Thy Lovingkindness Is Better

He can say it well. That is the thing that has started to bother him.

He said it four weeks ago to a younger man who was going through something, and he said it with real warmth and he meant it as help. That God Himself is the point. That the presence is better than the outcome. That the thing the younger man was asking for is real and God is realer.

And the younger man took it and it visibly helped him, and he went away steadier than he came, and there was a moment at the door where he gripped his hand.

And he shut the door and stood in his own hallway and thought: I do not believe that.

Not a crisis of faith. He believes in God, entirely, and he would go to the wall on the resurrection. It is more specific and more embarrassing than that. He does not, in the part of him that actually operates, believe that God Himself is better than the thing he wants. He would take the thing. He is fifty-eight and he has been in ministry of one kind or another for twenty-six years and he would take the thing.

And he can say the sentence beautifully, and there is now a gap in him with a name on it.

If you can say something you cannot yet mean, come and sit down. Nobody here is going to call you a hypocrite.

The man who wrote it was in a dry place while he wrote it

Here is the sentence, and everything depends on where the man was standing when he said it.

Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee.Psalm 63:3

That is the sentence he has been saying to other people. Better than life.

Now read the first two verses, because the psalm gives you the location before it gives you the claim.

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.

He is not writing this from a good week. The psalm is headed as being from the wilderness of Judah. He says his soul is thirsty and his flesh is longing and there is no water, and he says all of that before he says that God is better than life.

So the great sentence about God being enough is written by a man who is not currently full. It comes out of thirst rather than out of satisfaction.

Which means it was never a report on his emotional condition. It is a declaration made in a dry place by somebody who has decided to say a true thing before he can feel it.

You are saying something in the same posture the man who wrote it was in, and it was already said from a dry place first. Psalm 63:3 is where that sits, three verses after a man says there is no water where he is, and the same Spirit who kept the location in the heading is the one who takes the word hypocrite off a man in a hallway.

Saying it first is not lying

Now the thing that has him standing in the hallway, and it is worth taking apart properly.

He thinks the gap between what he says and what he believes is a kind of fraud. And there is a version of that which would be: if he were telling the younger man something he thought was untrue, that would be fraud and it would be serious.

But that is not what happened. He said something he believes is true and does not yet feel. Those are different, and the difference is the whole of the Christian life for most people most of the time.

Consider what the alternative would look like. He would have to wait, before saying anything true, until his interior had caught up with it. Nobody would ever teach anything, nobody would ever encourage anybody, and every person in that faith would be limited to describing their own current emotional weather.

The psalmist did not do that. He said the better thing in the dry land, out loud, with his flesh longing, and the saying is in the psalm as an act rather than as a description.

And here is the practical piece, which nobody tells fifty-eight year old men in ministry: what you say out loud in a dry place is one of the ways the dryness gets worked on. Not by pretending. By declaring, and then living long enough to find out.

You are declaring rather than reporting, and it was already a legitimate thing to do out loud. He promised it, in the sentence about believing and therefore speaking, where the speaking follows from a conviction rather than from a feeling (2 Corinthians 4:13), and His Spirit does not require a man's interior to have caught up before he may say a true thing.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And nothing on this site is a lever. Nothing here suggests that saying the sentence enough times produces the belief, or that any practice moves God, or that the thing you want arrives once your wanting is correctly ordered. There is no mechanism on this page.

And the thing you want still matters. This article does not dismiss it and it does not tell you that a better man would want it less.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You have been fully inside this, and you were never at its edge because of what your body allows. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by anybody's inner state.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.