Expecting More Than People Can Give
Psalm 42:1-2
Have you ever wished that you could start all over?
The Associated Press this week reported out of Georgetown, Texas that Molly Daniels pleaded guilty to charges of digging up a woman’s corpse, and staging a fiery car accident to fake her husband’s death. She insisted the plan wasn’t motivated by greed, but rather was a desperate attempt to keep her husband out of prison. After spending weeks surfing the Internet, gathering information for a bizarre and grisly plot of deception, she learned how to burn a human body beyond recognition. She learned ways to deceive arson investigators, and took meticulous steps to create a new identity for her husband.
The plot began to take shape last year after Clayton Daniels pleaded guilty to sexual assault charges. He was allowed to stay out of prison after the plea, but never reported to his probation officer, drawing a 30-day jail sentence.
Three days before he was to report to jail last June, police found a burned-out Chevrolet at the bottom of a roadside cliff. The corpse behind the wheel was unrecognizable. "Even the metal on the car was melted, it was so hot," said Thomas Vasquez, Molly Daniels’ defense attorney.
Molly Daniels told friends and relatives her husband had died. Her co-workers raised $1,000 for her and attended a memorial service. A few weeks later, Molly Daniels introduced "Jake Gregg," her new boyfriend, to their children, ages 4 and 1.
He looked a lot like Clayton Daniels but had black hair. Investigators say Molly Daniels also had forged documents to create a new identity for him, including a fake birth certificate and a Texas drivers’ license.
Maybe you wanted a new start to life but I seriously doubt that anyone of us here have ever considered going to such lengths of deception. Instead we all dream of a life with purpose and meaning. But most of us have never stopped to realize the purpose that we have right now.
What is life all about? It’s a hard question. It is much easier to ignore it than to answer it.
One reason people don’t spend much time thinking about their lives is because it doesn’t seem to matter. Remember the commercial, "Why ask why?"
Life is fine. Too many of us live from weekend to weekend, worshiping the American god the weekend. We have children, go to the mall, take vacations every third year, and stash away a few bucks for retirement. Everything seems pretty good. But really we are moving through life at warp speed without a rearview mirror to reflect on the past or a front windshield to make sure we’re going the right way. In all reality we are not living we’re just doing time. We don’t have any idea where we are going, but we want to get there fast. It’s a pointless way to live.
Another factor that sometimes holds us back from considering our life is fear. Most of us are a little afraid to meditate on our lives, fearful of what we will conclude. We hunger for something we don’t want to acknowledge.
That’s why people don’t look at their life until they are facing the end. This can be the end of an era, like when we graduate from college or retire, or experience extreme adversity such as illness or death.
Unfortunately, even when we allow ourselves to consider life, we often come up feeling empty, because the world does not have an answer to the question. The wisdom of the world tells each of us we must search and find our own purpose. This leads people on an endless, futile search for meaning.
Don’t believe me? Look at how have people fared from following the wisdom of the world: broken relationships, scarred lives, domestic violence, emptiness and loneliness, shattered dreams, substance abuse, and abandoned children. Christians are facing these pressing problems like everyone else.
But these aren’t so much the problems as they are some symptoms of a larger problem! And that problem is that we ignore the fact that we were made to live in relationship with God. When we ignore or minimize that need for a relationship we become like fish trying to live on land or humans trying to live on a planet that has no oxygen.
If Jesus were given a chance to offer his purpose of life, I think he’d have two messages.
First, he would say that God loves us deeply, just as we are. Our bodies may not be proportioned right, our marriages may be in shambles, we may be guilty of shameful sins. But God still loves us and longs to be in relationship with us.
Secondly, Jesus would tell those drifting characters that life does have a purpose. Their hunger can be satisfied-not by people, possessions, or money but only by being fined with God’s presence and having a relationship with him.
Understanding Our Hunger
One reason we may not recognize our hunger for God is because we don’t know what hunger really is.
