Abide: Connected to God - Psalm 63:1–11
Scripture: Psalm 63:1–11
Series: Connection: Practices for a Meaningful Life in a Disconnected World
Preacher: Russell Smith
Date: November 8, 2026
Church: Madeira-Silverwood Presbyterian Church, Cincinnati, Ohio
What do you hunger and thirst for?
Everybody’s got a hungry heart. We are really good at misidentifying what will fill the hungers in our heart. All of our earthly desires are signposts that point us to the deep hunger for relationship with the living, personal God. Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in the Lord. What we need to do is take our steps of faith with Jesus.
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Everybody’s Got a Hungry Heart
We are continuing through our series Connection: Practices for a Meaningful Life in a Disconnected World. What’s the institution of the church here for? It is to help us connect: to help us connect with God, to help us connect with one another as followers of Christ and to sharpen one another, and then to help us connect with people out there in the world so that we can help them take a next step of faith with Christ. That’s what we’re leaning into, and in this series, I’m focusing on how the church teaches practices that help us accomplish those connections.
But first, I have a question for you. What do you hunger and thirst for?
I think that’s a question posed by the very beginning of our psalm. What is your deep longing in your heart? Is it for success? Maybe it’s for a relationship, a significant relationship of some kind. Maybe it is for accomplishment, or accolades, or recognition. Is it maybe a chance to prove yourself, to prove your worth? What is it you’re hungering and thirsting for?
The prophet Bruce once sang, “Everybody’s got a hungry heart.” And those of you who know the song know that it is a wonderful illustration of a misdirected hunger, because he’s talking about dissatisfaction in a relationship and moving on to the next thing. It’s not a great message, but it’s a wonderful illustration. We’ve got a hungry heart, and we as human beings can misdirect our hunger awfully, terribly. We are really good at misidentifying what will fill the hungers in our heart.
Our Hearts Are Restless Until They Find Their Rest in You
Now Saint Augustine understands “everybody’s got a hungry heart” in a different way. In the very beginning of his monumental book, The Confessions, he begins with a prayer. And in that opening prayer, he says to the Lord, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”
I love the painting of Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne, who depicts Augustine holding his heart afire, because it has been lit afire with passion for God, and hearing the voice of the Lord inspiring him. Augustine understands that yes, everyone’s got a hungry heart. And ultimately, all those hungers point us to satisfaction in a relationship with the living God. It is God who satisfies the deep hungers in our heart.
So I ask you again: What do you hunger for? Or rather, who are you hungry for?
The church is an institution here to help each person take their next step of faith with Jesus, here to help each person take their next step of finding the satisfaction of their deep hunger in the living God. If Augustine is right, and I believe he is, that’s why we exist. That is what we as an institution are here for.
Practices of Connection: Abide, Belong, Bless
I suggest to you that spiritual practices are great tools that help us take those next steps of faith. This is one of the things an institution offers, versus just reading stuff in a book: we are a people gathered together, trying to help one another along, commending ways of being, commending practices, commending how we live out this faith.
We abide with God: we connect with God through the practices of abiding with him, dwelling with God, being filled with God.
We belong to each other: we connect in a fellowship of faith through practices of belonging and fellowshipping with the community God has called you to be a part of.
And we bless the world: we connect with the wider world through practices of connecting with folks beyond our community, blessing them, and showing them the goodness of God and the goodness of the kingdom. In this way we help them take their next step of faith with Jesus.
This week we’re focusing on the practices of abiding: connecting with God in a vital person-to-person relationship. This is what we as a church try to foster within each of our members. So, with all that preamble, let’s take a look at how Psalm 63 helps us get our minds around these practices of abiding.
The Hunger for God Is Discovered
The key first verse brings us back to our opening question, the hunger in our hearts: “You, God, are my God; earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water.” Wonderfully poetic, evocative. You just feel this visceral yearning that David is expressing here. This is a hunger. This is a longing. This is what Springsteen and Augustine are talking about.
