“My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God” (Psalm 42:2).
Solomon conducted an experiment wherein he sought satisfaction from everything “under the sun”. He tried wine, works, wealth, women, and “whatsoever” his eyes desired, yet he concluded that “all was vanity and a vexation of spirit, and—no profit”(SS 2:11). He should have known better! He should have listened to the counsel of the Psalmist who said, “My soul thirsteth for God”—there he would have found satisfaction.
Even so, we would do well to listen to these words written by Alexander Maclaren:
No man is made to be satisfied from himself. For the stilling of our own hearts, for the satisfying of our own nature, for the strengthening and joy of our being, we need to go beyond ourselves, and to fix upon something external to ourselves. We are not independent. None of us can stand by himself. No man carries within him the fountain from which he can draw. If a heart is to be blessed, it must go out of the narrow circle of its own individuality; and if a man’s life is to be strong and happy, he must get the foundation of his strength somewhere else than in his own soul….
We are made, next, to need, not things, but living beings. ‘My soul thirsteth’–for what? An abstraction, a possession, riches, a thing? No! ‘my soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.’ Yes, hearts want hearts. The converse of Christ’s saying is equally true; He said, ‘God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit’; man has a spirit, and man must have Spirit to worship, to lean upon, to live by, or all will be inefficient and unsatisfactory. Oh, lay this to heart, my brother!–no things can satisfy a living soul.
