ARE YOU SATISFIED?
ARE YOU SATISFIED?
Let me start off today’s words of encouragement with the words to a song by David Crowder:
“Come and listen, come to the water’s edge, all you who know and fear the Lord. Come and listen, come to the water’s edge all you who are thirsty, come. Let me tell you what He has done for me. Let me tell you what He has done for me, He has done for you, He has done for us.”
Isaiah 55:1-2 says “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.”
I grew up in a Lutheran church. I am grateful for growing up in church, and I have very fond memories of our small church family. I remember the potlucks, the Christmas pageants, the Easter traditions and the church camping trips. When I was 18 I was accepted to the UW and by what I now know as the hand of God, I ended up “accidentally” at Northwest Bible College. I went to college as a confused girl. By nature, I am an “all or nothing” kind of girl; but I struggled to find something worth putting my all into. My first few months of college I struggled with this terrible sense of purposeless. I wasn’t depressed, or even lost. I was a Christian girl, my eternity in heaven secured because I had prayed a prayer of salvation, taught Sunday school, volunteered in my church nursery and memorized large chunks of scripture in order to be “confirmed” in my Christian faith. And yet I still had this nagging feeling that something was missing. I felt an emptiness that was yelling to be filled. I tried to fill it with ridiculous things, things I said I would never do. Nothing helped. One day I was sitting in a required class called “foundations of the Christian life.” The professor was teaching on the Lordship of Christ, I was curious. He explained the difference between praying a prayer for salvation, and making Jesus the Lord (in charge) of my life. He talked about how much more there was to a life in Christ than just a belief that there is a God and a heaven and a hell. I was floored. I had never been presented this information before. Having grown up in the church, you would think I would have known that the Christian life is about a RELATIONSHIP, but I did not. It became clear to me, that I was not satisfied with God (as I knew him). That day I went back to my dorm room and gave my entire life to God; in an “all or nothing” sort of way. I decided that day that there had to be more of God, and that I wanted to know Him, all of Him. My entire life changed that day, and the months and years to follow have been filled with baptism in the Holy Spirit, intense encounters with God, and my eyes witnessing the miraculous power of God at work. Since then, my hunger for God has intensified and spread. I want everyone I cross paths with to encounter God as I have. It drives me, and it is why I am in ministry to this day.
Many, many Christians are not satisfied with God. Before we go any further, you have to make a pledge. Will you, as you read this, be 100% honest before God? You and I can waste many hours of the journey of our walk with God if we are not honest. Will you ask yourself; “am I satisfied with God?” Be honest. Are you really satisfied? Because the truth is, God is entirely satisfying. In fact, He is the only way for human kind to find ultimate satisfaction.
Soon after my college resolution to pursue the Lord with all I had, I memorized Isaiah 55 1-2. These verses say “Come all you who are thirsty, come to the waters.” (thirst here, refers to spiritual thirst and waters refers to spiritual refreshment). Scripture goes on to say “Come buy wine and milk without money and without cost.” (wine and milk are symbols of abundance that God is offering to us, all of us, for FREE). And then the Lord asks us a troubling question. “Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?” According to Beth Moore, “God is asking us ‘Why do you work so hard for things that are never enough, can never fill you up and are endlessly insufficient?’” And that is the question. Why do we settle? We all have it; that nagging empty feeling that longs for the touch of God, for the “Bread of Life” that only comes from a living, thriving relationship with God. In fact if you can feel that inner emptiness, it is the most obvious symptom of unfilled hunger for God. And just like with your physical body, your spirit must “eat” or it becomes ill. Scripture makes numerous references to a “soul filling” that only God can provide (see Jeremiah 31:23-25). This filling does not automatically accompany salvation. Salvation secures our eternity in heaven, but to have satisfaction, abundant life on earth, we must seek more of God.
