I've literally copied and pasted it from the document it's been written in, so excuse the notes I've made for myself. No editing has been done at all. I figured I wouldn't adapt it, as that means you can see what I do which, I'm hoping, is interesting for at least some of you :)
Discuss the hunger and thirst aspect of last week and how this ties beautifully into the name and theme of our school – Living Water Christian School. If we don’t go to the living water to refresh our thirsty souls, how will our thirst ever be truly quenched?
Read 107:9 again, then read verse 1-15 again. This time focus on Psalm 107:4,5
‘Some wandered in the desert wastes, finding no way to a city to dwell in, hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted within them. Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble.’
Ask the teachers to read this verse in the different versions of the Bible that they have, to compare and contrast the text and see if we can draw any conclusions ourselves from hearing it read in different translations. Discuss this a bit.
The verse that we’re focusing on doesn’t sound like an easy time. Clearly, there was a lot of suffering. It sounds like the psalmist is referring to the time the Israelites walked in the desert. The Israelites were hungry, thirsty, lost and desperate. It was a difficult time that lasted for years and years and years. I imagine it would have felt like it was never-ending. Which is the same for us when we are suffering or experiencing difficult times. We feel so trapped in our suffering, we’re so consumed by it, that we feel like it has taken over our life. We feel that the pain will never go away. But we need to look beyond! Look up! And not dwell in the trouble.
I once read a book that was called ‘Beyond the Clouds’. It was a fiction book, but one of the main themes in the story was that, no matter how much rain there is and how many black clouds there are in the sky, there is always, always, always sunshine beyond all of that.
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed that when you’ve been on a plane? Last year, when I was flying out of my home town of Launceston to go to Canberra, it was a very rainy, dark, cloudy day. When the plane took off, it was quite bumpy because the weather wasn’t good. I wondered to myself whether the whole flight would be as rough as the take off. The pilot led us up into the sky, through the rain, into the clouds and when we passed through the clouds, there was brilliant sunshine! It was almost blinding because we’d come from such gloomy darkness (actually it was grey, but don’t get too caught up in those details okay!). What an amazing picture of our life in Christ.
When we are facing a difficult time in life, it is so incredibly easy to be overcome by it. It can be so all encompassing and it’s really hard to think of anything else beyond the trouble. But if we have God, we can look beyond the trouble, look to Him and see the sunshine. We know that God is always good, especially in the troubles of life, and if we look beyond this life, towards our eternal one, we can see sunshine, we can find joy and we can live in peace, with ‘bel isi’, knowing that nothing that we suffer on this earth can take away our joy, that we will find so completely in eternity.
Another picture that reminds me of our life on this earth is the city of Lae itself. When you look at the city of Lae and its streets, settlements, suburbs, rivers and areas of vacant land, it looks quite dirty. There is often a lot of rubbish lying around, we see buai spit painting the road side red, the areas of town are filled with lots of people, yelling, getting angry and pushing each other around, the water ways are muddy and often have a lot of rubbish along their edges and the roads are filled with pot holes and crazy PMV drivers. But when you look up, even just a little bit, you see beautiful, lush, green gardens, bright, colourful flowers, strong, towering coconut trees and the most spectacular mountain ranges I’ve ever seen on this side of the Equator. Lae, and the country of PNG is so magnificently stunning. There is no doubt about that!
Again, this reminds me of our Great God and the way that He lifts us from this life of sin, into His presence. If we simply focus on our lives here on earth, we’re just like Lae, rubbished by sin, covered in the blood of our sin (like that red buai spit), yelling, angry and violent, filled with dirty-ness and living lives that are ruined by deep potholes of grief, all the while being torn down and distracted by those people around us who are just like the PMV drivers – getting in our way and telling us all about their problems too, which adds to our grief. But God brings us through this! He delivers us from our distress, as we’re reminded of in verse 5, and He comforts us in our troubles. The mountains, that stand strong, tall, unmoving and unshakable are just like our Almighty Father. Nothing can move Him and nothing can thwart His plan. He is a God of the here and now, but even more wonderfully, He’s a God of grace, who has given us all we need to live in eternal rest with Him, all because of His precious Son.
These pictures I’ve painted can explain a lot, but there’s more that I can add to the story. It’s easy to get caught up in this life, allowing ourselves to become so spiritually starved that we barely even notice it’s happened until it’s too late. We become like those Israelites – wandering in the (spiritual) desert, looking for a good place to live, while we suffer hunger, are parched with thirst and are absolutely exhausted. And when you’re at that point, you don’t have enough strength to truly focus - your mind wanders, it plays tricks and you can’t concentrate. And things just seems to get worse. Everything spirals out of control and you’re always left wanting. You can try to ignore the hunger, that ache in your stomachs, that deep-seated thirst that doesn’t go away and do everything in your power to try and dull the pain, to avoid facing reality. But the traps of this earth, the ‘relief’ that we can convince ourselves we’re finding, which are packaged so beautifully, will never truly fulfil us. (Insert your own traps for yourself! You know you have them and you know what they are! And don’t lie to yourself!)
We need to face up to our spiritual hunger and thirst and go to our life source. Everyday. Without fail. Again and again and again. For it is there that we will find true peace and rest. True joy. And the energy to keep on getting up to do it again. It’s hard, it takes a lot of self-discipline and we will continue to fall, but doing it all through the strength of the Spirit Jesus left with us, we can press on, towards our heavenly home, that will be so much more glorious and magnificent than we could ever imagine. For we are mere men, who do not have the mind of God. May that Glorious Day come quickly!!
