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Encountering God in the Valleys, on the Mountaintops, and in the Wilderness
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We're looking at Psalm 63, a psalm written by David during a time of deep crisis. David is literally in the desert of Judah, facing enemies, and in a metaphorical desert as well. If you're familiar with David's life, you know that getting chased by enemies is not an unusual occurrence for him—but here he is again, in the wilderness, relating to the dryness of the land around him as one who is hungry and thirsty for God.
Let's begin in verse one. David says: "You, God, are my God. Earnestly I seek you. I thirst for you. My whole being longs for you in a dry and parched land where there is no water."
Then he continues: "I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and glory." This phrase—I have seen you—is a technical Hebrew phrase that David uses specifically. It refers to a visionary encounter with God, seeing God with your being, seeing God in your spirit and your soul. A seer in the Old Testament was one who encountered God through visions.
David had gone into the sanctuary, the place where God was, and he had this visionary encounter with God. And here in the middle of the desert, his life is being threatened, and he remembers that encounter and longs to experience God in that way again.
David declares: "Your love is better than life. My lips will glorify you. I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands, and I will be satisfied with the riches of food."
He's in the valley. Trouble is at his door. But he has this belief that God will deliver him. There's a prophetic sensitivity to his words—it's actually future tense. Right now he's in the desert place, in the middle of a crisis. But there is a day coming when he will again taste the goodness of God and be satisfied in God's presence.
"With singing lips my mouth will praise you. On my bed I will remember you. I think of you through the watches of the night, because you are my help. I sing in the shadow of your wings. I cling to you. Your right hand upholds me."
David is literally pursuing God. He's getting up in the middle of the night, worshiping and praying, after the presence of God. You can feel the passion in his words.
Then David gives his attention to his enemies: "Those who want to kill me will be destroyed. They will go down into the depths of the earth. They will be given over to the sword and become food for jackals."
Not very Christlike, is it? Jesus tells us to love our enemies and bless those who curse us and forgive those who sin against us. But David prays, "God, make them dog food." You have to love David because when he processes his pain and these emotions, he's raw and honest. He says to God what he feels. And this is in the Bible because we need to be honest with God if we're going to draw near to him.
But then: "The king will rejoice in God. All who swear by God will glory in him, while the mouths of liars will be silenced."
I want to tell you a little bit of my story to set the framework for today's message. As a teenager, I began to long for something more than this world had to offer me. I was always a searcher, and nothing that I tried—and believe me, I was a little rebellious—nothing satisfied the longing that I felt in my soul. Nothing gave me the peace that I was longing for in the midst of the valley I was experiencing at that time.
As I held the longing and the lack that I felt out before me, I remembered that about a year earlier, someone had said to me, "Laura, you really need to know Jesus." I laughed it off at the time. But I thought, "Well, nothing else is working, so why not try God?" I found a little paperback Gospel of Luke in my sister's bookcase, and I read it cover to cover, night after night, pouring over the words of this man who claimed to be God. They moved me into the very depths of my being.
In those written words, I had the most profound encounter with the living Word, Jesus Christ. Jesus encountered me by his Spirit. Not knowing anything, I felt totally compelled to get down on my knees in my room—nobody telling me anything of what to do—and just pray a simple prayer: "I want to follow you, Jesus, for the rest of my life."
A simple yet profound prayer, because I felt the love of God poured out into my heart in a dramatic way. There are encounters that you have with God that are hard to articulate. I can't really articulate this to you, but I will tell you that in that singular encounter, everything in my life was altered. I was transformed and the course of my destiny was set.
I tell you that today because there are two things that I deeply believe are essential to our spirituality.
Firstly, rhythms of faithfully walking with God in the grit and the grind of our everyday lives, pouring over the scriptures day after day. Just the ongoing process of pursuing relationship with Jesus, keeping him first when you feel like it, and most importantly when you don't. This requires discipline. We're all invited to walk in step with the Spirit, but we like to walk on our own path and at our own pace. We need to keep in step with the Spirit. That takes discipline. That takes engaging in behaviors, decisions, and habits that help us pursue intimacy and union with God faithfully every day. And this is essential.
But secondly, we are also to expect moments of profound fresh encounters with the living God. These are also essential in our spiritual journey. If we take this book seriously—the Holy Bible—it is full of people who are encountering a God who transforms their lives. They meet him. He speaks to them, and they are changed forever.
This is true of David. David is a man who believes in a theology of pursuing God faithfully every day. He prays. He's in the Word. He actively participates in worship and goes to the sanctuary. And David is also a man who has experienced life-changing, life-altering encounters with God. In Psalm 63, we see both of these things: the faithful everyday and the fresh encounter.
