Seven Questions to Diagnose Your Spiritual Health

April 15, 2020

Bible Text: Psalm 63 |

Series:

Seven Questions to Diagnose Your Spiritual Health | Psalm 63
Brian Hedges | April 15, 2020

Good evening! Thanks for tuning in tonight. I want to encourage you to turn in your Bibles to Psalm 63. We’ve been for the last number of weeks looking at a number of the Psalms, and, as I’ve said before, Calvin called the Psalms “an anatomy for all the parts of the soul.” Tonight I want to look at Psalm 63.

I wonder if you’ve ever gone to the doctor—maybe it was just for your yearly checkup or maybe it was because you had a fever or something of that nature—but you go to the doctor and as soon as you get there the doctor and nurses and running diagnostic tests, right? They’re taking your temperature, they’re taking your blood pressure, they’re taking your pulse, they’re asking you questions about pain. “Do you have headaches?” They’re maybe asking about your sleep, about your diet, about your allergies, about the medicines that you take. All of that is just part of the diagnosis process.

Tonight, what I’d like to suggest is that Psalm 63, which is a wonderful psalm (it’s one of my favorite of all the psalms), is a psalm that can help us with some spiritual self-diagnosis. I want to read the psalm, written by David, of course, a man after God’s own heart. It’s a psalm that shows us what someone in spiritual health looks like, and I just want to read the psalm and then ask a series of seven diagnostic questions to help us assess our own walk with the Lord.

I think one of the things that’s happening during these days in which we live—our routines have been upset with COVID-19 and with the social distancing, and so on—one of the things it does is it kind of gives us an opportunity for a reset. It gives us an opportunity to ask some questions of our souls, some questions about our lives, and this psalm can help us with that process.

Psalm 63; let me read the passage, beginning in verse 1. David says,

“O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
beholding your power and glory.
Because your steadfast love is better than life,
my lips will praise you.
So I will bless you as long as I live;
in your name I will lift up my hands.

“My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food,
and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips,
when I remember you upon my bed,
and meditate on you in the watches of the night;
for you have been my help,
and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.
My soul clings to you;
your right hand upholds me.

“But those who seek to destroy my life
shall go down into the depths of the earth;
they shall be given over to the power of the sword;
they shall be a portion for jackals.
But the king shall rejoice in God;
all who swear by him shall exult,
for the mouths of liars will be stopped.”

This is God’s word.

Now, what I didn’t read at the beginning was the superscription or the inscription for the psalm, and I should read that as well, because it gives us just a little bit of the context of the psalm, in which David wrote. It’s called, “A psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah.”

We think that he was in the wilderness of Judah during the time when his son Absalom had instigated a coup against his kingdom. David is on the run, he’s outside of Jerusalem, he’s on the run, he’s hiding out in the wilderness, hoping to avoid war with his son, and he’s in a desperate time of his life. It’s in that desperate time in his life that he turns to the Lord.

So, David was going through something that was an upset to him, it was a change in his routines, it was a time of personal crisis and even spiritual crisis, and he turns to the Lord. The prayer that he prays here is a wonderful prayer, and as I said, I want to use it as a diagnostic tool. Let me ask you seven questions to help us in diagnosing our spiritual health.

1. Do you prioritize God?

Question number one: Do you prioritize God? There’s nothing like a change in our routines to help us look freshly at our priorities. Look at David’s sense of priority in Psalm 63:1. Just read the first couple of phrases. He says, “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you.”

The word “earnestly” carries the idea of early, “early in the morning I seek you.” In David’s prayer, he’s saying that he’s putting God first in his day. “Earnestly I seek you.” The word also carries the idea of intensity. He’s seeking God with intensity, with earnestness, with zeal.

Anytime you read books on priorities, those books are going to say something like this: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” Right? Putting first things first; that’s the secret to priorities. What David is showing us here is that God was the main thing in his life, God was the priority.

