PANTING FOR GOD

Meditations from Psalm Forty-Two for the Week of Preparation Summer Communion Season.Bulletin Lord's Day 07/12/26

“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” (Psalm 42:1)

A week of preparation opens before us, and the Lord’s table, we pray, waits at its end. Before we ask whether we are fit to come, the psalm asks something else: what does your soul thirst after? The hart (deer) in this verse has a history, and you can hear it in her breathing. Either the dry season has emptied the brooks, or the hounds have run her since dawn. She stands at the end of her strength, reaching toward water she can smell and cannot yet see. That is the creature the sons of Korah chose to picture this holy desire.

Every soul thirsts, and to one degree or another, this week will show you what. Watch where your mind runs when your work sets it free. Watch what your hand reaches for when the house grows quiet. There is your panting, silent as it is. Then look at the object of the psalmist’s thirst: so panteth my soul after thee, O God. A man may thirst for the old days. He may thirst for the sweet frames of past communions. He may even thirst for the season itself, full of reflection and solemnity. All this, and never once thirst for the Water. The hart wants nothing else from the brook, except the brook.

Take one thought into the week before you. This is a thirst only the living have. The dead pant after nothing. If there stirs in you this week an longing beneath the cold, even if it is a longing to long, it didn’t rise of itself. Grace plants every desire it afterward satisfies, and He has never yet required any soul to reach the brook already refreshed.

May you come to these meditations panting. Or perhaps, a panting to pant after Christ. Six mornings lie between us and the table. May they be thirsty.

The brooks is coming nearer now, opened for the parched by a nails and a spear.

Your friend and pastor,

J. Lewis

Next: The Panting Hart