Living Water in Christ; Deep Calls to Deep

Music is often an outlet for our deepest emotional needs and feelings.

Who among us hasn’t listened to the same song on repeat after a breakup or in a particularly emotionally vulnerable moment? I am not capable of listening to “He Stopped Loving Her Today” by George Jones without both singing at the top of my lungs and getting teary eyed.

I remember running down the highway in my buddy’s old pickup after a especially nasty break up with “Freebird” turned all the way up on repeat. There is something about music that taps into deep emotion and allows it to be expressed in ways that maybe we would not other be able to.

There is a reason that music and singing is a central part of Biblical worship. The sung word can and does stir our souls in ways that the spoken or written word often does not.

It should not surprise us, then, that some of the most emotionally raw writing in the Biblical canon comes in the book of the Psalms, a collections of worship music of ancient Israel.

In the Psalms that we see the full range of human emotion: anger, grief, despair, joy, and hope are all expressed in the Psalms. In ways that still touch us and teach us.

Because of this, I am beyond thankful for the Psalms. They have been my companion for many years now.

In our congregation this year, we are trying to read form the Psalms every Sunday, letting them saw us and teach us the full range of human experience when confronted both with this life and with a holy and perfect God. The Psalms can and should be a source of great comfort for God’s people, for in them we do see this range of expression but also how God has decided to meet his people in their need.

I do not know about you, but these days, I feel that I am more in need of God than ever. As someone told me this week, “we live in a crazy world, and we need to be reminded that God is with us!”

How true this is. Just this week we have been transfixed by the plight of people lost at the bottom of the ocean, continued stories about the violence in Ukraine, as well as increased heat in our own civic and political discourse. Things that just a few years ago would have seemed impossible are now on our televisions and news feeds with increasing regularity.

Psalm 42 is a psalm that was written in the midst of some extraordinary things happening in the life of Israel. The kingdom had split, north and south, and those that found themselves in the north were unable to travel to the temple in Jerusalem for worship. They were cut off from what they understood to be the physical presence of God that rested in the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem.

And so the psalmist finds himself severed from that presence. He feels so far from God that he likens his thirst for God as to that of a deer lost in the dessert, slowly dying of thirst from dehydration. This lack of God has brought him to the very edge of total despair, where his “tears have been my food day and night.”

People even mock him, asking him where God is, the implication being that God has forgotten him, so he should forget God. When we get to verse 7, however, we come to one of my favorite lines in all of scripture: “Deep call to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your billows have swept over me.”

Often the deepest longing in us is not satisfied until it comes face to face with the raging, overwhelming, uncontrollable power that is the Glory of God.

We seek a gentle stream with which to refresh ourselves and a quinch our thirst, but God’s presence is not a gentle babbling brook, rather is thunderous roar of power like Niagara Falls.

We still dejected, depressed and feeling as if we are cut off from God, he stands ready to overwhelm us with His very presence, grace and mercy.

Let us not forget that we are offered Living Water in Christ, water that will quench our thirst forever. It is in Christ that we find the “hope in God” that the psalmist writes about. So, let me encourage you, if you find yourself dejected, thirsty, and longing for God, seek Him in Christ Alone and you will find rest and thirst will be quenched.

Points to Consider:

1) What are some songs, secular or religious, that you turn to to express deep emotion?

2) Why do you think God chose to include the Psalms in the scripture? Do you think He was trying to tell us something about the importance of music in worship? Or perhaps something about deep emotions?

3) Name a time you were spiritually thirsty and God overwhelmed you with His goodness and mercy. How did that make you feel?