What I’m after here is for us to develop a lifestyle which is centered around God, a God-centered life rather than a self-centered life. A God-centered life is a life in which God is the sun in your personal solar system. So all the other planets in your life revolve around God as the sun—your family and your work and even your church and your personal life, your physical wellbeing—all of those things are really oriented around God as the main thing. God is central.

The Lord Jesus told us in Matthew 6:33 to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”

In Psalm 27:4 we read these words, “One thing have I desired of the Lord, and that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.” Notice that he says, “One thing I have desired,” not, “Twenty things have I dabbled at.”

In Philippians 3 Paul tells us, “Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” “This one thing I do.” The one thing that his entire life was centered around was pursuing the call of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord.

One more passage. Do you remember that story about Mary and Martha in Luke 10? Martha is busy serving Jesus and her guests, but Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus, worshipping him. Martha begins to complain, and you remember what Jesus’ words to Martha were? He says, “One thing is needful, and Mary has chosen that good part, and it shall not be taken away from her.”

What’s the one thing in your life? Is God the one thing? Is he the main thing? Is he the priority? David sought God first, he put God first in his life, and even, it seems in his day. I wonder how often we begin our days with prayer or we begin our days with thoughts about God, or days in which we orient the entire day around our relationship.

That doesn’t mean that we’re spending 24/7 on our knees or reading our Bibles, but it does mean that there’s a way of living our lives in which God receives first place, in which God is the priority, in which God is the sun in this solar system of our own personal universe. Do you prioritize God?

2. Do you desire God?

Second question: Do you desire God? Again, read verse 1. “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you. My soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints you as in a dry and weary land where there is on water.”

I think David looked around the geographical terrain in which he was (he’s in the wilderness), he looks around and he sees the parched earth, and he sees it as a metaphor for his own soul, and he says, “O God, my soul is parched, and I thirst for you. I’m thirsty. I need you, Lord.” He desires God.

St. Augustine said, “The whole life of a good Christian is a holy desire.” Desire is the motivational center of our lives. We pursue that which we desire. Nobody seeks for that which they do not desire.

We’ve already seen in this series Psalm 42:1, where the psalmist says, “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.” Here’s this deer, this hunted animal, running through the wilderness, and it desperately needs water to sustain its life. In the same way, we need God, but do we desire him as if we need him?

Psalm 73:25 is another wonderful parallel passage, where the psalmist there says, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.” That’s the idea. It’s a desire for God that is so great that it’s greater than any other desire that we have. It’s soul-thirst, a longing for God.

Notice how this is expressed in verse 1. He says, “My soul thirsts for you,” and, “My flesh faints for you.” Why does he say, “My flesh faints for you”? We’re talking about a spiritual longing for God, but he says, “My flesh faints for you.” The word “faint” carries the idea of a lover pining after his beloved.

Well, I don’t think I ever really understood this until I fell in love. I remember that when Holly and I were engaged we were separated by several states (she was in Georgia and I was in Texas), and I literally ached physically with the desire to just be in her company again. Every time I take a mission trip and I’m gone for multiple days or weeks on end, I feel the same way; I just ache to be with my beloved again.

David says that about God. God is his beloved, and he aches, he longs. He says, “My flesh faints for you,” or “pants for you.” He longs to be with God.

Notice what it is that he desires about God. You see it in verse 2. He wants to be with God, he has a soul thirst for God, in order, he says, “to see your power and your glory.” Get this: what he’s after here is not simply God’s blessings. He wants God himself. He wants the blesser more than the blessing. He’s seeking after the face of God, not merely the hand of God. He wants God himself! He’s longing for God; it’s a passion for God’s fellowship and God’s presence rather than for just God’s gifts and God’s blessings.

Listen, we have to beware that we do not become mercenary in our desires for God, where we want God in order to get something else. We seek God just because we want health restored, or we seek God just because we’re longing for prosperity. When we do that, we put God’s gifts ahead of God himself.