Now it is important to note here, that there is a form of dissatisfaction in a relationship with God can be good. When you develop an appetite for God, and His presence, He becomes the only way you can really feel satisfied, and you end up wanting more. Let me illustrate this with a story. Quite a few years ago, I spent a week at Bible Camp with the high school age kids from my church. It was a ton of fun, but God had an encounter planned for me and Him. At the end of the week, and for the first time in my Christian life, I HEARD the unmistakeable voice of God. He directed me to go and pray for someone (someone I didn’t even know) who was kneeling at an altar, desperate for a touch from God with a plan for suicide if God didn’t “come through.” I was so burdened from this COMMAND from God to pray for this person, I became physically ill at the mere thought of disobeying. I prayed for that young man, and the power and love of God SHOOK him. He had an encounter with God that when he later tried to explain, all he could do was fall to his knees and weep. Instead of following through with a suicide plan, he went into missions. And from that moment, I was hooked. I had to have more of God. I had to hear His voice, I had to be His instrument. Everything else just seemed petty and insignificant compared to people meeting the Living God. There is more to the story though, and though this is long, please stay with me.
Immediately following that week at camp, we took our teenagers on a mission trip to inner city Portland. We spent seven days doing servant work, doing dramas in the parks, putting on evening services and working around the church we were staying at. After exhausting 12 or 14 hour days of ministry and manual labor we would have our own “services.” Our 40 teenagers or so would get together in the church sanctuary and worship and pray. I am not kidding when I say an average night of worshipping and praying was 7 hours. The hours I spent on my face before God were endless, I hardly slept. Why? Because after being used by God in such a powerful way the previous week, I was now DISSATISFIED. What I had had before wasn’t good enough anymore. I wanted more. This is the dissatisfaction that is GOOD. Bear with me as I finish the story. After 6 days and nights of praying, seeking, and serving, God spoke to me again. We had been doing dramas in Pioneer Square in Portland, and had prayed for many people, including a man who was drawn to us because he was a volunteer youth pastor and wanted the passion he saw in us for his teenagers. I prayed for him as we were packing up and leaving. Later that afternoon, as all of us were taking a nap, God woke me up and clearly said a statement I will never forget. He said “it is raining outside, and the reason it is raining is because I want you to get that youth ministry here and pray for them so you can pass on your fire.” As I turned my eyes to the window, where it had just minutes earlier been a scorching 90 + degrees, I saw pouring rain. Now I finally had this message from God that I had been longing for, but I had to do something with it. To make a long story short, I recalled this man’s name (amazing in itself! His last name was Morgan) and I looked him up in the very overwhelming Portland phone book. I got him on the first call after randomly picking a number out of 3 columns of Morgan numbers. Chuck Morgan answered the phone, and sounded as shocked as I felt that I had found him. I had just caught this man getting out of the shower, so when I invited him to bring his youth ministry to the church we were at, he told me of their outdoor plans for the evening. I asked him if he had looked outside and he got really quiet and put the phone down. After returning to the phone, (and probably thinking I was insane) he said he’d “try” to come to our church. That night, our teenagers laid hands on 30 kids from inner city Portland. We saw a deaf guy receive his hearing, a kid that was mute receive his voice, various other healings and every one of them encountered God, were baptized in the Holy Spirit, and were fired up for Jesus. Chuck Morgan and I wept and were amazed that God would orchestrate this for us.
I share this story because my dissatisfaction resulted in me seeking more of God. That is the only “good” form of dissatisfaction. On the other hand, when our dissatisfaction causes us to turn to other sources for satisfaction, we have to call it what it is; Idolatry. What a tough pill to swallow; the thought that we, good American Christians, might be guilty of idolatry. But too many times, we are. Our God-created dissatisfaction, that is supposed to lead us to Him, leads us to everything else. We put other things and people before God in our lives, and we become guilty of idolatry. In order for us to continue on our road to freedom, we have to remove idolatry from our lives. The problem lies in that idolatry is often very difficult to remove because it is so well established in our lives. To move toward freedom, we have to start by recognizing the existence of idols in our lives, and then we have to admit that they don’t really satisfy us. Sometimes it is hard to recognize an idol at all, often because the idol itself is not necessarily bad. The tell-tale sign is when we rely on something (or someone) besides God to bring us the satisfaction we long for.
