The Deeply Satisfied Heart
?O taste and see that the Lord is good.?
We believe the much-quoted statement, ?in every man is a God-shaped void that can only be filled with Him.? And indeed that is true. It?s the heart of the gospel. Had we not believed it was true we would have never trusted Christ for salvation and invited Him to fill that void. Yet it?s so easy to reduce that fact to a trite phrase that merely smiles at our conversion experience but has little relevance to our present day-in, day-out experience.
Every day, I get out of bed with a void in the pit of my stomach. Hunger. The night is long and the previous night?s dinner has been absorbed into my body?s various systems. The stomach finished doing it?s job somewhere around 11:00 last night. This gnawing in the center of my physical being is reminding me that a particular digestive cavity needs to be filled with something and food is the only thing that will satisfy it. The hunger is the pertinent subject. Food is the pertinent complement.
Even though Christ fills us at salvation, he calls us to continually return to Him, not for salvation, but for satisfaction. The first bite from the Bread of Life brought into us life eternal, but it?s the continual ingestion of that Bread that brings life abundant. While to be saved is once-and-for-all, to be satiated is an every present need, because there is on a regular basis always some form of ?hunger pang? being activated in your life and mine. There is a particular continual gnawing of some kind that demands to be satisfied.
We awaken with it daily. A hunger to enjoy life, to get our basic needs met, to have a sense of worth. It would be great if these things, as benefits of our conversion, were delivered and sealed into our lives once-and-for-all when we accept Christ. But the truth is, they ebb and flow. We know this by experience. I can be satisfied, useful, happy, holy, encouraged and motivated today and not be tomorrow. I can enjoy my work today and loathe it tomorrow. I can be content in my marriage today and resent it tomorrow. I can be at peace in troubled times today and restless tomorrow. Circumstances change. Pressures rise. Emotions vacillate. And every day we are faced with a series of choices as to what or who we will depend on to satisfy our emotional, spiritual, and even physical appetites.
The answer to that question will determine whether we make a sin choice or a righteous choice. That?s where sin enters the picture. Think about this: all sin is basically an attempt to satisfy a God-given desire apart from God.
For instance, the person who sins by committing adultery has some legitimate desires underneath that are meant to be met by a God-given spouse within marriage (remember, marriage was God?s idea to meet man?s basic need for companionship and help indirectly through another human of the opposite sex), but in rejecting God, the adulterer has rejected God?s means of satisfying his emotional and physiological appetites. So he adulterates his marriage because he has already adulterated his dependence on God as his Source.
The trouble-maker who is constantly the source of gossip and manipulation within the church is not trusting God to a basic need we all have to feel important and valuable, or even safe. So they attempt control of others to meet this need instead of trusting God. The greater their control of others, the greater they appease an appetite to feel safe or important.
The person who sins by robbing God, withholding the tithe, is simply looking to that ten percent to meet his needs rather than trusting God to meet his needs.
Even the sin of open rebellion against all things Holy is an attempt to achieve a level of security and strength and stability of control that can only come through surrender to a loving God.
Is my wife to meet certain needs in my life? Certainly. Is it my own responsibility to meet other needs in my life? Absolutely. But one must understand that these are things God has directly supplied as our Source to indirectly meet certain needs, at His discretion. Without Him, there?s nothing. Strip all those things away, and there?s still Him. The problems starts when we confuse the means of meeting our needs with the Source of meeting our needs.
Satan tells us ?taste and see that your job is good (satisfying). Taste and see that pornography is good. Taste and see that more money is good. Taste and see that control, or applause, or men?s approval, or expensive stuff, or titles are good.? Anything but Jesus. Anything but the Living Water, the Bread of Life.
Every time you and I make a sin choice, we?re saying, by our choice, ?God won?t cut it this time. I need something else.? This delves to the heart of our sin. That is why every sin is ultimately against God. ?Against You and You only have I sinned.?
So one of the keys to victorious living over sin is having a heart deeply satisfied in God. On a rare occasion my prayer is ?I want to be satisfied in You, Lord.? But more often my prayer is ?I want to want to be satisfied in You, Lord!? The extra ?want to? in that last sentence is not a misprint. I?m finding that I need to pray that prayer more and more often because I so easily want to fill my ?voids? with something or someone else in some other way. That only leads to sin. And sin only leads to guilt. And guilt tends to lead to a desire to satiate the guilt, to numb the pained conscience, and the feeling of alienation from God. We tend to make another sin-choice to deal with that, too, apart from God. It?s a cycle. Maybe you?re in it right now. Would you take time to stop, go back to the Well, back to the Table, and taste and see that the Lord is good? He is our deepest satisfaction.