Listen to this sentence and fill in the blank: “Jesus plus ____ equals happiness for me.” Fill in the blank in your own mind, and whatever is in that blank is your idol. It’s the thing that you put before Jesus. If you can say, “Jesus plus nothing equals happiness for me,” then you know that you’ve really put him first in your life.

Do you desire God? Do you prioritize him, do you desire him?

3. Do you worship God?

Question number three: Do you worship God? We see the worship in verses 3-5. He says, “Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.” Okay, so he’s praising God, he’s worshipping God. Verse 4, “So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands.” Verse 5, “My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips.” He’s saying, “My lips praise you, I bless you as long as I live, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips.”

Did you know that “Praise the Lord” is the most often repeated command in Scripture? More than anything else, the Bible commands us to worship God. The Westminster Shorter Catechism had it right: “What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

This is why God made you. This is why God made me. He made us to glorify him. He made us for his glory. He made us to worship him. He created us with this singular purpose in mind, that we would exist for his praise.

Listen to these words from the prophet Isaiah, Isaiah 48:9-11. As John Piper has said, these words could be written as a banner over everything that God does. He says, “For my name’s sake I defer my anger; for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you, that I may not cut you off. Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction. For my own sake I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another.”

God loves his glory, and he wants to share the joy of being glorified, of glorifying himself, he wants to share the joy of glorification with his people. He does that as he pursues his glory in our own hearts. He has created us for his glory (Isaiah 43:7), he is worthy of our glory (Revelation 4:11), and he has redeemed us for his glory (Ephesians 1). Read that wonderful hymn of Paul in Ephesians 1, where Paul is extolling God for all of the spiritual blessings that are given to us in Christ Jesus. Three times there is this refrain that he has done it for the praise of the glory of his grace. That’s why he chose you, that’s why he redeemed you, that’s why he’s enriched you, that’s why he sealed you with the Spirit. It’s for the praise of the glory of his grace.

David praised God. He worshipped God. Notice some of the characteristics of that worship. It’s vital worship. He says, “I will bless you as long as I live,” so with every breath he breathes he’s worshipping God, he’s blessing God. It’s verbal. This isn’t something he merely does in his mind and in his thoughts, but he gives expression to it with his words and with his lips.

You see this in verse 3. He says, “My lips shall praise you,” and in verse 5, “My mouth will praise you with joyful lips.” We don’t really worship God unless we express that worship! The worship has to be verbalized, it has to be vocalized in our lives.

It’s also visible. He says, “I will lift up my hands in your name.” In other words, he is involved in worship with the whole of his being, so his worship of God is even reflected in his posture, as he lifts up his hands in the name of God.

God wants to be glorified. He created us for his glory, and the question for us is, do we worship him?

Now, one reason we know that this is not a selfish ambition on God’s part, to pursue his own worship and to pursue his own glory, is because worshipping God is right at the heart of our deepest joys. Listen to Psalm 16:11, where the psalmist says, “You make known to me the path of life, and in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” To know him, to glorify him, to worship him is to find fullness of joy.

4. Do you enjoy God?

That leads us right into the next diagnostic question: do you enjoy God? Not just do you prioritize him and desire him and worship him, but do you actually enjoy him?

You see the joy right here in the passage. It’s reflected in the praise, but you see it in the language of satisfaction. Look at verse 3 and then verse 5. He says, “Because your steadfast love is better than life—” see the value statement he’s making? “Your steadfast love, your love, your grace, your faithfulness is better than life to me; because of that, my lips will praise you.” Then verse 5, “My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips.” He enjoys God.

Again, to quote St. Augustine, he said in his Confessions, “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” To worship God and to know God is to enjoy him. It is to find our rest in him, to find our satisfaction in him. In fact, God commands us to do this. He commands us to delight ourselves in the Lord (Psalm 37:4), to serve the Lord with gladness (Psalm 100:2), and to rejoice in the Lord always, “again I will say, rejoice” (Philippians 4:4).

