“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. So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. For I will bless you as long as I live. In your name, I will lift up my hands. My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips. When I remember you upon my bed and meditate on you in the watches of the night. For you have been my help and in the shadow of your wings, I will sing for joy. My soul clings to you. Your right hand upholds me.”
-Psalm 63:1–8
Psalm 63 is one of my favorite psalms so I just want to read Psalm 63:1–8 and along the way, lead us to pray it together. I would encourage you to memorize these verses. They are so good. They’re so helpful. They’re such a powerful expression of not just our need for God, but what desire for God looks like in ways that as we pray, that knowing these verses, having them hidden in your heart so that they just flow out of your heart to God at different points is so helpful. So let me read them. They’re just a straight prayer to God and they lead us directly into praying through them.
We look to you in your sanctuary and we behold your power and your glory.
O God, we pray all of these verses together right now in each of our lives in the sense in which we’re all praying through this podcast right now. We say to you, O God, you are our God and we seek you earnestly. Our souls thirst for you. Our flesh faints for you as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. There is nothing in this world like you.
There is no one in this world like you. We need you, O God, and we want you. And we seek you. We want to know you more. We want to know your love more. And we want to know your wisdom more. Lord, we want to know your comfort more. We want to know your help more. We want to know you. Let him who boasts not boast in knowledge or riches or wisdom in this world but let him who boasts boast that he knows you.
Psalm 63:1–8 Teaches Us That Our Soul Should Be Satisfied In God
We want to know you. We look to you. And we look to you in your sanctuary, and we behold your power and your glory and your love, your steadfast love that is better than life itself. Your love is better than life. Our lips praise you. We sing to you. We glorify you. And we shout your greatness and your glory and your goodness. We bless you.
We will bless you as long as we live. In your name, we life up our hands. Can we just even right now, as long as you’re not driving a car or doing something else that you can’t lift up your hands, let’s just lift up our hands? O God, we lift up our hands to you in your name, in the name of the one who saves us, in the name of the one who leads us and guides us. We lift up our hands to you, the Lord God Jesus, the savior and king over all. We say our soul is satisfied in you even more than with the best food this world has to offer. You satisfy the depth of our souls.
Cling To God
We sing to you with joyful lips, we remember you when we lie down at night, when we get up in the morning. We meditate on you and your goodness and your grace. God, may it be so. Help us to meditate on you in the watches of the night. For you have been our help. We praise you, O God, for being our help and for bringing us into the shadow of your wings.
So in the shadow of your wings today, we sing for joy as we say our souls cling to you. We cling to you, not to anything else in this world. Our souls cling to you and we trust that your right hand will uphold us, that your right hand will uphold me, each one of us today, that you uphold us. God, I pray that over every single person listening right now. May they know that your right hand upholds all who cling to you.
God, help us make Psalm 63:1–8 more and more and more true of our hearts and our lives. Help us to seek you like this and to be satisfied in you like this. Gd, we love you. We praise you. We worship you. Help us to love you with all our heart and all our soul and all our might and all our strength. We pray Psalm 63 in Jesus’s name. Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
