Longing for Jesus

Psalm 63:1 (ESV)

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.

In prayer we express our longings. We utter our deepest needs. We ache. We hurt. We cry. We wait.

In a sense all our longings are the same, even though we are all different people with unique lives and individual feelings. But our longings, our friends’ longings, and even our enemy’s longings point in the same direction. The objective of all our longings is God.

God designed us to long for him. Every hunger pang, every craving to buy, to belong, or even to right a wrong shows that in our deepest heart we long for God. We want to know and be known by him, to love and be loved by him.

One day Jesus met a woman carrying a water jug. She was thirsty for God but didn’t know it. Divorced five times and ostracized by her community, she avoided people, preferring to draw water alone. She tried dodging Jesus’ conversation with religious chit–chat.

But the more he talked, the more she craved what He had. Soon the woman with the water jar found herself asking Jesus for a drink. Who could guess that the living water He was talking about was the gift of His own blood by which her life could be redeemed?

This woman didn’t know she had been praying, but she was. Going from husband to husband, from fad to fad, she was pleading. She was searching for God.

Dear Lord, our hearts are restless until we find our rest in You. Thank You for finding us in our need and for filling us with Your love and giving us life. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.