C.S. Lewis said, “It is the duty of the Christian to be as happy as he can.” There is nothing like our current set of circumstances to put the magnifying glass on the source of our joys, our delights, our satisfaction, our contentment. What is it that actually gives us joy and life? If we find ourselves less joyful right now, could it be that the very heart of our joys has not been in Christ and in Christ alone?

As I’m sure many of you have already noticed, I’m kind of channeling John Piper and Jonathan Edwards and C.S. Lewis into this sermon. I’ll never forget how deeply I was impacted by reading John Piper’s book Desiring God probably 20 years ago now. Let me just read you the key quote from that book. This was life-changing for me, as Piper shows how God’s glory and our joy come together in the experience of worship.

Piper said, “God’s quest to be glorified and our quest to be satisfied reach their goal in this one experience: our delight in God, which overflows in praise. For God, praise is the sweet echo of his own excellence in the hearts of his people, and for us, praise is the summit of satisfaction that comes from living in fellowship with God. God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”

Are you satisfied in God? Do you enjoy God? You know, the problem is that we are far too easily pleased. We just get so easily contented with little things, with trivial pleasures.

C.S. Lewis said that “if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised to us in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.” He said, “We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.” He says, “We’re like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Do some self-diagnosis. Do you enjoy God, or have you been too easily pleased with the lower, lesser, worldly pleasures instead of the infinite joy at God’s right hand forevermore?

One of the hymn-writers put it beautifully. He said,

“We taste thee, O thou living bread,
And long to feast upon thee still;
We drink of thee, the fountainhead,
And thirst, our souls from thee to fill.”

Do you enjoy God?

5. Do you think about God?

Question number five: Do you think about God? Is he in your thoughts? Look at verse 6. The psalmist says that he praises God with joyful lips “when I remember you upon my bed and meditate on you in the watches of the night.” Let’s get really practical here. How is it that you can actually prioritize God and cultivate a desire for God and then worship God so that you are enjoying God? What practically does that take in our lives?

Here’s what it takes. It takes centering your mind on him. It takes thinking about him. It takes what Scripture as well as Christians throughout the ages have called the spiritual discipline of meditation, thinking about God. “When I meditate on you in the watches of the night…” David says, “[that’s when] my soul is satisfied.” “I’m satisfied, I enjoy you, I am filled with joy, and I praise you with joyful lips—when I meditate on you in the watches of the night.”

St. Augustine said, “Lord, the more I meditate on thee, the sweeter thou art unto me.” St. Jerome called meditation his paradise. Another one of the ancient authors called meditation “the very gate and portal by which we enter into glory.”

What is meditation? When we hear the word meditation, we perhaps associate it with Eastern forms of meditation. We may be thinking of yoga or something like that, where essentially what you’re doing is you’re emptying the mind in pursuit of a calming effect on your body. That’s not biblical meditation. Biblical meditation is not emptying your mind, it’s, rather, filling your mind with thoughts of God. It’s filling your mind with truth. It’s thinking about God.

Listen, you will never have deep joy in God without high thoughts about God. Your thoughts of God are what lead to joy and worship and desire for God. We have to fill our minds, in other words, with the word of God. We meditate on his word (Psalm 1). The man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, who does not sit in the seat of scoffers; that man, what does he do? He delights in the law of the Lord, and he meditates on God’s law day and night. He’s filling his mind with the word of God.

We meditate on his word, we meditate on his worth, on his value, on God himself, thinking about his character and his attributes and who he is, and we meditate on his works. This is all part of meditation.

I’ll never forget, when I was just a kid (I was maybe ten years old), there was a young man who was probably in his late twenties at the time, a young man who was married and just had one child at the time. I still know this brother and he’s a pastor today. But I remember him talking to me, and he used an illustration that stuck with me. He said, “Brian, what if I told you to go outside and every day take a bag and just walk around and pick up rocks? Just put rocks in the bag and then store the rocks. That’d sound boring, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, that sounds pretty boring.”

