I’ve preached my last sermon on James. But I thought that before we start
our next series, which will be on Philippians, it would be good for me to
preach a few sermons on some different thoughts that have occurred to me.
So, today we look at a portion of Psalm 107. I was reading this Psalm during
my daily Bible reading, and some things struck me as I did. This Psalm is
about the return of Israel after it had been scattered from its homeland. It
looks at the redeemed whom the Lord is gathering from the lands. The
psalmist uses different vignettes to picture this gathering of the people of
God. Our text is one of those vignettes. After recounting God’s deliverance
the psalmist calls for thanks to be offered to the covenant-keeping God. And
he gives a reason why we should thank our God. ‘For he satisfies the longing
soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.’ It is this verse that
especially stood out during my reading of the Psalm. I want to tell you
about some of the thoughts that it provoked.
For one thing, it speaks about who you are. By that I mean how you have been
created. The verse talks about your hunger. You have been created with a
capacity for desires. God made you to long for some things. For one thing,
He made you to desire food and drink. That alone is actually quite
significant. God could have made you without such a capacity. The Scriptures
use the language of hunger to picture other things. We are hungry for more
than just food. ‘Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who
has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and
without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and
your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat
what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.’ [Isaiah 55:1-2] Isaiah
is not talking about sitting down to a good meal. He is talking about a
hunger and a thirst for God and for all that He has to offer. This applies
not only to ‘spiritual’ things, narrowly defined. We have been created with
a desire to enjoy all of God’s good gifts. And so, it includes enjoying a
good meal and it includes enjoying each other. It includes enjoying all the
good things of this life. And so, in another Psalm, David writes, ‘…at your
right hand are pleasures forevermore’. [Psalm 16.11] We were made with
desires which are meant to be satisfied. Do you see, then, that having a
desire for something doesn’t make you sub-Christian? This is the way that
you have been made. You have been made to desire and to be satisfied.
Now, here’s where it gets spiritual in the right sense. Enjoying the good
things of God, whether that is a good meal, a sense of justice, or some time
alone with someone you love, leads to enjoying God. Sadly, it is a strange
thought to some to talk about actually enjoying God. But He is to be
enjoyed. Consider that He made you with desires. Consider the good things He
has created for you to enjoy, things that satisfy your desires. This tells
you what your God is like. He’s not some killjoy with a frown and a stick to
smack people who are having too good of a time. He is the God who made you
capable of enjoying many things, things that He also provides for your
satisfaction. Do you see how this one little verse says so much about you
and how you were created as well as about the God who made you this way?
Now, we encounter a problem. If Adam had never sinned life would be bliss.
He would have experienced desires and those desires would have been
satisfied by his God. He would have been filled with good things. Each day
he would have enjoyed working out in the field. Remember there would be no
thorns or thistles, no laboring by the sweat of his brow. Farming would have
been an agreeable challenge, well-met and satisfying each day. He would come
home to his goodly wife, Eve, who also enjoyed a good day caring for the
home fires with the children. They all would have sat down to a
‘delight-full’ meal. And afterward, Adam and Eve would take a walk in the
sunset, chatting about this and that. They would have been supremely happy,
content and satisfied. But, as you know, Adam sinned. As a result, those
built-in desires are all twisted up. Sin warps and distorts. And so, desires
become lusts and longings become demands. Good desires are not satisfied.
Instead, they are glutted, denied or perverted in some way. So, we have the
anorexic who, trying to be beautiful and attractive to others, starves
herself to death. We have the obese who seeks to feel satisfied by a good
meal but never stops eating. We have the arrogant intellectual who desires
to know this creation but not in order to enjoy its Creator but rather to
supplant Him. This explains the lost. These are not people whose choices are
unexplainable or simply evil. They are people with desires, good desires,
that are all twisted up. It also explains why sin is so appealing. Sin
offers something to those desires that God has made us with. It offers to
satisfy them, but it cannot. The woman who hops from bed to bed is looking
for someone who will love her. The man who surfs the internet for those
pornographic sites wants to feel the thrill of life instead of the boredom
of modern existence. Sin appeals to our good desires, but it can never
satisfy them. It just makes it all worse.