Today we're going to look at three places where we can expect to encounter God on life's journey, and three ways that David models how we can prepare ourselves to be in the position to encounter him.
Firstly, God encounters us in the valleys of life. The valleys are places where life comes to break us. Can anyone relate in this room today? Some of us have walked through many valleys. Some of you are in a valley today. And I guarantee you, if you've journeyed with Jesus for some time, you could look back and see a place where trouble came to your door in some way, shape, or form, and you were plunged into the valley and God met you in that place. You encountered God and you were changed. That's David's story, too.
In Psalm 23, David sings: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for your rod and your staff, they comfort me." David knows the presence of God in the valley. And he's in a valley as he writes Psalm 63.
It's the deepest, darkest valley for David because the enemy chasing him is his own son, Absalom, his beloved son. Now, you're never meant to have favorites. But David had a favorite, and Absalom was his favorite. But now his beloved son, his favorite son, turned on him, betrayed him, and took his throne. Imagine the pain and the heartache and the sorrow that must be sitting on David's soul.
David has lost his family. He's lost his material possessions. He's lost his people. He's lost his sense of purpose. He's in a valley of battle, on the run, about to lose his life—or at least that's what's being threatened. David had everything, and it was all completely stripped away. That's a dark valley for David.
Here's the reality: every single one of us has moments in life where we feel pain and heartache and sorrow and deep disappointment and fear. Your testimony, like mine, is "God came to me in the valley." He encountered you there and he brought healing and hope and comfort, or he gave you the grace to endure that valley.
Some of you find yourselves in a valley today. I've got a word for you: He is the God of the valley. He is with you in the valley. That's who he is. So just like David, draw near to God there, because God is with you there and he will draw near to you.
But God doesn't just meet us in the valleys. He's also the God who encounters us on the mountaintop. This happens to David, too.
In verse two, he says: "I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and glory." There are two Hebrew words for seeing. The first is just physical material sight—like I see Beggy sitting in the front row. It's a material, physical way of seeing. But David uses the second Hebrew word, huzzah, which is always used for a prophetic, visionary encounter with God.
What David is saying is that one day, when he was showing up in his faithful everyday, just going along in his friendship with God—in this case, he was showing up to church, the sanctuary—he experienced the intimate, powerful presence of God. A faithful everyday turned into a fresh encounter. This intimate and profound encounter with God is such a precious gift to David. He never speaks of it anywhere else except in this psalm, where he's just recalling it and bringing it to mind.
You know why? Because he needs to feed his faith. He's in the middle of the valley. What you need to know in the middle of the valley is that the God of the mountaintop is with you there, too. He knows it, and he speaks it to his soul and he builds his faith: "I have seen you in the sanctuary, God."
He practices something called spiritual memory. When we're in the tough places, we need to practice spiritual memory: "God, I know who you are. God, I've experienced you. God, your love is better than life. God, you were there with me and you're here with me now."
The reality is there are times in your devotions, times when you're in the Word, when you're praying, and God speaks. He manifests his presence in a deeper way. There are times you show up to church and an ordinary Sunday becomes an extraordinary kingdom event.
We just choose him. Nothing is in crisis. Nothing is unusual. And he manifests his presence powerfully. There are many weeks that as I share God's Word and I look out at all of your beautiful faces, there are tears streaming down faces as God comes close. People often tell me that during our times of worship they experience God touching their heart. When we pray at the end, people weep—not because our team are doing a really bad job, but because they're encountering the living God. We're being soaked by the presence of God, and we see it and we feel it in our souls and in our bodies, because he is the God who encounters us on the mountaintop.
This is why pursuing God faithfully every day is so important. Being with him in his Word and in prayer alone, and here as part of the wider body on Sundays—when we feel like it and when we don't—because his love is better than life. And one of these days when we're just showing up, God shows up and it alters our life.
God is also the God who encounters us in the wilderness. This is not a valley. This is different. In the Bible, the wilderness often symbolizes a place where someone makes a choice to get away from ordinary everyday life to be alone with God. Jesus begins his ministry with a 40-day fast in the wilderness. He separated himself to meet with God. It's an intentional place of pursuing God—dedicated spaces where we just go after God's presence.
That's what David is doing in the psalm in the wilderness. He declares in verse one: "You, God, are my God. Earnestly I seek you. My whole being longs for you in a dry and parched land where there is no water."
Listen, it's the joy of each of us to pursue God in the faithfulness of every day. We show up and we read our Bibles and we pray and we confess our sin and we give thanks and we have rhythms of spiritual practices to seek God. But I also believe there are seasons where there's a thirst and a hunger and a longing that creeps into our soul. That's actually an invitation to get into the wilderness with God.
