BETTER THAN LIFE

O God, you are my God,

earnestly I seek you;

my soul thirsts for you,

my body longs for you,

in a dry and weary land

where there is no water.

I have seen you in the sanctuary

and beheld your power and your glory.

Because your love is better than life,

my lips will glorify you.

I will praise you as long as I live,

and in your name I will lift up my hands.

My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods;

with singing lips my mouth will praise you.

On my bed I remember you;

I think of you through the watches of the night.

Because you are my help,

I sing in the shadow of your wings.

My soul clings to you;

your right hand upholds me.

They who seek my life will be destroyed;

they will go down to the depths of the earth.

They will be given over to the sword

and become food for jackals.

But the king will rejoice in God;

all who swear by God’s name will praise him,

while the mouths of liars will be silenced.

Psalm 63

Only one week into school and I can already feel myself running dry, thirsting for SOMETHING MORE. After an entire year of trying to satisfy myself with the things I thought could fill me up once again, I felt God calling me this past summer to deal with my sins and, as one of my unnie’s would put it, “put some things of my old self to death for good.” And it was there I realized how sinful and weak I truly am. How easily distracted I am, so easily led astray by the things I think I want or think I need…

I don’t think I ever heard God’s voice so clearly in a room full of people ’til this past service. Abe Cho was speaking about the Life of King David, and my heart started racing with anxiety. He was talking about David’s search for God, his satisfying vision of God, and the solution amidst suffering… He was talking about this insatiable longing called ‘thirst’ that would have the whole man succumb to its power. The same thirst that was driving David his entire life as a kid, as a king, as an adulterer, and as one finally seeking after God’s own heart in that cave as he was hiding from his son Absalom who wanted to kill him… The source of all the undercurrent desires of our hearts as our ultimate search for God. He talked about how David as a king had it all, and it was then that he was most dissatisfied. And now having lost everything, he found himself most satisfied, ‘as with the richest of foods’. David endured because he could see God’s glory and beauty. And the power of beauty is that it exists not just to adorn life, but to continue through it. David could taste this beauty so well that he, in the midst of battle, could say, “Your love is better than life.“ Most people will search all their lives for the kind of love that will make their lives better, more satisfying… David found a love that was better than life itself. And through this realization, his life was changed. His life changed not despite his suffering, but because of it.

In the end, David mourned ’cause God promised to bring justice and destroy his enemies, his wrongdoer, which was his own son Absalom. Abe was explaining that as a people all complicit in humanity’s sin, in order for God to destroy our enemies, he’d have to destroy a part of ourselves. But by grace, and grace alone, God brings his own son Jesus Christ to reveal the fullness of his power at the cross, whispering to me in that service that THIS LOVE was better than HIS OWN LIFE… and by believing in that truth, my soul would be quenched, and so deeply satisfied, that even after having lost everything, or even the smallest part of me, or even after realizing how broken and sinful I really am, and even when at this moment the end of the road seems so unclear to me still, I can s i n g . . .

“He who has a why to live can endure any how.”