Jesus taught us to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread." We are to look to God for our physical needs. Our food, our health, our housing, our basic life's necessities are provided by God.
David would write,
"I have been young, and now am old; Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, Nor his descendants begging bread." Psa.37.25
So Jesus tells us:
"Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on."
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But then he asks the questions:
"Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?" Matt. 6.25
David's Psalm causes us to see God provides more than just physical needs:
HE PROVIDES FOR OUR SPIRITUAL NEEDS
"He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake."
One author wrote, "We are truly indefatigable in providing for the needs of the body, but we starve the soul."
The 23rd Psalm calls us to see our very souls have deep needs that must be met and can only be met by God. Our souls need what David needed and what ever person needs: a satisfied soul.
David writes about this:
"Hungry and thirsty, Their soul fainted in them."Psa. 107.5
"For He satisfies the longing soul, And fills the hungry soul with goodness." Psa. 107.9
Abraham Joshua Heshel, an old Jewish theologian, before he died, reflected on his life and told the person with him, "I only asked for wonder and He gave it..." The soul longs for wonder. Much of the religious searching that is going on in our world today is simply the human soul in search of wonder. They have come to understand that life must be more than McDonalds and 401ks and expensive vacations. They are seeking for wonder. And thus these searchers go to extraordinary lengths to fill their hungry hearts and their thirsty souls with what they call "spirituality." Go to any bookstore and you will find an entire section devoted to "spirituality." Much of it has nothing to do with the God of David. The spirituality of this world is predictable. It is known. It is tame. Because it is a pseudo-spirituality made by man, sometimes quite ingenious, and quite creative, but still man-made. The problem is it lacks "wonder." The problem is, it lacks the wideness, the unfathomable riches of God in Christ, which is the wonder we are all looking for. In Kansas, where it can get real dry sometimes, the way you water a tree is by putting a hose at the base of the tree, and just saturating that tree for an hour or so. And that is what God invites us to do with our souls: To saturate the very roots of our lives with the wonder of Jesus Christ.