A quick story (me being vulnerable). A few years back I joined our youth worship team. (Yes, I know, you had no idea I could sing. Really I am just average, I like to call myself a “worshipper” not a vocalist!) I LOVED being on the worship team. I only sang once a month, but I looked forward to it all month. I loved standing on that stage and watching passionate teenagers worship the Lord. I loved when the Holy Spirit would move and we would begin to sing whatever God laid on our hearts. New songs came from those worship times, it was incredible. Now there was nothing wrong with me singing on the worship team, and there was nothing wrong with me loving it, and looking forward to it. But along the way I began to sense that holding that microphone had taken precedent over me worshipping. I loved how we all sounded, how we harmonized, all the technical stuff, but God being glorified wasn’t the most important thing for me anymore. I remember the day God “spoke” to me and told me to lay down the worship team. I didn’t want to! I knew my priorities were out of whack (I even left Brandon on our vacation once to go in and sing because it was my one time a month and I didn’t want to miss it!). I knew if I laid it down, I wasn’t going to get it back. The worship team had become a sort of idol for me, and I knew it. After a struggle of me holding it tightly in my fist, I finally gave it up. I almost sort of grieved losing it for a while, and then I chose to move on. You may read that and think, “oh come on, that is nothing compared to the idols in my life!” Oh, but don’t be too quick to judge, laying down my spot on the worship team was harder for me than giving up an addiction I struggled with in my early 20s.
What is it for you? What is it that you are clenching in your fist? Will you be honest? Will you admit that you have filled your dissatisfaction with things or people other than God? Take heart, even if you feel that you can’t possibly let it go right now, begin by recognizing the idol, and then admitting it doesn’t satisfy you. Ask God to help you let go, and then ask Him to fill you with more of Himself. That is a request that He will not deny.
Your assignment for this week is just one thing:
Be honest and admit your biggest area of idolatry. Share it with the group (www.canyoncreekchicks.blogspot.com) and after you share your idol type the words “but this does not satisfy me.”
I want everyone to participate.
Let me start off today’s words of encouragement with the words to a song by David Crowder:
“Come and listen, come to the water’s edge, all you who know and fear the Lord. Come and listen, come to the water’s edge all you who are thirsty, come. Let me tell you what He has done for me. Let me tell you what He has done for me, He has done for you, He has done for us.”
Isaiah 55:1-2 says “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.”
I grew up in a Lutheran church. I am grateful for growing up in church, and I have very fond memories of our small church family. I remember the potlucks, the Christmas pageants, the Easter traditions and the church camping trips. When I was 18 I was accepted to the UW and by what I now know as the hand of God, I ended up “accidentally” at Northwest Bible College. I went to college as a confused girl. By nature, I am an “all or nothing” kind of girl; but I struggled to find something worth putting my all into. My first few months of college I struggled with this terrible sense of purposeless. I wasn’t depressed, or even lost. I was a Christian girl, my eternity in heaven secured because I had prayed a prayer of salvation, taught Sunday school, volunteered in my church nursery and memorized large chunks of scripture in order to be “confirmed” in my Christian faith. And yet I still had this nagging feeling that something was missing. I felt an emptiness that was yelling to be filled. I tried to fill it with ridiculous things, things I said I would never do. Nothing helped. One day I was sitting in a required class called “foundations of the Christian life.” The professor was teaching on the Lordship of Christ, I was curious. He explained the difference between praying a prayer for salvation, and making Jesus the Lord (in charge) of my life. He talked about how much more there was to a life in Christ than just a belief that there is a God and a heaven and a hell. I was floored. I had never been presented this information before. Having grown up in the church, you would think I would have known that the Christian life is about a RELATIONSHIP, but I did not. It became clear to me, that I was not satisfied with God (as I knew him). That day I went back to my dorm room and gave my entire life to God; in an “all or nothing” sort of way. I decided that day that there had to be more of God, and that I wanted to know Him, all of Him. My entire life changed that day, and the months and years to follow have been filled with baptism in the Holy Spirit, intense encounters with God, and my eyes witnessing the miraculous power of God at work. Since then, my hunger for God has intensified and spread. I want everyone I cross paths with to encounter God as I have. It drives me, and it is why I am in ministry to this day.
