Good morning, friends
Most of the people make decision as the new year starts and those might include spending more meaningful time in prayer and devotion. May this devotional encourage you to build your own salvation and may each encounter with Christ only make you better follower of Christ and a better witness for Him. May you find joy in your relationship with Jesus:
For the director of music. A maskil[c] of the Sons of Korah.
1 As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?
Commentary:
What is soul?
Biblically we believe it is a person; it is me or you and that which makes you and me.
In these verses the soul is something that is deep within us. It is not just that statement that we share when asked how our day was. The soul in these verses to me is what we believe in, what we stand for, what we would be ready to die for. For us who love God it He to whom we run to because we can trust Him no matter the circumstances. He led us to certain beliefs and stands and we are who we are because of our relationship with God. The emphasis on the soul is most likely in the deep searching of lives often when we find ourselves in the valleys of life, but sometimes on the summits of success when ponder is that what God made me for?
Prayer: Thank you Father for number of my soul searchings in life and finding You again and again in a better light, greater light, deeper light and in the same way my life’s purpose. For those lows of life and the highs in life I do praise You over and over again. Amen
Commentary:
It is verse 2 that I have chosen to expand upon and these are the crvs (cross-reference verses) that the Biblehub.com gave me:John 7:37-38 On the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood up and called out in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. / Whoever believes in Me, as the Scripture has said: ‘Streams of living water will flow from within him.’”
Commentary:
What a wonderful contrasting text.
Why?
Because few persons who be thirsty at the end of the feast, after drinking and eating much.
So, it must be that Jesus was talking about different kind of thirst.
Thirsty for a meaningful and satisfying relationship with Him. In a relationship in which we are satisfied and then out of that satisfaction we think of others who are not satisfied desiring to help them find the thirst Quencher.
Matthew 5:6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Revelation 21:6 And He told me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give freely from the spring of the water of life.
Commentary:
Jesus Christ has done that for the Samaritan woman and when she realized whom she met she proclaimed it to her friends. What a blessed cycle of satisfaction found in the Water of Life.
Revelation 22:17 The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” Let the one who hears say, “Come!” And let the one who is thirsty come, and the one who desires the water of life drink freely.
Commentary:
The last call to Christ for those who are thirsty for meaning in life found in Christ.
John 4:13-14 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks this 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 fount of water springing up to eternal life.”
Commentary:
All good things come from God. This Samaritan woman was OK for the Jew to quench the thirst from “the Samaritan well” and by doing so, she met God and shared not the physical water with others but the water that makes us not turn to any other drinks anymore.
Isaiah 55:1 “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you without money, come, buy, and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost!
Commentary:
This call is the call of comparison.
Following Jesus costs.
Following others in life even ourselves costs.
In comparison to what Jesus offers us and what anyone else can give us, His offer of eternity is so great that what we put in the game is nothing.
Psalm 63:1 A Psalm of David, when he was in the Wilderness of Judah. O God, You are my God. Earnestly I seek You; my soul thirsts for You. My body yearns for You in a dry and weary land without water.
Psalm 84:2 My soul longs, even faints, for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.
Psalm 143:6 I stretch out my hands to You; my soul thirsts for You like a parched land. Selah
Jeremiah 2:13 “For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water, and they have dug their own cisterns—broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
Commentary:
Human ways of salvation are too polluted when compared to our Salvation found in Christ Jesus.
Jeremiah 17:13 O LORD, the hope of Israel, all who abandon You will be put to shame. All who turn away will be written in the dust, for they have abandoned the LORD, the fountain of living water.
Commentary:
Water and the dust can make a clay out of which God made our first parent. Dust without water flies into the oceans of the world of not much use to us as humans.
Amos 8:11 Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land—not a famine of bread or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.
Isaiah 12:3 With joy you will draw water from the springs of salvation,
Isaiah 41:17 The poor and needy seek water, but there is none; their tongues are parched with thirst. I, the LORD, will answer them; I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.
John 6:35 Jesus answered, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to Me will never hunger, and whoever believes in Me will never thirst.
Commentary:
Only Jesus Christ offers complete diet found on this world and this diet works, it works so well that people have died because they have been on it.
Who in today’s world is willing to die for the diet they believe in?
Prayer: Jesus, you died for what You believe in, your disciples did the same. May we believe in You as a main staple of our lives to be willing to give our lives for You o Lord. Amen
Peter Caran
Pastor of Cobourg and Harmony Churches