Do you know what it's like to have God transform your life? If you have experienced His life-changing power for even a moment, it's something that you won't ever forget. If you have ever witnessed His glory touch you where you are, if you have ever known what it is like to be in His presence, which is better than anything else by far, the desire to experience more of Him should become a permanent fixture in your life. No matter what happens in your life, you will never totally get away from the memory of that time when God came in and healed, restored, comforted, or forgave you.
So if the memory of what God has done in the past is so permanent, why does it so often feel like, as time goes on, the memory begins to fade and things go back to "normal"? Maybe there was a time when God moved in your life and you responded saying "Lord, I don't ever want to be the same again. After what You have done for me, I want to keep pursuing you. I don't ever want to look back." But now, as you grind through every day life, you begin to see your commitment fade, and you start to feel as though what God did yesterday was just a thing of the past--irrelevant to the trials and temptations that you are facing today.
If you have ever felt this way, you are not alone. But if this describes you, let me ask you an honest question...
How much of you does God have?
There is a certain desire that each one of us experiences very accutely. I don't quite know how to describe it (I don't know that anyone does), but it's a kind of longing that you just can't quench. Many people experience it in different ways. Most of us don't really understand it. But this longing often produces a feeling of emptiness, as if something is missing from our lives, even when, from every natural standpoint, our lives seem like they should be just fine.
Each one of us was created by God, in His image. And each of us was born into a fallen condition--separated from God, alienated from His presence. In the beginning, Adam literally walked with God. They just hung out in the Garden of Eden, and God would just explain stuff to Him! But obviously, things changed a little bit. Adam exchanged a perfect existence for a condition of spiritual death when He bought into Satan's lies. Adam and Eve began to look at the fruit that God forbade them to eat, and "saw that [it] was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom..." (Genesis 3:6). In other words, instead of letting God be their satisfaction, they took the desire that was meant for God alone and began to project it onto the things of this world. They let their hearts be turned from God until they were captivated by something else, and in doing this, they relinquished their authority in the Earth and allowed themselves to fall into a state of sin and rebellion.
It didn't have to be this way, and, because of God's mercy in sending Jesus to pay the price for our sin, it doesn't have to be this way with us, either. We have been redeemed by Jesus' blood, and that work is complete and final. God looks at us not as filthy sinners but as holy, pure, and righteous. But unfortunately, we still inherited all the habits and inclinations of the old self, and these need to be dealt with.
I want to get back to that "longing" that I was describing earlier. This desire, as you can see, is God-given. It is our hearts crying out to be near Him. It is God's way of drawing us to Himself. But how many times do we misunderstand the desire of our own hearts? How many times do we, like Adam and Eve, forget what we really want, and start to chase after all these other things that only lead us away from the One who loves us?
Instead of letting this desire cause us to cry out for more of God, we allow it to eat us up. We try to fill the hole with all kinds of things that will never fit, and when they don't work, we try something else. We'll try anything, and it can be anything from full blown addictions to everything under the sun, to something as trivial (or so we think...) as sports fanaticism (look, I'm getting better about baseball...really), 24/7 X-Box (did I say that!? Nahhhh.), and unhealthy relationships (and don't try to trick yourself about what is healthy and what is unhealthy, you're only going to hurt yourself that way). What I'm getting at is this. There are literally thousands of things that people will pursue--will even give their whole lives to--in order to satisfy this desire, and the whole time, they are missing the point. And we all do this, to some extent, every single day.
C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite writers of all time, puts it this way in Mere Christianity: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world...earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing."
Sometimes we think we want something so bad that we feel like we're going to die if we don't get it. Sometimes we go to great lengths and do ridiculous things to satisfy our own desires, not realizing that, no matter how hard or long we look, we are not going to find the answer. Instead, we idolize the things of this world, and we allow Satan to build a stronghold in our lives. We need to recognize this, and let God do something about it.
When we finally see that nothing in this world but God Himself can satisfy the desire that He has put in our heart, we will finally turn to Him to fill us with Himself, and that is exactly what He will do. When we invite the Holy Spirit into our lives, He removes all that isn't His. He will go as far as we let Him, but we need to invite Him - He will never force Himself on us. But when we turn from everything that we've been chasing, and we let go of all the other things that we thought would save us, we can turn to Him and ask Him to fill us completely. When He has all of us, we will have all of Him, because we were created for intimacy with Christ.
We need to come to a place where He is all we are longing for, and nothing in this world can substitute for the total fulfillment that we can only find in Him. We need to let Him synchronize our hearts with His, so that His desires become our desires, and we want only what He wants. When this happens, we will begin to see His glory come into our lives in a way that we have never experienced before. God's power is unlimited, and His goodness is unfathomable, and we can experience all of it to the degree that we surrender ourselves to Him and let Him have His way in us.
I want to end by describing something that has been getting me really, really excited lately. In Matthew 6:10, a passage commonly referred to as "The Lord's Prayer," Jesus instructs His disciples to pray this way: "Your kingdom come, Your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven." We've all heard this before, but think about what that last line means. "On Earth as it is in Heaven." This is God's will for us. Imagine what that would look like! Just think about how it would be if every moment of your life transpired exactly as if you were in Heaven. Pretty amazing, right? Well that is exactly what this verse is talking about, and Jesus would not have told us to pray for this to happen if it was not His plan for our lives! But look what comes directly before it. "Your kingdom come, Your will be done." We aren't going to experience "On Earth as it is in Heaven" until we are willing to say "Your kingdom come, Your will be done." We aren't going to see the fullness of what God has for us until we are willing to let go and allow Him to have His way in our lives.
Let's start today. When you start to long for something that you don't understand, don't try to fill it up with all the junk of this world. Recognize that this is God's way of drawing you to Him. Turn your heart toward Him and cry out to Him. Ask Him to fill you up to overflowing. Ask Him to do whatever He wants to do in your life, and then let go and watch what He can do. Ask for His will to be done, get to the point where you are completely desperate for Him alone, and you will begin to see "On Earth as it is in Heaven" become a reality in your life.
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