Many, many Christians are not satisfied with God. Before we go any further, you have to make a pledge. Will you, as you read this, be 100% honest before God? You and I can waste many hours of the journey of our walk with God if we are not honest. Will you ask yourself; “am I satisfied with God?” Be honest. Are you really satisfied? Because the truth is, God is entirely satisfying. In fact, He is the only way for human kind to find ultimate satisfaction.
Soon after my college resolution to pursue the Lord with all I had, I memorized Isaiah 55 1-2. These verses say “Come all you who are thirsty, come to the waters.” (thirst here, refers to spiritual thirst and waters refers to spiritual refreshment). Scripture goes on to say “Come buy wine and milk without money and without cost.” (wine and milk are symbols of abundance that God is offering to us, all of us, for FREE). And then the Lord asks us a troubling question. “Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?” According to Beth Moore, “God is asking us ‘Why do you work so hard for things that are never enough, can never fill you up and are endlessly insufficient?’” And that is the question. Why do we settle? We all have it; that nagging empty feeling that longs for the touch of God, for the “Bread of Life” that only comes from a living, thriving relationship with God. In fact if you can feel that inner emptiness, it is the most obvious symptom of unfilled hunger for God. And just like with your physical body, your spirit must “eat” or it becomes ill. Scripture makes numerous references to a “soul filling” that only God can provide (see Jeremiah 31:23-25). This filling does not automatically accompany salvation. Salvation secures our eternity in heaven, but to have satisfaction, abundant life on earth, we must seek more of God.
Now it is important to note here, that there is a form of dissatisfaction in a relationship with God can be good. When you develop an appetite for God, and His presence, He becomes the only way you can really feel satisfied, and you end up wanting more. Let me illustrate this with a story. Quite a few years ago, I spent a week at Bible Camp with the high school age kids from my church. It was a ton of fun, but God had an encounter planned for me and Him. At the end of the week, and for the first time in my Christian life, I HEARD the unmistakeable voice of God. He directed me to go and pray for someone (someone I didn’t even know) who was kneeling at an altar, desperate for a touch from God with a plan for suicide if God didn’t “come through.” I was so burdened from this COMMAND from God to pray for this person, I became physically ill at the mere thought of disobeying. I prayed for that young man, and the power and love of God SHOOK him. He had an encounter with God that when he later tried to explain, all he could do was fall to his knees and weep. Instead of following through with a suicide plan, he went into missions. And from that moment, I was hooked. I had to have more of God. I had to hear His voice, I had to be His instrument. Everything else just seemed petty and insignificant compared to people meeting the Living God. There is more to the story though, and though this is long, please stay with me.
Immediately following that week at camp, we took our teenagers on a mission trip to inner city Portland. We spent seven days doing servant work, doing dramas in the parks, putting on evening services and working around the church we were staying at. After exhausting 12 or 14 hour days of ministry and manual labor we would have our own “services.” Our 40 teenagers or so would get together in the church sanctuary and worship and pray. I am not kidding when I say an average night of worshipping and praying was 7 hours. The hours I spent on my face before God were endless, I hardly slept. Why? Because after being used by God in such a powerful way the previous week, I was now DISSATISFIED. What I had had before wasn’t good enough anymore. I wanted more. This is the dissatisfaction that is GOOD. Bear with me as I finish the story. After 6 days and nights of praying, seeking, and serving, God spoke to me again. We had been doing dramas in Pioneer Square in Portland, and had prayed for many people, including a man who was drawn to us because he was a volunteer youth pastor and wanted the passion he saw in us for his teenagers. I prayed for him as we were packing up and leaving. Later that afternoon, as all of us were taking a nap, God woke me up and clearly said a statement I will never forget. He said “it is raining outside, and the reason it is raining is because I want you to get that youth ministry here and pray for them so you can pass on your fire.” As I turned my eyes to the window, where it had just minutes earlier been a scorching 90 + degrees, I saw pouring rain. Now I finally had this message from God that I had been longing for, but I had to do something with it. To make a long story short, I recalled this man’s name (amazing in itself! His last name was Morgan) and I looked him up in the very overwhelming Portland phone book. I got him on the first call after randomly picking a number out of 3 columns of Morgan numbers. Chuck Morgan answered the phone, and sounded as shocked as I felt that I had found him. I had just caught this man getting out of the shower, so when I invited him to bring his youth ministry to the church we were at, he told me of their outdoor plans for the evening. I asked him if he had looked outside and he got really quiet and put the phone down. After returning to the phone, (and probably thinking I was insane) he said he’d “try” to come to our church. That night, our teenagers laid hands on 30 kids from inner city Portland. We saw a deaf guy receive his hearing, a kid that was mute receive his voice, various other healings and every one of them encountered God, were baptized in the Holy Spirit, and were fired up for Jesus. Chuck Morgan and I wept and were amazed that God would orchestrate this for us.
