“As a deer pants for flowing streams, 

so pants my soul for you, O God.

 My soul thirsts for God,

for the living God. 

When shall I come and appear before God?” 

— Psalm 42:1–2

As many of you know, I am an avid coffee drinker.  While medical tests have never proved it, there have been times I’ve been pretty sure there’s more coffee running through my veins than blood.  It’s not so much about the caffeine (caffeine doesn’t really wake me up, it just keeps me from going to sleep), I just simply love the taste and the smell.  

For no particular reason a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t drink any coffee for three or four days and instead drank several glasses of water.  Just water, with nothing added.  A few days later, I noticed that my quality of sleep had significantly improved and that some of the aches and pains that come with middle age had lessened.  The only thing I had changed was decreasing the amount of coffee consumed each day.  It’s not that I had been dehydrated; I was definitely getting plenty of fluids.  There’s simply no substitute for a nice, cool glass of perfectly mixed dihydrogen monoxide.

I’ve often said that going to church for Christians is the air we breathe.  I think that was the wrong analogy, because you can only go without air for a few minutes.  However, one can live and exist just fine without water.  As long as you’re still getting fluids (coffee, tea, your carbonated beverage of choice, so on and so forth), your body will continue to function, and probably fairly decently.  But if you want your body to be at its best, then we need water.  You don’t need water in order to be human (most any fluid will suffice), but the human body can’t be at its best without water.  For the Christian, going to church isn’t the air we breathe, it’s the water we drink.  Going to church won’t make you a Christian, but I don’t know how to be a Christian without going to church.

In the Psalm at the beginning, the psalmist is in exile in a far off land.  He is unable to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem; he hasn’t been able to go to church for a very, very long time.  As a result, his soul is drying up.  Three times in the Psalm he says his soul is “cast down within me.”  In addition to sleeping better and the aches and pains lessening as I drank more water, my mind also seems a bit sharper and clearer.  Who knew that sometimes depression can be eased by drinking water?  The same is true spiritually.  We were created to worship God, together, with the other saints, on a regular basis.  We need water daily.  Our spirit needs corporate worship at least weekly.

If your spiritual life seems a bit dry lately or if you’ve found your soul “thirsting for the living God,” maybe it’s because you’ve “neglected meeting together” (Hebrews 10:25) with the saints in worship, prayer and Bible study. I didn’t realize how much my body was craving pure water until I started drinking more.  Sometimes, we don’t even realize how thirsty our soul is until we gather together with other believers to worship the Lord and pray together.  We drink best from the well of living water when we do so together with other believers.

Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”  — John 4:13–14

Blessings,

Rev. David Garrison