During the famine in Somalia, thousands of starving families left their homes and once-productive farms to seek shelter and food at distant refugee centers. Foreign nations and humanitarian agencies sent and distributed food to these starving people. Many received help in time to save their lives. Some, however, waited too long before seeking help. They were so malnourished that when they tried to eat, their bodies rejected food. Their digestive systems had shut down and would no longer process the very thing their bodies needed. Many died because their bodies no longer recognized or accepted life-sustaining nourishment.
The psalmist had a deep hunger, but unlike most folks, he understood the source of his hunger and expressed it clearly:
We read in Psalm 42:1-2 As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, 0 God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
You can hear the grumbling caused by hunger pains from bars to Bible classes. Unfortunately, people-both those outside the church and many inside-have failed to recognize in those hunger pains a deep longing for God.
Many people identify their hunger as the need for a relationship, which it is. But they look for the perfect relationship with another person. They try to fill their void with a parent, spouse, or child. They endlessly look for that someone who can make them happy and complete. Each time they are disappointed because there are no perfect human relationships. There is no person that can make you or me feel satisfied.
Only God can bring fulfillment to our lives because he made us to live in harmony with him. Scripture never tells us to love another person with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. That is investing way too much in any human being. The place to invest our heart, soul, mind, and strength is with God, and God alone.
Listen to what some great men who invested in God and hungered for him had to say on the subject:
You have made us for yourself, and our souls are restless until they rest in you. - Augustine
Your name and renown are the desire of our hearts. My soul yearns for you in the night; in the morning my spirit longs for you. Isaiah 26:8b, 9
Made as we were in the image of God, we scarcely find it strange to take again our God as our all. God was our original habitat and our hearts cannot but feel at home when they enter again that ancient and beautiful abode. – A.W. Tozer
O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water. Psalm 63: 1
Each of these testimonies cuts through the noise of culture to hear the one clear voice of God, the same God who created us, sent his Son for us, and longs for us intensely. And, he carefully made each of us with an inner desire, a hunger-to know him. His heart rejoices when we accept and draw near to him. He delights when we accept his eager desire for a relationship with us.
Isaiah says in verse 30:18 Yet the LORD longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the LORD is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!
God is a self-sufficient God and needs nothing to be complete, including us. Yet, he loves us so much, so overwhelmingly, and he wants us to benefit from his abundant blessings. So he relentlessly pursues us as a shepherd for his sheep, as a father for his child, as a mother for her baby, as a groom for his bride.
Until we understand that and respond to his love, we are like the prodigal son, searching again for the security of our home. And our search will end in disappointment until we search for God. No human relationship, no job, no possession, and no amount of money or success can ultimately satisfy us.
God Hunger
Our hunger is for God. Not God as a doctrine, or as an idea, or as the necessary conclusion of our "proofs." But God as a living Being. As a Someone who pursues a relationship--with us!
For those of us with a Christian heritage this seems so obvious. But there are a couple of problems we as Christians face-barriers that can easily sidetrack us in our response to God, barriers that keep us from realizing we are all God-hungry and that only he can fill us.
Barrier One: Our Confusion
One problem is our tendency to confuse knowledge about God with knowing God. We easily fall into the trap of believing that information is the key to eternal life. So we turn to "data-based Christianity" to fill us with knowledge about God. We then open the pages of Scripture to memorize events that can later be regurgitated as if Christian living were similar to a sophomore history class.
What happened on the fifth day of Creation? Who were Moses’-parents? Who was the second judge? What objects were in the ark of the covenant? How many chapters are in the Book of Psalms?
We can buzz through the Old Testament without ever pausing to ask, "What is the message of Scripture? What is its central point? What is it trying to accomplish?"
As a result, we can become proficient in biblical information without becoming closer to God and more sensitive to the people he has created.
Don’t misunderstand me: I’m all in favor of learning the information of Scripture. Biblical illiteracy isn’t a virtue! But biblical knowledge shouldn’t be the goal of our reading.
