As a deer pants for flowing streams,
so pants my soul for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?
—Psalm 42:1–2
In the opening paragraph of his Confessions, Augustine writes, “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” All spirituality, all religion, all quests for the true, the good, and the beautiful, man’s every longing, all of it testifies to this restlessness, and yet, it also shouts that man does not long for God. Romans 3:11 tells us “no one seeks for God.” Man paradoxically wants all that God is, minus God. Man needs God and is desperate for all that God is and God alone, but he wants it all apart from the true God as He is. Sinful man is a fool wanting a solar system without a star.
This is also true of many who long for the true God revealed in Jesus Christ, because they long for God too. They long for God to deliver them, to help them, to lead them, to bless them. Such longings are not always evil, but it is evil to only long for God to.
Even the true saint recognizes something of this idolatrous longing cloaked as piety remaining within him. Here is something rare and beautiful. It is a work of God’s grace. Here the psalmist longs for God. Oh, it will be plain he longs for God to as well, but foundationally, what he longs for is God himself.
God is not a means to to. To is a means to God. Deliverance is deliverance to God. Help is help unto God. God’s leading is a leading unto Himself. Blessedness is God.
John Piper helps separate the wheat from the chaff with this question,
“The critical question for our generation—and for every generation—is this: If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ was not there?”
Here is the heart of true worship, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you” (Psalm 73:25).
No Other Boast 