In our text we have a promise of God. ‘He satisfies the longing soul, and
the hungry He fills with good things.’ This speaks to the desires and the
longings that we all have. This too is a part of the Gospel. The psalmist is
speaking of the redeemed, those whom Christ is gathering together. He is
reminding them – and us – of what Christ has promised in the Gospel. Do you
see why the lost need to hear it?
This speaks in another direction also. This helps us to gain a better sense
of heaven, of the life to come. There are such lame notions of what heaven
will be like. For so many, heaven is a boring place. Why would anyone want
to be there? Going to be there is like the little boy who was taken to the
opera. His parents thought that it would be a good cultural experience. But
he had no clue what was going on. The people were singing strange-sounding
music, in a language that he had never heard before. And while his parents
were enraptured by what was going on he was totally bored. All he wanted to
do was to be home playing computer games. If that’s heaven, it’s no wonder
that even Christians would rather stay here. But that is so wrong. Heaven is
the place where the desires of soul and body are all satisfied – properly,
perfectly, completely. ‘He satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry He
fills with good things.’ I don’t know the details of what that will be like,
but it’s got to be something like a big family get-together, like
Thanksgiving Day or a family reunion. There will be time to talk and catch
up with each other, to enjoy a funny story, laughing so hard it almost
hurts, and to just sit back and watch the sky. Everyone there is having a
blast just being together. We’ll sit down for a great meal with that special
dish that your grandmother always used to make. You’ll turn to the person
next to you and tell her that you love her, and she’ll turn, look into your
eyes and tell you that she loves you, too. And then, the Older Brother will
take His place at the head of the table and lead in a prayer of thanks to
the Father, and after a hearty ‘Amen’ from us all, we’ll dig in. And then,
the next day, we do it again but at somebody else’s house. Desires of soul
and body will be satisfied – properly, perfectly, completely – and forever.
But we’re not there yet, are we? We’re still here. And ‘here’ means sins and
desires that are all twisted up. ‘Here’ means battling with all of that,
trying to get it right – or, at least, not too wrong. But we should not
despair. Jesus has come. The Gospel is real. We have hope. Jesus has given
His Spirit to the Church. His goal is to redeem us. Remember, we are the
redeemed who are being gathered. And the work of the Spirit in redeeming us
is to straighten out the desires that sin has twisted. He also reveals to
our hearts what temptation really is, an empty promise. He gives us the
grace to avoid giving in to it. The Spirit is in the process of getting us
ready for heaven. So, our battles are not for nothing. One day we’ll fight
our last battle and join the other members of the family who are already
gathered for the great reunion. Heaven is assured. And it will be better
than what I can describe or what you can imagine.
Being ‘here’ also means that some good and right desires will not be
satisfied. We are all called upon to set aside enjoying some of those
desires for the sake of the kingdom. And so, we have the Apostle Paul going
from town to town to preach Gospel, knowing that, more than likely, he will
be hated, beaten, jailed and all the rest. He set aside good and right
desires for the sake of the kingdom. And it’s not that Paul chose this life.
It wasn’t a career decision with pluses and minuses. It was the calling of
Christ to which he submitted. You too have been called to set aside some
desires that are good and right, for the sake of the kingdom. There will be
joys of this life that you will not experience. There will be longings that
will remain unmet. There will be desires that will not be satisfied. You are
called to this for the sake of the kingdom. You are called to this so that
you might serve Christ better. You need to submit to this call. But, as you
do, remember the promise of Jesus. ‘And everyone who has left houses or
brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name's
sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. But many who
are first will be last, and the last first.’ [Matthew 19:29-30] The day will
come when those who have done without ‘here’, those who have accepted unmet
desires and unfulfilled longings in submission to Christ, will be filled to
overflowing. Those who have been last in these things ‘here’ will be first
in these things ‘there’.
