Did you ever watch those survival shows on cable like "Survivor Man" or that one on the Discovery Channel hosted by a guy named Bear Grylls?  There's a common theme in them; once they find themselves in, let's say a desert like the one surrounding Judea, they set about taking care of what they are going to need to survive by going after the most important resource.  Often they point out that a human can survive surprisingly long without food, and air is abundant and free, so usually the first order of business is to secure drinking water.  Without water, all of their other skills for survival won't matter very much because they'll wind up dead.  That's how important water is.

Psalm 42 gives us a pretty powerful image of a believer's relationship with and orientation to God.  That image is of a deer or hart longing for flowing streams or panting for water.  That deer would have been dwelling in the wilderness; that desert region of the Middle East that is hot and arid; where water would be of first importance.  Without that water, the deer would instinctively know it would not survive.  So it is with us; the world says we need "stuff", sometimes important "stuff", but we really know that all that "stuff" is meaningless unless we have God first and foremost.  Without God, we won't make it!

In our church, we used a self-assessment tool that told us that we needed to get more passionate about our spirituality.  Rather than embrace that as a growing edge; mourning that short coming, exploring it and accepting responsibility for it and implementing a plan to facilitate growth, we all whined; "But what IS Passionate Spirituality?  I don't understand!"  And we tried to explain it in terms of our committment levels to God and our prayer lives, and we tried to describe it in terms of the extent to which a member is "on fire" for Christ.  But still, no one got it.  Here is a perfect image of Passionate Spirituality in Psalm 42: When you long for God, when you can't live without God just the way a deer longs for and can't live without water in the desert; when prayer, worship and fellowship with God become THAT important to you ... THEN you will have passionate spirituality!  Until then, all of the superficial changes you make, no matter how painful, are just like putting a band-aid on a tumor and thinking that you have treated the underlying cancer.

Make God the center and focus of your life.  Then you can echoe the Psalmist's sentiment; as the deer pants for water, so my soul longs for the Lord!