Worship and the Wilderness
Matt Morley • Sunday, June 22, 2025
To Gaze Upon His Beauty — Part 1
Psalm 63 is…
Written by David in the wilderness of Judea.
Not dated. We really don’t know when this took place in David's life. It could have been after His anointing to become king and Saul runs David off. It could have been after David had been king, and then experienced his own son Absolom's rebellion against him. It’s speculated back and forth, but we just don’t know for sure.
Where David in an incredibly hard season and chooses to acknowledge God and His great love, and worship God in every circumstance.
Psalm 63
1 O 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 is no water.2 So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
beholding your power and glory.
3 Because your steadfast love is better than life,
my lips will praise you.
4 So I will bless you as long as I live;
in your name I will lift up my hands.5 My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food,
and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips,
6 when I remember you upon my bed,
and meditate on you in the watches of the night;
7 for you have been my help,
and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.
8 My soul clings to you;
your right hand upholds me.9 But those who seek to destroy my life
shall go down into the depths of the earth;
10 they shall be given over to the power of the sword;
they shall be a portion for jackals.
11 But the king shall rejoice in God;
all who swear by him shall exult,
for the mouths of liars will be stopped.
The Love of God
David says that God’s love is better than life. That’s quite a bold claim coming from someone with no food, water, or legitimate shelter. Yet David was fully convinced and satisfied by God’s love.
1 John 4:19 says, “We love because he first loved us.”
Our response to God’s great love is loving Him in return. Not out of forced obligation, but out of delight and joy. We have been given free will and we can actively choose God, or to reject God. now God loved us to the point of death, He sent His son for us to die on the cross so that we could be made whole and united with Him. He gave himself up, so that we could be filled up with His Holy spirit. And we get to love Him in response to that, which is so beautiful!
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. 10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. 11 More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. — Romans 5:1-11
And now we see how Psalm 63 plays out in what Paul writes in Romans 5.
Our response to trials and suffering is turning our affection, our hope and our love to God! There are benefits of enduring through the desert or wilderness seasons. We see the building up of us as a people into greater maturity because “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame.”
So, what is God’s love really like like?
We find God’s love being revealed through His character and through His word.
God’s love is everlasting - Jeremiah 31:3 - The Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.
God’s love is forgiving - Ephesians 4:32 - Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
God’s love is comforting - Zephaniah 3:17 - The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.
God’s love is Steadfast
Psalm 103:8 - The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
Lamentations 3:22-23 - The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
Isaiah 54:10 - For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed,” says the Lord, who has compassion on you.
God’s love is sacrificial - Romans 5, John 3:16, ephesians 5:2
God’s love is absolutely remarkable and undeniably supernatural! We as humans do not love naturally! It’s actually God’s love in us, that allows us to love.
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. — 1 John 4:7-8 7
The Hebrew word for “love ”often used is the word Ahavah. It’s used to describe God’s love that He has for us, that we should have for Him and for one another. This word is a deep emotional feeling yes, but it's also an action. It’s a choice to love not just an, “Oh, I feel it right now,” kind-of-love. God willingly chooses to love His people and His children.
This Ahavah is used to describe many forms of love whether that’s:
A husband to a wife
Father to a son
Brother to a brother
An entire people to their king
Etc.
However, it always comes back to the choice of love which is an action.
God’s love is better than life itself. David believed so, and he wrote this Psalm in the wilderness.
So If God has such a great love for us, how can we display or act out this love to Him in response?
Worship is the answer.
The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing. — Zephaniah 3:17
If God our creator is singing over us maybe He wants that same love and intentionality to be given back?
Worship by definition means: “to honor or show reverence for as a divine being or supernatural power - to regard with great or extravagant respect, honor, or devotion.”
What we see in Psalm 63 is David choosing to give God the honor and the glory He deserves even while being on the run for his life.
David has the greatest respect and honor of who God is to the point of choosing to worship God in the wilderness. David did not start worshipping God in the wilderness. He spent years worshipping God in the fields while tending sheep. As David is in the wilderness he declares “because your steadfast love is better than life my lips will praise you.” David chooses to worship God when he doesn’t “feel” like it because worship has nothing to do with your current feelings.
Worship has everything to do with who God is.
Now, in the wilderness almost everything will be working against you so that you lose focus of who to worship.
There is a legitimate battle for your worship because once you lose sight of who God is you’re much easier to take down. The whole goal is to get you distracted so your attention, your attraction or your affection to God gets put on the side lines. If we choose to worship when we feel like it we would never worship God, we would worship everything else! Like every pop star, every tv show, every actor, etc...
However, when we choose to Love God with our song and our words, and our hearts, things change.
When we say, “God I am hurting and in pain but you are worthy of my worship!,” our circumstances start to look different. We take our eyes off of our immediate surroundings and place the focus on HIM so that we maintain faith and hope. The emotional change our spirits feel as we worship is intentional, because when we see Him as He is, our affections grow and our hearts can rightly respond in adoration and praise.
When we choose to worship in the wilderness, much like Romans 5, it produces endurance. Endurance turns into character, and character into hope. This is how David made it through wilderness seasons. He chose to worship God when it was hard. He chose to worship God when he was suffering. He chose to worship God when he was in pain.
Worship is the active choice to glorify God when you don’t want to.
Worship has nothing to do with you, your circumstance or crisis, but it does have everything to do with God.
Following Jesus means that we are called to sacrifice on a daily basis. A sacrifice means that it costs YOU something. With worship it most likely costs your comfort or your desires.
Our corporate gatherings should be saturated with all of our personal, intimate, worship of God, coming together and erupting in praise!
Wilderness seasons aren’t fun or easy. Oftentimes they're really painful even. If you’re in a season like this, where you feel like the ground beneath your feet has dried out, or like your soul has dried up, I just want to say you’re not alone. I won’t speak this over anyone's life, but it is very likely that the average follower of Jesus will face a wilderness season.
But believe it or not wilderness seasons have a purpose, and can refine us greatly.
Just like we talked about in Romans 5, God wants to do something in you while in that season. Yet we know, through suffering produces endurance, which produces character, which produces hope. So as we endure through the suffering, or wilderness, we can place our hope in God that He will carry us through. We can learn to depend deeper on a God daily as our source of satisfaction and joy!
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” — Matthew 11:28-30
The peace that David finds in God even in the wilderness, we now get to find in Jesus.
So come to Jesus!