Going after God (1): Obey your Thirst
- Rev Norman Cameron

I want to start a new series today called Going after God. God is the subject, and what a great and inexhaustible subject that is. It is also a difficult subject. Difficult because different people have different ideas of what God is like, how he is to be worshipped, what pleases and displeases him. Difficult also because we cannot see him – God is invisible, He is Spirit; also he is not heard in the same way as we hear each other.

Yet we come to this subject knowing that many of us would say although we cannot see, hear or feel him, we know Him. We have different experiences of God, we have an assurance in our hearts that he is with us and that he loves us. Many here and many in our world today can say we love God and know him as our heavenly Father and we know Jesus as our Saviour, and this causes some people to scratch their heads and say how can you know and indeed say you love someone that you have not seen, perhaps have not heard, how can this be?

Well we know that it can be, and sometimes it is more felt than tel’t! And yet if we are honest we can also say that sometimes we have wondered is God really there – sometimes we have wondered why does God allow some things to happen? We live by faith, and always with faith, there is room for doubt, room for uncertainty. Doubt is not opposed to faith, it is part of the package of faith, otherwise it would not be faith.

This series is about getting to know God, it is about how we can intentionally go after God, how we can develop our relationship with him for he is there and he longs to relate to us. The series is deliberately entitled Going after God because it is about being intentional, it is about making efforts to get to know him. As in any relationship, forming relationships takes time and effort. Good friendships take time, good marriages need effort – it is no different in a spiritual relationship with God.

I am coming from the conviction that God is there and that He has placed a desire in each of our hearts for him. This is part of what it means to be made in the image of God. Eccles. 3:11 says “God has set eternity in the hearts of men”. St Augustine famously said “You have made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rest in Thee”. David in Psalm 27:8 has this “My heart says of you, Seek his face. Your face O Lord I will seek.” Our innermost being longs for a relationship with our maker. Do we hear that heartbeat, do we respond to it – many today suppress that longing and they are missing out on the fullness of what God intended for us.

So we are looking at desiring God and at how we can create a taste for God and nurture that longing and have it satisfied. I want us to see ultimately, that God has placed a desire in us for himself that cannot, and will not, be satisfied in anything else and by anything else except him. We will also see that we need to desire God and find joy in God for who he is rather than for what we can get from him. Here is a good test of our spiritual maturity – are we desiring God for who he is or for what we can get out of him?

John Piper says this in Desiring God – “In the end the heart longs not for any of God’s good gifts, but for God himself. To see him and know him and be in his presence is the soul’s final feast. Beyond this there is no quest. Words fail. We call it pleasure, joy, delight. But these are weak pointers to the unspeakable experience.” This is what we are going to look at in these Sunday mornings together. We want to be in a position where we can echo the Psalmist who said: “As the deer pants for streams of water so my soul pants for you, my soul thirsts for God, for the living God” (Ps.42:1-2), or who can say “One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.” (Ps.27:4)

or who can say “Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.” (Ps.73:25-26)

If we are honest, who of us can say with conviction that this is our experience – and yet it can be, it can be.

For some years Sprite have run a slogan to help sell their soft drink and it was a successful slogan that helped them move up the soft drinks market – it does pay to advertise. The slogan went like this “Be true to yourself – obey your thirst”. It was a very clever slogan and it implied that what you are really thirsting for is Sprite. Go on give in to that longing, satisfy that thirst and Sprite will satisfy it more than any other drink.

It was clever because it reflected a truth – we get physically thirsty and we need to have that thirst quenched or we will be very unhappy as people- indeed we will die if our physical thirst is not catered for. Now of course it is a matter for debate as to whether Sprite is actually the best thing to slake your thirst and we will not waste time on discussing that. But we can take that slogan and apply it to our lives spiritually because if we are true to ourselves, our whole selves as physical and spiritual creatures then we need to recognize that we have a spiritual thirst as well as a physical thirst that needs to be satisfied. If we do not satisfy it we will be unhealthy and we will die spiritually.

God has made us as a whole – as in the physical so in the spiritual – this is how we are made and we ignore this at our peril. Be true to yourself – obey your thirst. God has created us with a desire for him, a longing to relate to Him, and yet what invariably happens is that either we ignore this ache or we try and satisfy it with other things – they may even be other good things – but they are created things and not the creator.