We say, "Lord, I'm coming after you in an unusual season of pursuit, like David, like Jesus, like many saints who've gone before us, and we seek your face because we have a deeper longing."
I know this because I've experienced it many times throughout my journey with Christ. I've had these seasons where life is good. There's no crisis. There's fruit. There's joy. But there's this realization that despite all the goodness I'm experiencing, there's a something—this longing that is sitting on my soul that nothing else can satisfy. I'm just longing for God.
David describes this longing like a thirst in the desert. I haven't been in a desert recently, but I have been in France under a heat dome. One day we were in Paris and the temperatures were soaring, and you're so thirsty and you're constantly buying bottles of water. The water is lovely and cold when you buy it, and it's sweating. You're walking around with water that's sweating. It's lukewarm. You're drinking warm water. Everyone is sweating. The Eiffel Tower is sweating. It's awful. And you're thirsty.
Thirst is such a vivid and powerful picture. "My soul thirsts for you," David says. There's almost a longing in there, and it's painful at times. Ronald Rohheiser calls it holy longing.
It's really important that when we feel this profound sense of spiritual dryness, we understand that it is not proof of God's absence. That's what the enemy would try to make you believe. "Oh, you feel dissatisfied. You feel a longing. You just can't get enough of God. It's a sign that God is absent." But it's a sign of your soul recognizing its true habitat—that your soul is a parched and weary ground waiting, longing for living water from the living God being poured out upon your lack.
Because if you haven't yet had that feeling of acute lack, it will come to you. What this world has to offer, all the superficial gratifications that it offers us to water our souls, are nothing but broken cisterns. They won't satisfy. And David shows us that these longings are signposts to direct us to reach out for God.
I felt that holy longing, a deep dissatisfaction. And I've entered into long seasons of prayer and fasting and silence—wilderness seasons. What I can say is that when you extend yourself to seek God, he marks you with his presence in a way that's unmistakable.
Perhaps there's a deep dissatisfaction in you today. Maybe there's a holy longing that's been sitting on your soul. I want to say it's an invitation. It's an invitation into a wilderness season of encounter with God. Let it draw you in to more.
What can we learn from David about how we should position ourselves to encounter God? He is the God of encounter, and he encounters us in every season of life, wherever we find ourselves. Here are three quick points.
Firstly, pursue God passionately. Listen to David's words of passion and longing in the psalm: "Earnestly I seek you. I thirst for you. My whole body longs for you. On my bed, I remember you. I think of you through the watches of the night. I cling to you."
David's words are not casual. They're not apathetic or unintentional. These are passionate words of pursuit. And I've learned that if you want this kind of passion in your relationship with God, you have to feed the right appetites in your life.
Listen, every day of your life, you are feeding longings—whether they are good longings or disordered longings. Humans are people with empty spaces—not just your stomach. In those empty spaces, we are longing. You will either feed your longing in an unhealthy way that ultimately will not satisfy, or you will feed your longing with God like David does.
Let me give you two things that I do to feed my longing for God.
Number one: I like to spend time with what I call soul friends. There are certain people who, when I spend time with them, make me want to be with Jesus. One of my desires in life is that I would be that kind of friend. The second thing that I do is I turn up the volume of certain voices in my life. This can be through reading their books or listening to their teachings or their lectures. Why? Because those voices, their message, who they are, and what they're sharing—it triggers my heart to long for God.
So, what do you do to feed the right longings and the right appetites in your life? What does that look like in your everyday? Yes, read the Bible. Yes, pray. Yes, get silent with God. All of that. But as you go about your everyday, how are you feeding the right longings?
Secondly, you have to live sacrificially. If you want to posture yourself to be in a place to receive an encounter from God, sacrifice is critically important. Look at David's life. Look at the life of Jesus in the Gospels. They fast. Jesus starts his ministry with a 40-day fast. They stay up through the night. They separate themselves, pursuing God in the wilderness. Why? Because they long to encounter him. And sacrifice has always been essential in deepening our union with God because it kills the flesh like nothing else.
Here's what happens to many of us: We're following Jesus—usually an up-and-down journey, but we're making progress. And all of a sudden you find yourself flatlined. You're numb. You feel numb to God. You feel numb to the Spirit. When you're going about your life, you're just going about your life. Yes, you believe something, but it isn't sitting there. It's not real to you at the moment. You're stuck.
