Psalm 103 (3)

“Bless Yahweh O my soul, and forget none of His benefits; who pardons all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases; who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with lovingkindness and compassion; who satisfies your years [or desires] with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle.” Psalm 103:2 – 5 NASB.

Where do we seek satisfaction and fulfillment? Where do we seek renewal?

We need more than food for our bodies to eat, we need food for our souls to eat. We not only need to nourish our bodies; we need to nourish our souls. Where do we seek such nourishment?

What does it mean that God “satisfies your years [or desires] with good things”? Does this mean that whatever our desires are that God is the source of their fulfillment? Does this mean that God will fill our years, our lives, with the good things that we want?

We see in Ephesians 2:10 that “…we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them”.

It seems to me that one of the challenges of the Christian life is to, by God’s grace, remain on the Potter’s wheel so that our hopes and dreams and desires are molded into the will of God. We are to present our bodies, our entire selves, as living sacrifices, well – pleasing to God; and our inner persons are to be transformed so that the will of God will unfold in our lives to His glory (Romans 12:1 – 2).

When we repent of having ourselves at the center of the universe and submit to Jesus Christ as our Lord, as the center of our universe, we relinquish what we want for what God wants. Then our lives, our years, become not a quest to fulfill what we want, but rather as our desires are displaced by God’s desires and our God’s desires become our desires – we then experience fulfillment because we are living as the sons and daughters that God called us to be.

The years of our pilgrimage are not to be years seeking what we, outside of Christ, might want, but are rather to be years seeking the will of our Father and Lord Jesus. Those who call Jesus Christ “Lord” are called to say with Paul, “I have not been disobedient to the heavenly vision” and to say with Jesus, “I have glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do.”

As the will of our Father unfolds in our lives, as the desires of God become our desires, as our years are lived “blessing the LORD” and living in the light of God’s redemption and forgiveness, then our years will know the satisfaction of good things and our youth, our vitality, our inner person, will be renewed like the eagle’s – for we will be increasingly living in the eternals, in the things of the Holy Spirit of God.

“…though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day,” 2 Corinthians 4:16 (see also 2 Cor. 3:17 – 18; Proverbs 4:18).

What does this look like in your life today?