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Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
Devotional: October 1st

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THE LONGING SOUL SATISFIED

For Thy loving-kindness is better than life; my lips shall praise Thee, So will I bless Thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in Thy Name. My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness. - Psalms 63:3-5

Life is good mainly as the field upon which God’s lovingkindness may be manifested and grasped. It is like the white sheet on which the beam of light is thrown, worth nothing in itself, worth everything as the medium for the manifestation of that lustrous light. It is like a stained-glass window, only a poor bit of glass till the sunshine gleams behind it, and then it flashes up into rubies and purples and gold. Life is best when through life there filters or flashes on us the brightness of the loving-kindness of the Lord.

And all real religion includes in it a calm, deliberate, fixed preference of God to life itself. Does your religion do that? Can you say, "It were wise and it were blessed to die, to get more of God into my soul"? If not, our longing, which is the very language of the Spirit in our hearts, has to

be intensified much ere it reaches its fitting height.

And then, still further, this longing is accompanied with a firm resolve of continuance: " Thus will I bless Thee while I live." "Thus" - as I am doing now in the midst of my longing - " I will lift up my hands in Thy name." " My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness."

Notice how very beautiful that immediate turn in the Psalmist’s feelings is. The fruition of God is contemporaneous with the desire after God. The one moment, "my soul thirsteth"; the next moment, "my soul is satisfied." As in the wilderness when the rain comes down, and in a couple of days what was baked earth is flowery meadow, and all the torrent-beds where the white stones glistened ghastly in the heat are foaming with rushing water and fringed with budding willows - so in the instant in which a heart turns with true desire to God, in that instant does God draw near to it. The Arctic spring comes with one stride; to-day snow, to-morrow flowers. There is no time needed to work this telegraph; while we speak He hears; before we call He answers. We have to wait for many of His gifts, never for Himself. We have to wait sometimes when by our own faults we postpone the coming of the blessings that we have asked. If we are thinking more about Absalom and Ahithophel than about God, more about our sorrows and our troubles than about Himself; if we are busy with other things; if having asked we do not look up and expect; if we shut the doors of our hearts as soon as our prayer is offered, or languidly stroll away from the place of prayer ere the blessing has fluttered down upon our souls; - of course we do not get it. But God is always waiting to bestow; and all that we need to do is to open the sluices, and the great ocean flows in, or as much of it as our hearts can hold. " My soul thirsteth " is the experience of the one moment, and ere the clock has ticked again "my soul shall be satisfied."

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