Sunday, May 20, 2012

I Know What You Want

I know what you want.

It’s big. Very big.
And though you might not know it, no matter how much of it you get…you will still want more.
There is something you are craving for and that something is EVERYTHING.
Now I know what you’re thinking. “Come on …I don’t want everything. I just want something.
Just a little something more than what I have right now.” But once you get it, it won’t be enough. You’ll want more. And if you get that…you’ll want more again…and more and more…

Like JD Rockefeller who when he was the world’s richest man asked, “How much money is enough?” He replied, “Just a little bit more.”
  
And before you feel too guilty for wanting more and more and more you need to know that you were made you crave. You were made to be a being who lives with longing. Craving is in your nature. Longing and desire are woven into the fabric of who you are.

But if you make the focus of your longing the wrong things; if you point your cravings toward certain objects; if you face your longing and desire in the wrong direction you are sure to be disappointed. You will find yourself in an increasingly sticky and binding web of discontent, dissatisfaction and despair.

Your song will sound strikingly like Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, “I can’t get no, satisfaction.”

And no matter how much of the objects of your desire you do attain you will finally realize that the superspy James Bond was right when he said, “The world is not enough.” – The world really isn’t enough…

You want something infinitely bigger than the whole world! That’s a lot of longing. That’s a big desire!

And though logically you can tell yourself that this is silly. That you can’t possibly want or need “everything”… you will never convince your soul of that. You will always be bound by the hardwiring that God placed in you for MORE.

“There is an insatiable and universal longing to experience more, to attain something higher, deeper, fuller, richer, stronger, wiser, safer, happier, freer….Whatever security, happiness, relief, rescue, affirmation, meaning and sense of purpose we’re privileged enough to experience – it still isn’t enough. Something within us hungers for what we don’t yet have. And whether or not we realize it, this drives our every pursuit.”  – Tchividjian

You see… the something that you want really is EVERYTHING. And everything has a name: His name is Jesus. He is impossibly bigger than you can possibly imagine. He is more desirable, satisfying, fulfilling than your wildest dreams. He is “MORE” defined. He is the “More” you are longing for.

 “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” CS Lewis
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world.” CS Lewis
 “You made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” Augustine
“…there was once in man a true happiness, the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent, the help he does not attain in things present. But these are all inadequate. Because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.” – Pascal
Oh that we would grasp this simple idea that JESUS is enough! He is more than enough.
You were made with infinite longing because you were made for the Infinite One!
Really all Christian growth is having Jesus take over more and more of the territory of our hearts…becoming more and more consumed, captivated, captured, enthralled, and satisfied with Jesus.
God in His relentless love and pursuit of us is continually working in us to take over more and more of the territory of our hearts. He wants to rescue us from what John Piper calls “our own suicidal tendency to find our life and joy in the world rather than in Christ.”
Jesus is not the beginning of the Christian life and then we build from there. He is the beginning and the end. …He is not the ABC of Christianity. He is the A to Z of Christianity.