Gods unfailing love

Ps 63 3 Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. 

When I was in my late teens and early twenties I had a very difficult time developing relationships with the opposite sex. I had a very big hunger for intellectual stimulus. But it was miss directed because I was motivated to gain knowledge through my hands on experience. I think this was from growing up in a family where the communication and the level of enjoyment through entertainment was so high that it created a connection in our family that was uncommon. So I learned at a young age how to focus my mind and body to experience the ultimate enjoyment. I was so self motivated that it was hard for me to read people as they responded to me in the proper context. Im gonna explain how I freed myself from this terrible introspection. 

When I began to memorize the Psalms they became my language of prayer. There are two miss guided principles that we apply to ourselves in our natural way of thinking in the christian experience. One is that we view our growth process by how we respond to scripture. We focus on our response as the cause of getting Gods favor. The other miss guided principle is that we focus on our actions as the cause of getting God to communicate acceptance to us. When we complete our task then God will respond with a reward. 

This kind of natural way of thinking is circular. We are starting out with focusing on our selves and we are ending with a focus on our selves This limits how we communicate to God. We feel safe with the thinking that we are approaching God through a process. We always confess our sin first, then we express our guilt, then we focus on being forgiven, then we feel accepted and then we pray for others.  The reason that we do this is because we are trying to make our wills acceptable to God in order to make our petition. 

But in this verse the Psalmist is saying that we are not pursuing God but God is pursuing us. A lot of people reason that we fulfill our side through confession and God will fulfill His side which is pursuing us. But this is just a contradiction. The Psalmist is expressing Gods love in a metaphorical way as a Person. You will find this kind of reasoning throughout the Psalms. 

As I began my long journey on praying the Psalms this one teaching allowed me to free myself from this terrible introspection and begin to enjoy the other person. Every time the Psalmist was petitioning God to gain a greater trust or to ask blessing for the people in his kingly role , he expressed his confidence in Gods blessing on the basis of Gods unfailing love. 6 4 Turn, O LORD, and deliver me; save me because of your unfailing love.21 7 For the king trusts in the LORD; through the unfailing love of the Most High he will not be shaken.  13 5 But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.31 16 Let your face shine on your servant; save me in your unfailing love. etc.

The Psalmist self confidence in Gods blessing was based upon Gods unfailing love. We see the same type of teaching by the Apostle when He says that "It is not I who do it but it is Christ living in me" In other words because the Psalmist points to Gods love as the only reason that he has confidence in Gods blessing , he is pointing away from himself and praying on the basis of Someone else who causes him to be confident. But in my younger years my attitude began to change as I came to this part of the petition. So the change did not start from experiencing Christ substituting Himself in everything that I experienced but it began the process by acknowledging that Christ alone was the basis of my confidence in my petition that I was drawn into being attracted to having a relationship with Him in which my confidence and growth was based upon seeing Christ in this substitutionary relationship.

So I did not really believe that Christ was pursuing me until I His unfailing love gave me freedom to be transparent before Him so that all of the other expressions of the Psalmist like praise, describing his relationship with Christ in terms of hunger, debt, longing etc was all given to me for my own benefit. I had to be freed through Christ unfailing love in order to be fully engaged in how He substituted Himself on my behalf in every situation.

This is exactly what the Psalmist is expressing here. This is a mature man who has gone through many victories. He has a relationship with Christ as if  Christ was in the battle and jumped in front of David to take the arrow and save him from death. So you see this expression of this relationship that is beyond explanation as the Psalmist uses eating at a table with the finest foods as a metaphor for this enjoyment of being delivered through substitution.