We know I am sure what it is to be thirsty and that ache we have for a drink of water on a hot day or after a game of football or hockey or after you have been fasting for an operation. That gnawing thirst needs to be satisfied. So also we have a spiritual thirst and we need to learn to recognize it and satisfy it in the proper way. We have an ache for someone or something beyond ourselves. This is part of what it means to be human, to be created in God’s image.

So what does this look like on the ground? Let us look at two examples of thirsting from the Bible. One is an example of someone who had a longing for God but who satisfied it in the wrong way – the other is an example of someone who had this longing for God and knew how to satisfy this thirst in the right way.

In John 4 we have an encounter between Jesus and a woman beside a well in Samaria. It is a fascinating encounter and it involves a play on words. Jesus uses his own physical thirst and the woman’s physical thirst to lead her into a discussion about satisfying her spiritual thirst. He asks her for a drink of water because he is thirsty. This was risky of course on three counts – she was a woman and men and women who were strangers did not often converse; not only was she a woman but she was a woman with a reputation, an immoral woman; but thirdly she was a samaritan woman and Jews and Samaritans were hostile to each other and suspicious of each other. Jesus crossed a lot of barriers here to evangelise and in this there is a lesson for us but this is not the point we want to dwell on but we note it.

He then offers her “living water”, which literally and physically means fresh running water rather than well water. But Jesus means something deeper, he is referring to a water that will quench a deeper spiritual thirst. In v.13 he says “everyone who drinks this (physical) water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life”. Jesus offers spiritual water to quench a spiritual thirst – the thirst we have for God.

The woman does not quite get it, she thinks he is some kind of water engineer who is still talking about providing a river instead of a well. But he is not. He is talking about her deepest inner longing and how that will be satisfied. And Jesus moves to the crunch point and asks a question that will blow her open entirely and show her who He is, but also show her where she has been going wrong for all these years and why her thirst for God has not been satisfied. He asks her a question which seems to be totally out of the blue and completely irrelevant.

He asks her to go and get her husband. She says she has no husband and then Jesus says “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband.” Jesus had a way of going to the heart of things and going to the heart of a person’s sin and what was blocking them from getting to know God. He knew all this about her and she acknowledges that he is a prophet and that in turn leads to a theological discussion about where people should worship – Mt Gerizim (preferred by the Samaritans) or Jerusalem (preferred by the Jews)

But at heart this is a discussion about desire – this woman has an interest in God. Most people have. It is inbuilt. But again what most people do is that they try and satisfy this longing for God, not with God, but with other things. I suggest that that is what this woman has done – she has tried to satisfy her deepest longing for God with relationships with men. She has had five husbands and the man she lives with is not her husband. She has lived with six men and still has not found what she has been looking. On this day she meets a seventh man, who seems to know all about her, and he points her to a deeper source of joy and satisfaction, to a river of life that will satisfy her thirst, her longing, her ache for God. Be true to yourself, obey your thirst.

So many are led by our sinful nature into trying to satisfy our deepest longing in the wrong place. The words of Jeremiah ch.2 could be written over many lives – “They have followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves…my people have exchanged their glory for worthless idols…they have forsaken me., the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

There used to be an old hymn and the words went this way - :I tried the broken cisterns Lord but ah the waters failed, and as I stooped to drink they fled and mocked me as I wailed – now none but Christ can satisfy, none other is for me, there’s love and life and lasting joy Lord Jesus found in thee.

Or more up to date in the words of the new Razorlight single America - “Nothing on the TV nothing on the radio that I can believe in”.. There is more than we can see and hear around us. All around the media offer shallow and empty things and people are hungry and thirsty for God.

This woman was a worshipper – that is what she, and we, are made to be. And our deepest joy is found in going after God.

Finally someone who recognized this thirst and who knew how to satisfy it. King David. David was far from perfect but he knew how to listen to his heart.

In Psalm 63 we find him in a physical desert, he is alone, he misses the temple, he misses the corporate worship of God’s people. But he knows that God is with him, he worships where he is, he knows his deepest soul thirst can be satisfied right there even in a desert. As he reflects, as he contemplates, as he sings, God ministers to his soul and satisfies him. Verse 5 says “My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods.”

David eats and drinks at God’s table and is satisfied even in the midst of his enemies who are pursuing, even in the midst of suffering, even in the midst of physical hunger and thirst. It takes maturity to praise God and relate to God in the middle of mess and pain. David is a good example of someone who went after God and saw God where others did not and in the coming weeks God willing we will see how we can go after God and what will help us in that task, for we all need help.

Go on, be true to yourself, obey your thirst.