I share this story because my dissatisfaction resulted in me seeking more of God. That is the only “good” form of dissatisfaction. On the other hand, when our dissatisfaction causes us to turn to other sources for satisfaction, we have to call it what it is; Idolatry. What a tough pill to swallow; the thought that we, good American Christians, might be guilty of idolatry. But too many times, we are. Our God-created dissatisfaction, that is supposed to lead us to Him, leads us to everything else. We put other things and people before God in our lives, and we become guilty of idolatry. In order for us to continue on our road to freedom, we have to remove idolatry from our lives. The problem lies in that idolatry is often very difficult to remove because it is so well established in our lives. To move toward freedom, we have to start by recognizing the existence of idols in our lives, and then we have to admit that they don’t really satisfy us. Sometimes it is hard to recognize an idol at all, often because the idol itself is not necessarily bad. The tell-tale sign is when we rely on something (or someone) besides God to bring us the satisfaction we long for.
A quick story (me being vulnerable). A few years back I joined our youth worship team. (Yes, I know, you had no idea I could sing. Really I am just average, I like to call myself a “worshipper” not a vocalist!) I LOVED being on the worship team. I only sang once a month, but I looked forward to it all month. I loved standing on that stage and watching passionate teenagers worship the Lord. I loved when the Holy Spirit would move and we would begin to sing whatever God laid on our hearts. New songs came from those worship times, it was incredible. Now there was nothing wrong with me singing on the worship team, and there was nothing wrong with me loving it, and looking forward to it. But along the way I began to sense that holding that microphone had taken precedent over me worshipping. I loved how we all sounded, how we harmonized, all the technical stuff, but God being glorified wasn’t the most important thing for me anymore. I remember the day God “spoke” to me and told me to lay down the worship team. I didn’t want to! I knew my priorities were out of whack (I even left Brandon on our vacation once to go in and sing because it was my one time a month and I didn’t want to miss it!). I knew if I laid it down, I wasn’t going to get it back. The worship team had become a sort of idol for me, and I knew it. After a struggle of me holding it tightly in my fist, I finally gave it up. I almost sort of grieved losing it for a while, and then I chose to move on. You may read that and think, “oh come on, that is nothing compared to the idols in my life!” Oh, but don’t be too quick to judge, laying down my spot on the worship team was harder for me than giving up an addiction I struggled with in my early 20s.
What is it for you? What is it that you are clenching in your fist? Will you be honest? Will you admit that you have filled your dissatisfaction with things or people other than God? Take heart, even if you feel that you can’t possibly let it go right now, begin by recognizing the idol, and then admitting it doesn’t satisfy you. Ask God to help you let go, and then ask Him to fill you with more of Himself. That is a request that He will not deny.
Your assignment for this week is just one thing:
Be honest and admit your biggest area of idolatry. Share it with the group (www.canyoncreekchicks.blogspot.com) and after you share your idol type the words “but this does not satisfy me.”
I want everyone to participate.
posted by Di Beals | 10:58 AM
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