David, much like Augustine, has experienced that all of our hungers, all of our thirsts, ultimately are signposts that point us to the deep hunger, the deep thirst, for relationship with the living, personal God. If you’ve gotten anything from what I’ve taught over the years, I hope that you understand that the Christian faith isn’t just a matter of ideas that we say yes to. It’s not just a matter of, “Check, I believe that with my mind,” and then, “I’m off to go live my life, now.” God is not an abstract concept. God is a living God: ever present, personal, real, with us even now. The Christian faith is about a heartfelt connection with a living person, the eternal God, the God who is there, the God who calls you beloved and calls you to him as beloved. That is someone we hunger and thirst for deeper connection with.
Part of what we have to do is figure out how to address those inner hungers and discover how they point us to the living God. You see, the hunger for God isn’t something that’s just turned on like a light switch. It is discovered. And as I’ve discovered it, I’ve realized, “Oh. It was there all along, hidden behind the other things I hunger for.”
Our Earthly Desires Are Signposts
So for instance, I grew up with a mom who was a lover of nature, and grandparents who were lovers of nature. My grandfather had a magnificent garden. Mom has a lush wooded backyard, and she would oftentimes take me on walks in parks and through the woods. I did scouting when I was in middle school and into high school, with lots of camping trips, getting out in the wilderness. I love being outdoors. And I used to think that was simply because I found the experience of the outdoors to be a sublime experience. But as I’ve grown, I’ve learned that that yearning, that hunger to be in the wilderness, to be outdoors, was a signpost pointing me to the Maker of all creation: the Maker who created nature, who created the woods, who created every creature and stamped each one with a distinctiveness that bears his glory. My hunger for the outdoors was really a signpost pointing me to a hunger for the Maker.
Or, consider that I’m an ambitious person. I like to accomplish things. A lot of us like to accomplish things. We feel good when we get a project done. We set a goal, we chase after that goal, we achieve that goal. And that feels wonderful to accomplish and achieve. I used to think that wonderful feeling was simply a satisfaction of my ambition. But what I have learned is that that desire to achieve, that desire to accomplish a goal, is really but a signpost pointing me to a deeper hunger to please the Maker, to please the Maker of me, who gave me certain gifts and abilities and skills and things that light up my imagination. God wove that within me. And so that ambition, that hunger to achieve, is actually a hunger to please my heavenly Father.
Or perhaps this: we all have hungers for relationships. We want close friends. We want a romantic partner. We want to be in relationship with someone. We want to be a part of a community. And I used to think that was simply us being social creatures. But I’ve come to realize that the hunger for every earthly relationship, whether it be familial love, romantic love, or fraternal love, is but a signpost pointing us to an eternal relationship with the triune God, who in his very identity has relationship at his core: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three in one, one in three.
I Was Made for Another World
All of our earthly desires are signposts, because all of our earthly desires ultimately don’t completely fulfill us. They don’t completely satisfy. This is a running theme in the work of C. S. Lewis. He famously articulated it in his essay The Weight of Glory, where he said, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy”—or, I would say, can fully satisfy—“the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” That I was made for a fullness beyond this existence. That I was made for an eternal relationship with the living God.
All of these earthly desires are good things in and of themselves, but they’re just pointers, signifiers of that deeper hunger, that deeper longing. And so we discover that all our longings, all my longings, find their perfect fulfillment in the experience of the living God. That, I suggest to you, is what is implied right there at the very beginning of Psalm 63: “You, God, are my God; earnestly I seek you.”
So make no mistake: we are wired to worship. Our very longings and our desires point us towards worshiping something. We don’t want to worship the lesser desires. Let those be springboards to help us discover the eternal, living God.
And so the question this poses is: if that is true, how then do I transform my hungers? I still want to achieve. I still want these relationships. How do I transform these earthly hungers and desires into a hunger for God? How do I look beyond the signpost to what it’s signifying? That, I suggest to you, is what the practices of worship are all about. The practices of worship reshape our minds, and they train us to hunger for God. They train us to look beyond our earthly desires and our hungers to the deep hunger.
