion, you don't get no religion, you get disorganized religion. I spent a little bit of time, way too much time on YouTube a few years back. I was

really, really interested in cults and did quite a bit of research. You can find a lot of stuff out there. I found a lot of strange stuff, but maybe the quirkiest, one of the quirkiest I had ever seen was this fellow by the name of Brocco. Brocco's thing was he comes out on stage and he doesn't say anything. He just moves his eyes from side to side. What's his religion? It's called the gaze. And if you will meet his gaze, if you will just contemplate and meditate upon the gaze, all of your questions in life will melt away and all of your problems will go away. In the gaze is the answer to all the mysteries of life, the gaze. So tens of thousands of people pay big money to come and see Brocco when he comes to town. I haven't checked up on him in a couple of years, but it's a pretty good scam. You come out for 20 minutes and

you do this. No sweat, no tears, no preparation. You don't have to study for this, gaze. You just need to have functioning eyeballs. You can even get online, or at least you could get online. He has an online gaze and it's live at certain hours of the day. We're laughing and I thought it would be funny because it is funny. But my soul thirsted for the educated people aren't supposed to believe in God, they say. So do you suppose their education is going to eradicate this thirst for God? As if a professor could rewire the human being at the most fundamental level of existence? As if you could talk a man dying of thirst out of being thirsty? No. My soul thirsteth for thee. In a dry and thirsty land where no water is. You know what people do in a desert? When they've been in there long enough and they're dying of thirst, they see mirages. It looks like water out there

on the distance. They see the shimmering waters and they run up to it and then they fill their mouths with sand. They drink sand. That's what's happening to our world. Drinking sand, cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, drug addiction, porn addiction, vile and dirty and terrible things. But my soul thirsteth for thee. Dirt will do as biblical faith wanes. In our world, something has to take its place. And that thirst, it doesn't just go away. It's with us forever. We thirst for God. So we try to find him in a thousand other places. As church attendance and affiliation go down across culture, drug use rises. What's happening here? Correlation or causation? It's both. The sense of awe and spirituality that we normally find in religion become a need to find that sense of awe and glory and euphoria and psychedelics and mind altering substances. To get in touch with something that transcends normal experience. To step outside of reality and come into direct contact with another

greater reality. You know what they're all saying. Yes, you do. My soul thirsteth for thee. Drug use isn't the only result, though, of a loss of biblical faith. There's also the rise in sexual experimentation. The loss of traditional faith across culture leads to a frightening boredom with life. And so our culture's trying to find meaning and transcendence and excitement in crossing moral boundaries. You know what this is? There's a thrill in going beyond moral boundaries because moral boundaries are human boundaries. And there's a desire to go beyond the human deviant sexual behavior. It's a misplaced desire to reach beyond our humanity and experience the divine to alter our identity at its most fundamental place. Some have turned from faith in God to faith in nature. Try to find this sense of awe in nature as a substitute for the God of the Bible. It's almost understandable. There are moments in nature that demonstrate the greatest shows of power you could ever witness with

your eyes. I was on the west coast a few weeks ago and the seas were going through what was called a king tide. I stood on the beach and felt the earth beneath me tremble. It's one distant wave after another rose up like colossal white panthers leaping up and falling down upon the shore. 60-foot waves so large they look like they're moving in slow motion slamming into haystack rock like a frost shooting up in jagged fashion on a frozen window. And the impenetrable gray skies in the horizon boiling with thunder and 100 seagulls on that early morning soared motionless in a perfect line high above me gliding on the 50 mile an hour winds and all of them facing the dim eastern sky at dawn as if in holy reverence for the break of day. A few hours later I stood in an Sitka spruce's trees hundreds of feet high holding on to the same forest floor that has nourished them since before

Columbus was a baby. Awesome nature. It's awesome and people get lost there. But nature has a terrible side. Science itself has succumbed to the thirst for God. You'd think that at least if in if everyone else succumbs to this thirst science driven people would be able to stave this thirst off but they can't either. So science has begun to take on the characteristics of religious belief. Every day people every day every single day people are asked to trust the science to have faith in experts. Have you noticed that every natural disaster now is connected to a narrative. In biblical times a flood would come or hailstorm or hurricane or a great fire and the priests or the prophets would say this disaster has happened because we humans have sinned and we're being punished for that sin. 30 years ago when a hurricane would come we'd shrug our shoulders and say boy what can we do how awful is this. Nature sure has a

cruel side but not today. We're right back where we were 3000 years ago thinking exactly like bronze age prophets. The tragic weather is now connected to something we've done wrong. After every deadly weather event you can turn on any news station and listen to our scientists say this hurricane is the result of climate change and as long as we continue to live lives of privilege and spending and accumulating and expanding nature is going to retaliate against us like this. In other words nature is punishing us for our sins and this sounds exactly like something the ancient priests of Apollo would have said and you know what else all of this sounds like. Even the scientists are now saying my soul thirsteth for thee. Our culture is like a hummingbird flying but completely still poised over the bud trying to extract sweet nectar from the heart of the flower. We're trying to extract the divine from this world but coming up empty and thirsty