He said, “But what if you discovered years later, after years and years and years of collecting rocks, what if you discovered that those rocks, every one of them, had gold in the rocks? You would be amazingly rich, and it would have been worth all of the effort to pick up rocks.”

He said, “Right now, you read your Bible and you may feel like you’re just picking up rocks; but someday you will discover that there is gold in those rocks.”

It was good advice, it stuck with me, and it has been helpful through the years to just keep me coming back to the word.

Let me ask you about your spiritual disciplines when it comes to the Bible. Do a little bit of self-analysis here. How much time do you tend to spend in a given day in Scripture or in reading good, spiritual books that help you in meditating on Scripture?

Now, contrast that with how much time you tend to spend in a day on social media. How much time do you tend to spend every day watching television? Did you know that if you just spent one hour a day in social media—and the stats tell us that most people are spending two or three hours a day—but if you just spent one hour a day for social media, an average of one hour a day for the course of your life, and you lived to be, say, 72 years old. Seventy-two years; that’s the average, one hour a day. Do you know that you will have spent three entire years of your life on social media or watching TV?

That’s just one hour a day! If you spent three hours a day in a combination of social media and television, you would have spent close to a decade of your life just scrolling through Facebook, looking through Twitter, looking through Instagram, watching TV.

Now listen, I’m not trying to be legalistic here. I’m not saying that you would close your Facebook account or you should never watch a television program or whatever. What I’m saying is that we need to prioritize those things that actually get our minds on God, who should be the very object of our heart’s desires. The only way that happens is by getting in the word and reading and saturating ourselves in the kind of literature, the kind of media that gets us thinking about God.

Just change the scenario. What if you spent an average of one hour a day in your Bible or reading good books, and by the end of your life you had spent three entire years of your life doing that? Or what if you’re spending two or three hours a day in that way, and you’d spent a decade of your life meditating, cultivating thoughts of God? How much richer would you be? You may feel like you’re picking up rocks when you first get started, but you will find there’s gold in those rocks.

6. Do you pursue God?

Question number six (we’re almost done): Do you pursue God? Look at verse 8. David says, “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.” Or take the old King James: “My soul followeth hard after thee.”

Both translations of the word are right. The Hebrew word carries the idea of clinging or of sticking or of holding fast. But sometimes the word was used in a military context. That’s where we get the language of “follow hard.”

For example, in 1 Samuel 31:2 we read about how the Philistines followed hard after Saul and his sons, or some versions say overtook Saul and his sons. It’s the idea that you have these soldiers who are pursuing King Saul and his sons in the heat of battle. That’s the idea.

Perhaps that’s what David is thinking of here when he says, “My soul pursues you. My soul clings to you. My soul follows hard after you.”

Is that characteristic of your pursuit of God, that you’re following hard, you’re clinging, you’re sticking to him, you’re holding fast, you’re pursuing him as if you were pursuing someone in this military context?

My family has just recently started rewatching The Lord of the Rings films. You remember in the second Lord of the Rings film, The Two Towers, when a couple of the hobbits have been carried off by the enemy orcs. Do you remember that Aragorn and Legolas and Gimli are pursuing them? They’re just running at—they’re basically sprinting through the wilderness in order to try to catch up. Well, that’s the idea. That's the kind of intensity that should characterize our pursuit of God.

By the way, if you’d like a little help with this, I recommend A.W. Tozer’s classic book by that very title, The Pursuit of God, where Tozer said that “a man can never seek after God unless God has first sought the man,” and then he spent an entire book describing what it looks like to live in the pursuit of God. Do you pursue him?

7. Do you trust God?

Here’s the final question, number seven: Do you trust God? Look at verse 7, and then just the last three verses of the psalm. Verse 7 says, “For you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.” Again, he’s thinking here about his meditation on God, he’s thinking about how God has helped him, and he’s essentially saying in this verse that “because you have been my help in the past, I will continue to trust you in the present.”

