June 3

At this, I said, ‘I have been banished from Your sight; yet I will look once more toward Your holy temple.’ — Jonah 2:4 BSB

When Jonah spoke these words, he said them in the deep bitterness of his heart. He felt as if he had been cast out of God’s gracious presence. But he must have known firsthand the sweetness of God’s presence, tasting heaven in it, and finding his happiness centered there. He must have experienced this to understand that without God’s felt presence, life was nothing but gloom and death, and that being “cast out of his sight” was like experiencing the beginning of hell on earth.

This is where a living soul differs from others—whether dead in sin or merely practicing religion. Knowing that true happiness is found only in God, feeling misery and dissatisfaction with everything else, especially when the Lord’s presence isn’t felt—this is what marks the reality of God’s life in a person’s soul. Religious pretenders feel no misery, no dissatisfaction, and no sorrow when God doesn’t shine on them. As long as the world smiles on them and they have what they want, they are content, carried along by false hope and the flattery of others, satisfied to sail down the stream of an empty religious life.

But for a living soul, there is often a deep longing for God’s smile, a thirst for His presence. There’s a dissatisfaction with the world and everything it offers if the Lord cannot be found, if His presence isn’t felt. Where this is experienced, it marks someone as having the grace of God in their heart.