still and as we chase the god of the bible away and we try to quench our thirst with substitutes people are getting more and more disordered. The apostle Paul said the wrath of god is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness for the invisible things of god from the creation of the world are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made so that they are without excuse because that when they knew god they glorified him not as god professing themselves wise they became fools and changed the glory of the uncorruptible god into an image made like to corruptible man birds forfeited beasts and creeping things wherefore god also gave them up so what do we do what do we do I say all this because sometimes we think we're a part of something that's dying there used to be a desire for god but there's no more hunger and sometimes we give this sense that we're just shrinking every day

it's not true there is a hunger and a thirst for god like there has never been before and all the craziness that you're seeing all the craziness you're seeing is the result of satan successfully re-channeling and misdirecting that desire and thirst for god into other and stranger outlets that are destructive but the church there's a desire for god there are people out there right now they're waiting for you to witness they're waiting for your testimony don't stop giving your testimony don't say nobody wants this anymore no one's listening anymore oh yes somebody's listening you can try everything else but these are just poor substitutes placebos for beholding the glory of god in the face of jesus christ if you try to make these substitutes your purpose and joy in life if you try to embrace them the moments you do they'll fly away and you find yourself strangely alone and abandoned and wondering where the joy went but this is because the joy

never belonged to those things you are made to see god's glory it's the beacon towards which all souls fly it was what we were specifically made to see and in seeing that glory we reach the summit of our whole existence the glory has whispered to you in every joy you've ever had that glory has been what is good about every form of goodness you've ever known once had a young man a pastor's son pull me aside and he said keep this between you and me which is of course what i'm doing right now maybe i shouldn't go on he said i i really i don't really know how to put this and i could probably talk to you for 30 minutes and beat around the bush but let me just go straight to it and it's really awkward and really awful and terrible the way i'll say it say that again i i don't think i want to go to heaven that's quite

an admission tell me about it why well and this is why he said i'm dating somebody and we're a few months away from getting married i feel so bad as i hear people preaching about heaven and i don't want anything to do with it really except to avoid hell and i don't want god to interrupt my life with heaven i want my heaven to be my marriage and i'm afraid he might come before the trumpet sounds maybe the day before my honeymoon i'm starting to see your problem first of all tell me what you think heaven is and then he told me and i that's familiar you think heaven here's what he said here's what heaven is from what i understand what we're going to do is we're all going to sit around a throne and we're going to sing forever and people are going to maybe read the holy scriptures and there's going to be a great choir and then once we've

finished all of our songs we're going to start them all over again and forever is a really long time as i'm really starting to see your problem see you think heaven is a church service that never ends like this one i saw some of you checking your watches i saw you i'm conscious i'm very aware of you i'm very aware i know i came a long way and i'm a long way from my grandkids right now so i'm going to say what i gotta say i'm almost done but this will be worth it i think now i remember being eight years old and is this service ever gonna end i can't why can't he just say amen why can't why can't he close that bible and make an altar call and imagine telling a kid that's what heaven is on an endless loop my friend this is what what i said to him and i say to all of you sometimes we forget

about heaven we used to sing a lot of songs about heaven all the time and i pray we never stop thinking about heaven every day i remember when i met laura somebody had to be back be be back be back home we had another trip to the er today one of the one of the one of my daughters had to go so somebody had to stay home i remember when i met her if you're live streaming this she's probably watching right now i was 15 we had convention and i saw her really for the first time and i remember what dress she was wearing she was wearing a black dress with peach and yellow flowers and she was sitting right over there and she had long blonde hair down almost to her knees and i couldn't take my eyes off of her kept on looking over and the kid sitting next to me says what do you keep looking at me for bro

i'm not every few seconds i'm i keep doing this a stop stop she's gonna see she's gonna see me no stop stop some lucky guy some lucky guy and after the service we had a banquet and i didn't have a date but i went to the banquet with my cousin and i got up i remember from the table to go get a refill fill of the drink and i i walked over here and all of a sudden lo and behold she's walking toward me but it's not one of those kind you know when somebody's gonna walk past you and you also know from the look in their eye if they're gonna talk to you and she had that look in her eye what i do this is great this is great no this can't be happening this it's happening and she said your name's jeremy right um i i think yeah i yes thanks jeremy remember my name yes she said your friend