Often the key to getting to the next depth of your intimacy with Jesus is sacrifice. Because what you're really saying through sacrifice is, "God, I need you. God, I want you. God, I long for you. All the good stuff this world has to offer, everything that I'm just going through in my everyday—it does not satisfy the deepest spaces in my soul."
So you need to get into the wilderness with God. What could that look like for you in this season? We have at least two weeks of prayer and fasting every year, where we show up together and say, "God, we need you. God, we desire you. God, we long for you." But what does it look like for you personally to say, "God, my whole body longs for you"?
And then finally, worship him. If you want to position yourself to encounter God afresh, put him first. Worship him because he's worthy of it. Praise him for who he is and what he is like. Because this is part of building your faith.
David does this in verses 2 to 5. He recalls his previous encounter with God in the sanctuary and tells God that because his love is better than life, his lips will glorify him.
Listen, at that moment, do you really think that David felt that God's love was better than life? He was on the run. He lost everything. Someone was trying to kill him. I highly doubt that's what he felt. But it's what he knew. And sometimes we have to live from what is true, not just from what we feel.
He feels like making his enemies pedigree chum. That's what he feels like. He's angry. I guarantee you he did not feel like worshiping. But he chooses to. "I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands"—which is a posture of prayer. He's praying and he's worshiping God not based on his current experience but based on who God is.
Worship is about what God is worth, not what we feel able to give him.
So I wonder when you came in here today—maybe you came in and we were already singing, or maybe you came in and we started singing, and you were like [sighs], "These Christians singing." Because something in you just didn't feel like worshiping today. Sometimes it doesn't come naturally. It never really does. Sometimes we're in the valley. Sometimes we need our souls to be awakened because they've been numbed all week, and you're like, "Man alive, I'm here and they're singing. I'm just not in the mood."
Listen, there's something amazing that happens when we come into the sanctuary and we just lift our hands up. We take them out of our pockets and we just lift them up and we reach out for God. Not because we feel like it, not because we feel like we have anything to give, but because of who he is, because of what he's like—because of how we've encountered him. There's something that happens when we just get down on our knees because we can't even sing and we don't even have it in us, but we just get down on our knees and say, "You're Lord." And something shifts. Our perspective begins to shift. We begin to see things differently. He starts to soften our hearts and we begin to feel him and encounter him.
Charles Spurgeon, the incredible preacher, commented on Psalm 63. He said this: "Shall we praise God in the garden and not in the wilderness? Even though we might be in the desert, there should be no reason that the desert be in us."
Hey, people of God, are you in a valley today? A desert place today? There is no reason that what's here needs to get in here. Guard your heart, for from it comes the wellspring of life.
Our God meets us in the valleys. He meets us on the mountaintops. He meets us in the wilderness. He is faithful to meet his people because he is a God who longs to be near to us. He has literally moved heaven and earth to be near to you. Christ has already come, put flesh on, became human, lived, went to the cross, went down into the depths of hell, and rose again so that you and I could be intimate with him, could be near to him, could experience that love that is better than life.
This year has been so fulfilling, so fruitful, and so beneficial in so many ways. But I came into this year and I felt that longing—that longing for deeper intimacy, for fresh encounter. My soul longs for God. And I feel an invitation into the wilderness space in my own life, in my own devotion to him, because there's a longing that is just drawing me in.
Perhaps that's you today too. Or maybe you want to be awakened afresh to his presence and ask him to plant a seed of holy longing within you that's been missing.
Lord, some of us here today we just need a fresh encounter with you. In my own journey this year, Jesus, I am in a fresh season of longing. But what we need is your presence. Jesus, you said you are living water. You're the only one who can quench this deep thirst in our hearts. You're the bread of life. You're the only one who can satisfy the hunger in our souls. We run after all this other stuff, but you are the source of life.
So today, Lord, we ask: would you plant a seed of holy longing in each one of our hearts? Birth holy desire within us today. Lord, forgive us where we've been feeding other longings, other appetites at the expense of our desire and relationship for you. Lord, birth holy desire within us. And then give us the faithfulness to journey in everyday life with you. Give us the grace to separate off and sacrifice into the wilderness when you're really calling us to be there. And then give us dreams and visions, through whispers and encounters with you. Lord, meet us now in these moments. Come, Holy Spirit.
Maybe you didn't even realize how thirsty you were until just now. Maybe as we opened up the psalm and as you heard the words, you thought, "I haven't experienced his presence in a long time." He's here and he hasn't left you, and he longs for you. His promise is: "Draw near to me and I will draw near to you."
So tell him how you long for him this morning. Just as we begin to worship, why don't you just form a prayer just from the depths of your heart—an honest prayer to God about where you are, about how life is, about how you need him. Just begin to talk to him.
