We all know that the more yellow the colour of our urine the more dehydrated we are and if our wee is clearer things inside our body are generally better.
This is true.
Can you remember the last time that you were so thirsty that gulping down multiple glasses of water didn’t seem to take the edge off the thirst sensation? I remember once as a kid being woken from my sleep by such intense thirst that I had to go down 3 flights of stairs in the middle of the night and drink the lemon juice drink that I had been dreaming about from the fridge – intense, unusual, apparently insatiable thirst.
This extreme type of thirst is unfamiliar to most of us but better known as a symptom by people who suffer from diabetes, for example. Diabetics have a metabolic disease which, basically, means that their homeostatic internal world struggles to maintain balance. In the case of diabetics, balance of blood sugars.
Thirst is thought to be part of a corrective mechanism which acts as a support to the physiological control of fluid balance in the body.
When you feel thirsty it’s an indication that your homeostatic world needs a little help and that your fluid balance levels have dipped, in a similar way that blood sugars can dip in all of us. You need to drink some fluids, to replace fluids that you have lost.
Physiologically, this thirst mechanism relates to something called plasma osmolality – a measure of your body’s electrolyte-water balance. Our bodies require balance, it would seem.
We all get thirsty but we don’t all regularly experience extreme thirst. This is called Polydipsia
When King David wrote Psalm 63 he was experiencing a spiritual equivalent of Polydipsia – his internal, spiritual electrolyte-water balance had plummeted giving him the intensity of thirst for God that overwhelmed his own desert-bound physical thirst.
1 You, God, are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you,
my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
where there is no water.
Notice David wasn’t longing for water; he was longing for God.
When you think that the degree of our physical thirst sensation is based on the extent of the imbalance between the fluids we have given out and those we have taken in, what is your spiritual plasma osmolality currently at? How much do you need to take Him in? Do you feel thirst for Him? Do you sip or are you gulping?
I hope I am thirsty for Jesus, enough to wake me from my sleep – my spiritual slumbers. I hope I am thirsty for the word of God. I hope I am thirsty for the realties of he Kingdom of heaven. I hope I am thirsty for Biblical truth in the church. I certainly am thirsty to be more thirsty and to be a better, regular, deeper drinker.
We must drink, deeply and regularly of Jesus as a reflex to the pangs we feel for God and for those we don’t.
firebrandnotes.com 