shon no no no no no no no no i have seen the pearly gates open and uh she said does he have a girlfriend it oh no this is awful but i thought i seriously thought but at least we got this far at least i can be john the baptist and she said i said yeah he he he has a real serious relationship with her what's her name i said christina christina she's she's she she's real serious too she said can you show me christina point her out pretty rich well i'm in uncharted territory i don't know really where to go with this but i'm going to point out christina i'm going to keep i'm going to take the long way because i want to walk with her as long as i possibly can so we're going to take the long and winding path and i'm going to show you that table over around the corner and and i i i acted like

i didn't see or know where she was so we were walking together for a little bit longer than finally that there she is and laura looked at her and said and i really like this girl oh whoa yes yes res pect her friend called me up a week later she lived over in in in seattle belview i lived in bermerton about an hour away and um and then uh stefanie said laura wants to talk to you okay i don't have any new news on christina but this is pretty exciting and we talked for an hour and we went to another church service and afterwards all the folks were going out to pancake house she made a special trip to come over with her friends we went over our way to the family pancake house and sat down and i made sure that there was a a little bit of a spot next to me no one was going to sit there in case

she came and sure enough i saw her i saw that restaurant still there i know the exact window she walked up i saw her and she walked in and then she walked by me and she saw the empty spot and she said move over jair she already was calling me jair so i moved over and we talked about we talked about a movie robin hood prince of thieves that had just come out apparently it was our first face-to-face conversation she lived an hour away and i didn't get to see her but once a month neither of us had our driver's license but she would write me letters and there was this perfume that she wore really it was an oil it was called rain and she would put some of it on the envelope and she would send it to me and i would see her real bubbly writing and read and cherish every word and i would think of the day that

i got to see her again see her again her blue eyes beautiful face the sound of her voice the recognition in her eyes over the separation i would think i will cherish every moment the next time she's here every moment i won't let a single grain of sand go through the isthmus of the hourglass without picking it up and inspecting it and holding it up to the light and seeing it from every angle they call this love my first experience i remember thinking well what if the lord came back we were separated and i i told this young man about my experience and and he nodded with familiarity he knew exactly what i was talking about yep yep but this is something i only realized later on in life i wish i had known it all along i told him i'm telling you now imagine seeing only a shadow of your beloved one look at the shadow she casts upon the wall and

then try to embrace the shadow you don't know what color of eyes she has from her shadow you don't know what color of dress she wears from her shadow you can't hear the sound of her voice from her shadow you can't see the look of recognition in her eyes shadow is a poor representation just a little reminder of the reality that casts it and this whole world the bible says is a shadow cast by the goodness of god that all the good things that we experience in life or could ever experience are just shadow imitations representations whispers rumors of another world glorious and resplendent with the glory of god and the majesty we're embracing shadows one day we'll stand face to face and if you think that that girl young man is awesome and glorious she is but she's a creation imagine the glory of the creator that made her we are like we are like some bottom feeder fish it sits at

the bottom of the ocean miles and miles deep where the light doesn't shine something at the top precious meat begins to fall and it's picked apart and picked apart until at last only that only the fragments drift and make it all the way to the bottom for this one fish at the bottom of the sea we are like that fish at the bottom of the sea we experience the divine and experience god through a thousand removes but one day we'll stand at the very fountain of all that is good and all that is blessed that which made all that is good and all that is blessed heaven is not an eternal church service it is beholding the glory of the lord that your soul has sought in every other way and here he will be my soul thirsteth for thee in a dry and thirsty land where no water is to see thy power and thy glory so as I have seen thee

in the sanctuary because I love in kindness is better than life than life my lips shall praise thee and thus will I bless thee while I live and I will lift up my hands in thy name Lord Jesus I pray for I pray for the man who's begun to be distracted I pray for the woman the mother who feels tired weary that you would return the joy of their salvation and that they would comfort one another with words and reminders of heaven I pray for the young man that is trying to find the ultimate joy and pleasure in something that's merely a shadow but that he would direct his mind to that which made the shadow once again before we go home I think it would be appropriate to come and pray and ask the Lord to redirect your heart and your affections to set them upon things above and not things here upon the earth that we lay up our treasures in

heaven that we may persevere in the faith and endure to the end and then behold thy glory after him let's be sensitive to the holy responding to your seeking right now it's doing something deep here church let's be sensitive to the holy ghost I know the hour is late but let's be led of the spirit right now let's be led of the holy ghost as we seek him as we long after him as our soul thirst for him if you feel led to pray with somebody near you to minister to somebody besides you God's doing a deep work here tonight hallelujah you're all I want you all across the house from the front of the back minister minister to someone pray the holy ghost somebody just respond to the presence of God that's in this place right now hallelujah take us back to our first yes yes come on let that flow you've got to leave your speed be quiet me as your

dismiss but there's gods doing something deep here right now somebody's touching heaven yeah somebody's coming back to their first love