Scripture was written to reveal to us a God who longs for relationships. It pleads with us to long for him as well. The goal of Scripture isn’t minds filled with facts about God but hearts that are using those facts to be full of his presence.
I remember reading about Dennis Wise, a young man who spent all his time collecting Elvis memorabilia: clothes, records, photographs, programs. He even underwent plastic surgery to try to look more like his hero. But his great regret was that he never got to meet the man he adored.
A similar but much greater tragedy with many Christians is that they spend years listening to sermons, reading Scripture, and teaching Sunday school classes but fail to enjoy an intimate relationship with God. They could pass any theological exam or answer any Bible trivia question. But they don’t hunger and thirst to know God personally, to be filled with his presence, to be changed into his likeness. No wonder religion often becomes empty!
Barrier Two: Our Satisfaction
A second problem we face is that we’re too easily satisfied. We’re like Rylan sometimes. We were making Supper the other night and it was going to be ready at 6:00 but Rylan couldn’t’ wait and climbed up in his high chair and found some Cheese Toast from lunch at 5:40 and gobbles it down. We are offered a fabulous vacation by the ocean and settle instead for wading in a ditch.
Instead of craving a vibrant relationship with the God who made us, we settle for a house, a family, a few friends, a job, a TV and DVD player, and a yearly vacation. We think we can survive with this and just a bit of religion. Yet our souls starve!
longing for God
People who are trying to fill their hunger for love, acceptance, and security in relationships, material possessions, or even success will never find real or lasting satisfaction.
Their hunger is not a mere physical or emotional hunger. It is a holy hunger, a hunger from God, for God. Some may not know they long for him because they don’t know him. Some don’t seek him because they don’t know where or how to look. Others are looking for God, but they aren’t sure what he "looks like. "
For a couple of years in the early 1990s, the New York Times Bestseller List included picture books starring a funny little man named Waldo. In Where’s Waldo? and its sequels the object is to find the little guy amidst all the other people and objects. Sometimes he blends into the background, while at other times he "hides" in the foreground. Waldo is easily recognizable because he has specific physical characteristics that never change. However, clutter and things around him often obscure and confuse the reader’s vision. Though a reader may sometimes give up, assuming there was a trick page that omits Waldo just to drive you crazy, he’s there every time. (1)
That’s Scripture’s testimony about God-he is there every time. Sometimes God is so present you can’t miss him-like when he brought fire down on the altar at Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18. But at other times he seems hidden-as when he was present in the whisper in 1 Kings 19. Even when he’s silent, however, he is not absent.
Listen to God’s testimony about himself. The Bible is a thrilling story of a God who cannot possibly be fully understood but who nevertheless invites us to share his life. Since our minds are so limited in understanding this Eternal One, this God has offered metaphors and descriptions that permit us to catch a glimpse of His Being.
The goal, of course, isn’t for us to read this and then be able to list the qualities of God or the biblical metaphors that refer to God. Rather, the goal is to know God better. This is a plea for us to "taste and see that the LORD is good," as Psalm 34:8 invites us.
Rather than reading a list of ingredients in homemade chocolate ice cream, isn’t it better just to eat a bowl ... or two? So, rather than just filling our minds with facts about God, we’re invited to fill our hearts with him.
A couple of decades ago, J. I. Packer wrote in his classic book, Knowing God, that "we must seek, in studying God, to be led to God." We seek to know him by praying, by crying out, by meditating, by trusting when we’ve been afraid to trust, by submitting, by obeying.
A doorman at a Broadway theater was asked if during his nineteen years there he enjoyed the shows that had come through. His answer was startling: he hadn’t been interested, so he’d never gone in where the performance was.
How long have you been just outside the door which God has opened for you? How long have you tried to quench your thirst with brackish water or satisfy your hunger with worthless junk food?
Invitation
(1) Taken from Mike Cope One Holy Hunger Sweet Publishing 1993
