Fancy yourself the rightful king of a country, but now you're on the run because your own son has stirred up a rebellion again you. Your life is threatened. It's not that you are the rightful king of just any country, but you are king over God's own chosen covenant people; and God Himself has promised that "your house and your kingdom shall endure before me forever, your throne shall be established forever" (2 Sam. 7:16). The well-being of God's people is tied to that promise and to your faithful perseverance in the Lord's love. For all that, you have to run for your life; you have to leave the peace and comfort of your palace in Jerusalem and go east into the desert.

This is the trouble David describes in the title of Psalm 63; he ties the psalm to his flight from his son Absalom (2 Sam. 15). I think David wanted us to imagine ourselves in his sandals and ask how we would feel, how we would respond. What would I miss the most if I were David? What promises would I cling to? And the words of the psalm teach us the right way to respond.

So first, let's consider what it is that David misses. In verse 1 he says, "O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water." David misses God. But wait a second: isn't this the same guy that wrote Psalm 139, which teaches us that God is everywhere? (See Psalm 139:7, "Where shall I go from your Spirit, or where shall I flee from your presence?") So what gives here? The answer is in Psalm 63:2. David writes, "So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and your glory." He remembers how he has "looked upon" God in the sanctuary–that is, when he was in the sanctuary for public worship; he remembers how he has beheld God's "power and glory" there in the sanctuary.

In this context these two things, God's power and glory, refer specifically to the special pres¬ence God gives to His covenant people in worship (see Exodus 40:34-35). What David misses, what really makes his situation galling, is not the comfort or peace he had before; the thing that he misses is the special presence of God that comes in public, sacramental worship, from which his circumstances have cut him off.

This Psalm, however, is not a lament. More than anything else it is a psalm of confidence in God's perfect care of His people, even in their hardships. So what does David expect here? (It is not so easy to see this in some English versions, because the tenses are translated in a man¬ner that does not quite show the contrast between David's present trouble and what he expects to see in the future.) He tells us in verse 1 that his soul thirsts and his flesh faints; in verse 2 he remembers how he once looked upon God in the sanctuary. That is past. David goes on to say in verses 3-4, "because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands."

He is looking forward to something that he will be able to do. As the commentator Franz Delitsch observed, the contrast between the past (verse 2) and the future (verses 3-4) "implies that what has been the psalmist's favorite occupation heretofore shall also be so in the future."¹ That is to say, he looks forward to once again being able to worship in the tabernacle. In verse 3 he even says, "because your steadfast love is better than life": he'd prefer to taste the Lord's steadfast love that the sacraments mediate, even at the risk of his own life!

Now if I were in David's place, I think I would just want relief–Lord, get me out of this. Or perhaps I would pray for the strength to "get through" this time of stress. But David has put these words into our mouths for us to sing to God, to teach us to lift our sights higher than that - higher than "getting out of this" or just "getting through it"–to the thing that matters most, to the highest privilege a mortal can enjoy, the worship of our Lord; and to yearn for it. We might not have the same specific promise that David did (2 Sam. 7:16–"your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever"), but we know that even if we should die that will only mean that we get promoted all the soon¬er to the heavenly service–which is, after all, our final destination.

Thirdly, then, let's consider why this attitude is important. Why should participation in public, sacramental, Lord's Day worship be the "one thing needful," so that even deliverance from trouble gets its value from restoring us to that privilege? We all know the first answer in the Westminster Shorter Catechism: "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." Maybe we've heard Augustine's famous line, "You made us for yourself, O God, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you." And if we're really lucky we've been awe-struck by the place in C.S. Lewis' children's story The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where one of the main characters, Lucy, learns she is not to return to the land of Narnia. She says to Aslan (the Christ-figure), "It isn't Narnia, you know; it's you. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?"²

Now the Psalms are full of this poignant longing for God: to know Him, to be in His presence, to sense His smile and to know that we are His special possession forever. Think of Psalm 84, "My soul longs, yes faints" - for what? For the Lord, yes, but the Psalm says, "my soul longs, yes faints, for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God." Psalms 27, 42, and 73 make the same point, that our chief good is to be in God's presence, and that at the end of a life of faith and perseverance we shall be ushered into the full enjoyment of that pres¬ence; and that the chief foretaste we get of that presence in this life comes in public worship. The public praise of the people of God is the place where God is especially present with His people; as Psalm 22:3 puts it, "You, Lord, are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel."

The natural world of sight and sound and sense is not all there is. There is a supernatural world, whose power invades our world by the Holy Spirit. And the corporate, sacramental worship of the covenant people of God is the doorway to that supernatural world. There we join our worship with the perfect worship in glory; and this takes place, not in our imaginations, but in reality. The trouble is, most of the time we just do not see it or feel it. You see, we have to live by faith, not by sight: we have to take God's Word for it, because He is likely to know, even if we do not.

This, then, leads to my final point: How does this Psalm function for us today? We have to recognize that the first function of the Psalms is to put words into our mouths to sing or chant to God in public worship. Most people can see that the Psalms are expressive–that is, they contain plenty of raw emotion. (Witness verse 1, "My soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.") Now if you're like me, you face a big problem with a verse like that right away. I mean, we know that Christian living is not bubble-and-froth emotionalism; instead it's tough discipleship. And not only that, I'm not sure I can sing something like, "my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you" on a Sunday just because the people who planned the service on Wednesday thought that I should. After all, I only rarely feel even a little this way, and I sure can't command the feelings to be there! I don't want to lie to God–He'd know it anyhow–and I don't want to lie to my fellow believers by singing this; so I might as well keep silent.

The trouble with that approach is that it misses the point. The Psalms are not primarily expressive–that is, to express what I now feel. They are instead formative–that is, they show me how I ought to feel, and if I honestly offer my worship to God, He will enable me actually to begin to feel such things. He will change my character in ways I might not fully understand, and He will do this so slowly and gently that I might not even see it going on. That is to say, we worship God properly when we sing the Psalms by faith, not by sight. To be near to God; to know His fatherly care and affection; to be faithfully obedient to Him even at the cost of my life–this is what He made me for, this is what my soul cries out for, and this is what He offers to His covenant people.

If the worship we offer is that of sinners saved by grace who yearn for more of that grace in order to please our Lord better, then whether the choir is in tune or the music is contemporary or traditional is not important. These things do not determine whether or not we enter God's presence in worship. Brothers and sisters, we do enter the Lord's presence in corporate worship on the Lord's Day. The question is whether we'll do so honestly, humbly, believing His promises, and offering ourselves to Him.

C.S. Lewis spoke to this subject as well as anyone can, in his Reflections on the Psalms. He acknowledged that "our [church] services both in their conduct and in our power to participate, are merely attempts at worship; never fully successful, often 99.9 percent failures, sometimes total failures. We are not riders, but pupils in the riding school; for most of us the falls and bruises, the aching muscles and the severity of the exercise, far outweigh those few moments in which we were, to our own astonishment, actually galloping without terror and without disaster."

Lewis went on to liken our worship services to the tuning up of an orchestra in preparation for something much grander:

"The tuning up of the orchestra can be itself delightful, but only to those who can, in some measure, however little, anticipate the symphony. The Jewish sacrifices, even our own most sacred rites as they actually occur in human experience, are, like the tuning, promise, not performance. Hence, like the tuning, they may have in them much duty and little delight; or even none. But the duty exists for the delight. When we carry out our religious duties, we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that when at last the water comes, it may find them ready. I mean, for the most part. There are happy moments, even now, when a trickle creeps along the dry beds; and happy souls to whom this happens often."³