May nine. What it means to love God. Oh 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's no water. So I have

looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. Psalm 63, 1 and 2. Only God will satisfy

a heart like David's and David was a man after God's own heart. That's the way we were created to be.

This is the essence of what it means to love God, to be satisfied in him, in him, not just his

gifts, but God himself as the glorious person that he is. Loving God will include obeying all his

commandments. It will include believing all his word. It will include thanking him for all his gifts.

But all of that is overflow. The essence of loving God is admiring and enjoying all he is.

And it is this enjoyment of God that makes all of our other responses truly glorifying to him.

We all know this intuitively as well as from scripture. Do we feel most honored by the love of those

who serve us from the constraints of duty or from the delights of fellowship? My wife is most

honored when I say, it makes me happy to spend time with you. My happiness is the echo of her

excellence. And so it is with God. He is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

None of us has arrived at perfect satisfaction in God. I grieve often over the murmuring of my heart

when I lose some earthly comfort or convenience. But I have tasted that the Lord is good.

By God's grace, I now know the fountain of everlasting joy. And so I love to spend my days

luring people into joy until they say with me, one thing, have I asked of the Lord,

that will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,

to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple, Psalm 274.