I Have Seen You in the Sanctuary
David goes on in the psalm: “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.” Let’s linger on that. “I have seen you in the sanctuary.” This is so interesting, because David is writing this, I believe, before he is king. David doesn’t build the temple in Jerusalem; that’s the job for his son Solomon. But there were sanctuaries throughout Israel. When Israel was traveling out of Egypt, they traveled with a tabernacle, and after they came into the land, there were regional sanctuaries that were set up. So it’s reasonable that David is talking about a sanctuary.
But what is a sanctuary? A sanctuary is a building in a place where the people of God gather. It is a place of corporate worship, worshiping with others. David referencing the sanctuary is referencing the institution, the place where he goes with others: “I am seeing you, God, with your people. I am in the sanctuary with your people.” So it’s not just an individual “me and my connection with God.” It’s our connection with God. There is a community aspect to his seeking the Lord.
One of the practices taught in Scripture is the practice of a weekly Sabbath, which is a day of abiding with God in rest, relationship, and restorative practice. The ancients understood that you would practice Sabbath as part of the community. This was a communal activity. And that is something we try to provide here every week. On Sunday we provide public worship so that you can come not just to be entertained, but also so that you can connect with the community, joining your voices together, seeking God.
What If We Came to Worship Expecting God’s Power and Glory?
And here is the fascinating piece of this: “I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory.” What if we came to worship expecting to connect with God’s power and glory?
I know how it is. You get up on Sunday, you’re rushing out of the door, maybe you haven’t had your coffee yet and you’re waiting to pick up the coffee in the sanctuary, maybe you’re trying to get the kids going or the grandkids going, or you’re just running behind a little bit and you’re just trying to get here. Or we’ve got other stuff we’ve got to do, or the Bengals kickoff is happening pretty soon, and we’ve got other things on our minds.
But what if, as soon as we crossed that property line, we had the mindset: “I am going to experience God’s power and glory. God has a word for me. God is going to show up.” It doesn’t necessarily have to be with lightning bolts and earthquakes and amazing things like that. It could simply be the still small voice, the gentle nudge, saying, “Child. I see you. Child, I hear you. Child, I’ve got this for you this week.” What if we came to worship not just as another activity that I’ve got to do during the week, but as a practice, with that eager expectation that we’re going to see and experience and drink deeply from God’s power and glory?
That is the heart David has in verses 2 and 3: showing up and saying, “Lord, show me your power and your glory.”
I Will Lift Up My Hands
The psalm goes on to talk about the corporate worship experience: “I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands. I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you.”
That fascinating line: “I will lift up my hands.” I know us mainline Christians, we’re not terribly exuberant. And yet here it is in Scripture: “In your name I will lift up my hands.” There’s a physicality to worship, that you are here not just with your minds but with your bodies, whether that’s lending yourself to full-voiced song or, when we are in prayer, putting yourself in a prayerful position, sitting there and perhaps just opening your palms. You use your physicality, your presence, to connect with God, who is here. You bring your heart, your voice, your mind to worship, to express that praise to the Lord.
I Will Be Fully Satisfied
And then verse 5 so challenges me: “I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods.” Notice that confidence. Notice that determination. It’s not “I expect to be.” It’s not “I hope I will be satisfied.” It’s not “Well, I’m going to wait and evaluate and see if I’m fully satisfied.” It is the determination: I will be fully satisfied, no matter what happens. It is an expectation: I will show up, and God will satisfy me as I gather with the saints in worship. God will meet my every need. God will provide for my daily bread. God will provide my spiritual, my intellectual, my relational nourishment. “I am here to receive whatever it is you have for me, Lord, and I will be satisfied.”
That challenges me so, because, let’s be honest, we live in a consumer society, a society that’s built around dissatisfaction. “I have a need. I need to get it met.” And if I’m dissatisfied, then I go to my provider of goods and services and say, “Satisfy me.” And if he doesn’t, then I move on to another provider of goods and services, or I find a cheaper price, or I find something else. But here is a completely different mindset. Instead of the provider of goods and services, I am trusting the Lord to satisfy me. Even if something doesn’t necessarily meet my tastes or my preferences, I will be satisfied, because the Lord is enough.