Then, verses 9-11—these verses are slightly different from the rest of the psalm, but it’s where we get a sense of the context, as David is in the wilderness and he’s running, we think, from Absalom, his son. What does he do here? He is directing all of his trust towards the Lord to deal with his enemies.

He says, “But those who seek to destroy my life shall go down into the depths of the earth; they shall be given over to the power of the sword; they shall be a portion for jackals. But the king [speaking of himself] shall rejoice in God; all who swear by him shall exult, for the mouths of liars will be stopped.”

In other words, he’s expressing here his trust in God, that as he trusts in God, God will vindicate him, God will protect him, God will be with him, God will fight his battles for him. He’s looking to the Lord; he’s hoping in the Lord in the middle of his difficult circumstances.

Listen, trusting God is foundational to everything else in your life. It’s foundational to everything else we’ve talked about in this psalm. This is right at the heart of your spiritual health: do you trust him? If you trust him, then won’t you prioritize him? Won’t you worship him? Won’t you desire him? Won’t you enjoy him? Won’t you think about him? Won’t you pursue him? It all comes down to this: do you trust God? If we trust God, our trust will motivate us to organize our lives around him.

David had great reason to trust in God. He says, “You have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.” He looks back! David, at this point in his life, is probably in his upper middle ages. He’s experienced a lot. He can remember how God had delivered him from the paw of the lion and the bear when he was tending his father’s sheep, he can remember how God had delivered him from the hand of Goliath the giant, as recorded there for us in 1 Samuel 17. He can remember how God had protected him for years while he was running from Saul in the wilderness. He can remember every victory God gave him as he fought against the enemies of the Lord, the Philistines, in his early reign.

He can also look back and he can see his sins, he can see his mistakes. The sin with Bathsheba; that’s already happened, and yet God had forgiven him, God had restored him.

He looks back and he says, “You have been my help.” He looks back on the life that is marked with not perfect obedience by a long shot, but with a consistent pursuit of God, trusting God, and how God has helped him again and again through his distresses, through his sufferings, even in his sins, restoring him, drawing him back to himself. He says, “Because you have been my help, I’ll trust you now.”

Brothers and sisters, let me encourage you to look back on your life and look at how God has taken care of you. Look at how God has provided for you. Look at how God has sustained you. But don’t just look back at your life; we have something better to look back at. Look back to the cross. Look back to what God did for us through his Son, Jesus, as he died for our sins on the cross. Look back to the empty tomb. Look back to what God has done through his Son, Jesus, by sending him to die for us and to rise again.

Romans 8:32 says that “he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, with him, graciously give us all things?” In other words, if Jesus has already gone to the cross for us, if the Father has already sent his Son to die for us, won’t he also give us everything we need? If that’s true, can’t we trust him? We can and we should, and if we do, if we trust him, it will be the foundation to everything.

Let me encourage you, spend some time in this psalm, do some diagnosis, ask some questions, and renew your trust and your desire for the Lord.

Let me close with these words from a wonderful old him. The hymn-writer said,

“Jesus is all I wish or want;
For him I pray, I thirst, I pant.
Let others after earth aspire;
Christ is the treasure I desire.”

Let’s pray.

Lord, as we look at this psalm, we are challenged by it. I certainly feel challenged by this psalm; challenged to examine priorities and desires and thoughts and joys, to ask ourselves some hard questions, but also to renew our trust in you, and we pray for you to renew our desire for you. Lord, would you help us see how great you are, how worthy you are, of all of our worship, of all of our praise? Help us see how sufficient you are to meet the deep desires of our hearts, to bring real joy and satisfaction; and help us then align our lives accordingly. Help us organize our lives around you. May you the sun in the solar system of each of our universes. Lord, do a work of renewal in us, restore us to spiritual health. We pray that you would do it in Jesus’ name and for his sake, Amen.