Better Is One Day

Better Is One Day

Augustine of Hippo, before his conversion, was a man of enormous intellect and extraordinary pleasure-seeking. He had a mistress of fifteen years, an academic career, and a life of genuine worldly achievement. After his conversion he tried to explain what had changed: 'I had been searching everywhere for the good that my heart insisted must exist. When I found it in God, I understood what I had been searching for in everything else.' His most famous line — 'Our heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee' — is, at its core, a commentary on Psalm 84:10. One day in God's presence made every other pleasure pale. Not because other pleasures weren't real, but because this one was incomparably better.

Psalm 84 is a song of longing — a pilgrimage psalm written by someone who cannot be in the temple and yearns for it. 'My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the LORD' (verse 2). From that depth of longing, the declaration of verse 10 is not mere sentiment; it is the testimony of someone who has tasted and knows. Better — morally, experientially, ultimately. A doorkeeper in God's house over a dignitary in the world's best address. The psalmist would rather have a lowly place in God's presence than a high place in God's absence. We live in a world of competing offers for our deepest attention. The question Psalm 84 puts to us daily is simply: Have you tasted the courts of the Lord? If you have, you know. If you haven't, you are invited.