It’s so easy to whinge. It’s so easy to whine. It’s so easy to complain and say, “Well, I just didn’t really like that very much.” But it’s not about the irritants, or about whether this was an exceptional show. The odd things, the quirky things, the irritating things: getting everything 100 percent right doesn’t satisfy. I will be fully satisfied, as with the richest of foods, by the Lord, by the power and the presence of the Lord.
And so it begs the question: What if our dissatisfactions, the things that irritate us or grind us, lead us to seek a deeper satisfaction in the living God, rather than just getting our tastes and our proclivities met?
On My Bed I Remember You
Now David goes deeper. He goes beyond the corporate worship experience into a personal worship experience. And this I find really interesting. Verse 6: “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. I cling to you; your right hand upholds me.” That’s not the sanctuary. My bed is a very personal, alone thing. And so this is that personal discipline of abiding.
I believe that one of the essential practices of abiding is a daily time with the Lord. Jesus modeled this. He would get up early in the morning and go off by himself to a lonely place to pray and commune with the Lord. You can practice daily times with the Lord any time, and we try to provide resources like devotional guides and encouragement for that daily personal experience.
But what I find so lovely about this psalm is the “on my bed” component. I’ve really been leaning into that for the past year or two. When I wake up in the morning, while I’m still there in the bed, I am intentionally trying to bend my brain toward prayer, and when I hit my pillow at night, I am intentionally trying to rest my brain in prayer as I drift off to sleep. That’s one of the wonderful things about the Lord’s Prayer: it gives you something you can just lean into as you’re drifting off to sleep. Or a lot of times, in the morning, before I reach for the phone, I’ll go through the fruit of the Spirit from Galatians: “Okay, Lord, help me to be an instrument of bringing more love, more joy, more peace, more patience, more kindness, more goodness, more faithfulness, more gentleness, more self-control into the world.”
What would it be like, on your bed in the morning, when the alarm clock goes off, before you reach for the phone and start scrolling through all the notifications and all the news, to just linger on your bed? Not clicking the snooze button, saying, “Oh, give me fifteen more minutes of sleep,” but lying there and rehearsing in your mind some of the Scriptures you may have stored up. What would it be like, when you’re lying down tonight, to intentionally take that as your opportunity to abide with the Lord and commit your day to the Lord? “On my bed I remember you.”
Worship Shapes the Worshiper
One other thing we see in this psalm is how worship shapes the worshiper. These are hard verses to read, verses 9 and 10: “Those who want to kill me 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.” That is unsettling to our modern sensibilities, isn’t it? This does not feel very religious. You can feel the burn that David has experienced. And let’s be honest: haven’t we all felt that burn? Even if we don’t wish destruction on somebody, haven’t we all felt that burn? “Yeah, they need to get theirs.”
The Psalms are wonderfully honest about life. The psalms do not say, “Oh my, feelings of burn and feelings of anger aren’t spiritual. I shouldn’t feel those, so I won’t express those to God.” No. If we are truly in this intimate, personal relationship with God, then we can bring the things we feel ashamed to feel to the Lord.
One of the things we typically don’t read when we read the Psalms are the superscriptions often found right there at the very beginning of a psalm. They oftentimes give us very helpful context. The superscription for this Psalm is “A psalm of David. When he was in the Desert of Judah.”
There are many instances in the Old Testament where David was in the desert of Judah, so I’m taking a little bit of a leap here, and we can’t tell for certain which of these desert experiences David is referring to. But in my mind I go to 1 Samuel 24 through 26, a longer section of David’s life when he’s not yet king. Saul is king. David was a knight in King Saul’s household, one of Saul’s mighty men. He was Saul’s son’s best friend, and he married one of King Saul’s daughters. And King Saul got insanely jealous and determined he was going to kill David. He was consumed by fits of rage, and one time at a banquet he took a spear and hurled it at David. David, being the agile warrior he was, avoided being speared to the wall, but he knew he needed to go on the run. And of course, David being the charismatic leader he was, a band of mighty men went with him. For a long time he was kind of like a Robin Hood figure, living in the desert of Judah with a bunch of followers. He could have started a revolution and seized the kingship.
