I pause at Psalm 34:10b: “But they who seek the Lord shall not be in want of any good thing.” What a verse! What a promise!
I’m realizing what we must believe in order for this verse to make sense to us. We have to believe that what God withholds from us is for our good. We have to believe that the thing we want but don’t have wasn’t good for us or wasn’t good for us right now. We have to believe that we have Jesus as our Good Thing and, with Him, we have everything we really need.
I think of Elisabeth Elliot and her words on “severe mercies.” She writes this:
“God never withholds from His child that which His love and wisdom call good. God’s refusals are always merciful—’severe mercies’ at times but mercies all the same. God never denies us our heart’s desire except to give us something better.”