February 19

You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing. — Ps 145:16 BSB

That phrase, “Every living thing,” has sometimes been so sweet to me. How comprehensive it is, and how low it reaches! It comes down to the weakest, the smallest, the least in God’s family, if only they are a “living thing.” Even if they can’t see themselves as “a man in Christ,” or even as a child of God, or a newborn babe, still, to be “a living thing”—what comfort!

Maybe you can’t trace the features of a mature Christian in yourself. Maybe you’re burdened with doubts about whether your experience even rises to the level of a newborn babe in Christ. Yet, perhaps, you find yourself here, identifying as “a living thing,” unsure of yourself, feeling like a person no one can understand, with experiences no one else seems to share, walking a path no other child of God appears to have walked before you.

Didn’t someone once say, “I was like a beast before you”? And haven’t we echoed those words? “Surely I am more brutish than any man, and I do not have the understanding of a man” (Proverbs 30:2). Yet there remains life within us—still breathing after God, still with a longing that will never be satisfied until we see the manifestation and presence of God.

The mark of this “living thing” is its desire—“You satisfy the desire of every living thing.” Not natural desires, not the empty desire of the sluggard, but spiritual desires, ignited by the Holy Spirit: desires for God, like the deer that pants for the water brooks; desires to know Christ through a sweet revelation of His glory; desires to be brought to the foot of the cross, to have His image imprinted on our soul; desires to experience the depth, height, and breadth of His love, which surpasses knowledge; desires to walk before God, accepted in the Beloved; and desires to feel within our soul the sweet assurance that we are eternally His.

This “living thing,” though feeling like an unclassifiable, strange creature in its own experience, is marked by its living desires for the living God. It has affections that long for Jesus, a heart restless and discontented with the things of this world, taking no pleasure in what the world offers, and sighing to the Lord for the manifestation of His grace and love.