But here’s the interesting thing: he determined he was not going to raise his hand against King Saul. He didn’t have a problem with fighting on behalf of Israel. He didn’t have a problem serving his country and his people. But the fight with Saul was a personal affront, and he was not going to raise his hand against the king, against someone personally affronting him. The ancient world was a world of honor. If someone personally affronts you, you kill them. David wasn’t going to do that. Why? Because worship transformed him, I suggest. David’s a man after God’s own heart. He’s not going to raise his hand against God’s anointed king.
In 1 Samuel 24, Saul and his men are hunting David. David and his men are hiding deep in some caves. Saul’s troop comes by, and Saul ducks into a cave to speak to a man about a horse, to take care of some necessities, if you will. And David sneaks up behind him and snips off a corner of his cloak. Saul never knew. When Saul and his men ride off, David comes out of the cave and says, “Saul, look. I had you in my hands. I could have killed you. I mean you no harm. I’m not your enemy.” David refused to take things into his own hands and kill Saul. I believe that’s the background story for this whole psalm.
With that in mind, go back to the verse: “Those who want to kill me will be destroyed.” That doesn’t mean David stopped feeling the burn. Instead, David commits it to the Lord, saying, in effect: “I’m not taking it into my own hands, but Lord, you’ve got to do something. This person is maddening, frustrating. This person is driving me up the wall. I entrust them to you. I entrust my frustrations to you.” David understands how to take his anger, his sense of betrayal, his sense of “I’ve been burned by this guy,” and commit it to the Lord. God is big enough to handle the feelings we thing we shouldn’t feel because good Christian people don’t feel those feelings. We can be completely honest with God in our bitterness, our wrath, our disappointment, and all the things that burn us. And here’s the thing: when you entrust people who madden you to the Lord, that can help take the burden off your shoulders, and also transform you.
When I have practiced this, and believe me, I have, here is what I have found. When I voice my wrath to God about people who have burned me, and I commit them to the Lord, I find that God softens my heart. When I commit my anger, my frustration, my wrath to the Lord, the Lord releases me from it, so I don’t have to be so angry anymore. I don’t need those people to change. I don’t need those people to be different. And then I stop caring about whether they get theirs. I stop caring about justice for me. Interestingly, I also find that God does things in people’s lives that I am completely unaware of, and transforms them, when I commit the people who have burned me to prayer.
So worship shapes the worshiper. It shapes me. God used worship to transform David from a man who seeks his own honor into a man after God’s own heart. And so we can commit our stuff to the Lord, because trusting him heals us from these less-than-pleasant feelings.
The King Will Rejoice in God
And so the psalm ends: “But the king will rejoice in God; all who swear by God will glory in him, while the mouths of liars will be silenced.” Already there’s a backing off there. David is simply committing himself to the Lord: “I’m going to glory in the Lord. I’m leaving all the rest in God’s hands.” God is going to take care of this.
Worship transforms us. The disciplines of abiding, the practices of weekly abiding together and the practices of daily abiding alone, shape us and transform us into people after God’s own heart. That’s why we lean into this. Those are the things we try to foster.
Invitation to Reflection
God’s been talking all during worship. What’s the Spirit saying? Maybe these questions stir something in you. Maybe the Lord was saying something else completely. Let’s just take a moment. Let’s abide with the Lord. What’s the Lord been saying to you? What’s something you might do with it?
Questions for Reflection
What is revealed to me when I examine my own hungers, my desires, and my restlessness?
What would it be like for me to come to worship expecting to see God’s power and glory revealed to me?
Tonight, as I lie down, what, or rather who, am I going to release to God? And what am I going to seek from God?
This sermon is part of the Digital Discipleship Resources of Madeira-Silverwood Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. We create resources to help people take their next step of faith with Jesus.
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