What keeps you from desiring God?

What on earth do you treasure so greatly that you are willing to trade the limitless joy found in Christ for a brief moment's stolen pleasure?

Believer, your spiritual adoption into the family of God allows you to seek God and to find Him; to drink and never be thirsty again. Think about the wonder in that statement: to drink, and in so doing to forever satisfy your longing. You are granted this access, this satisfaction in God, by birthright; His grace to you has made you His own. You who were once far off have been brought near, and He who was your greatest enemy you are able to call Father, to dine at His table. If your heart of stone has been ripped out and replaced with a heart of flesh, why do you return to your old ways? How, if you have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, can you even once more chose to believe that the spoiled meat which you feasted upon in your former life could fill you up?

The tragedy of the believer's life is that he chooses like a dog to return to his own vomit. Proverbs tells us that this is the mark of a fool: to repeat his folly. It is not enough to eat the spoiled meat of sin once, and being sickened by it, to be necessarily purged of it; the sinning believer willingly puts aside the remembrance of the surpassing greatness of the feast at God's table and goes sniffing back to gnaw at the very thing that Scripture and experience tell him he can not stomach.

The beauty in a believer's life is this: he has tasted and seen that the Lord is good, and therefore what would have satisfied the dead heart inside the walking corpse of the old man can no longer taste the same to a regenerated soul. A believer cannot tarry in sin, to live by that poison. He must, by his new nature, eat the food that gives life, that is, the water and bread of life: Jesus Christ. Christ has transformed your soul from the dead to the alive, has taken your sin on Himself that you may have his righteousness, and has has changed your appetite from the damning to the glorifying. It is because of and through Christ that we are given the promise that we will not be tempted beyond what we are able, and it is by feasting on the life-giving Christ that we are able to deny the cravings of a body that were accustomed to eating filth. Oh set your mind on Him! Find your satisfaction in Christ!

Remember that we are told to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. I understand this to mean that I should be so fearful of harboring any sin against God, or valuing anything before Him, that I will not wait for the purifying fire to come to me, but that I will run to the altar of God, eager to burn away the old poison- and death-loving man; that in order to satisfy my God-breathed appetite for the life-giving, I will pursue Christ as the sole and greatest prize in a race that my life, joy, and eternity depend on.

Will you run with me?

It is an amazing perspective to look on the sin in your life through the lens of contentment in Christ. Whatever urgent lust had seemed so impossibly attractive is revealed in its true form: a lie, spoken by a dead heart, believed by a frail mind, and acted upon by a corrupted will. The lie is this; that anything can feign to be as immensely satisfying as God himself.

Examine yourself, Christian. Expose yourself to the light and let your faults be clearly visible, that you may give them over to God. Look inward, unbeliever. Search out for yourself why it is that your consumption fails to satisfy - why it is that you must continually seek contentment, but are perpetually short of arriving there.

It is only God that will satisfy you - He is your highest calling.

“...neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Permit me, if I may, to reproduce here an excerpt from the biography George Müller of Bristol, by A.T. Pierson:

“Think of a young convert, with such an ensnaring past to reproach and retard him, within these few years learning such advanced lessons in renunciation: burning his manuscript novel, giving up the girl the loved, turning this back on the seductive prospect of ease and wealth, to accept self-denial for God, cutting loose from dependence on his father and then refusing all stated salary lest his liberty of witness be curtailed, and choosing a simple expository mode of preaching, instead of catering to popular taste! Then mark how he fed on the word of God; how he cultivated the habits of searching the Scriptures and praying in secret; how he threw himself on God, not only for temporal supplies, but for support in bearing all burdens, however great or small; and how thus early he offered himself for the mission field and was impatiently eager to enter it. Then look at the sovereign love of God, imparting to him in so eminent a degree the childlike spirit, teaching him to trust not his own variable moods of feeling, but the changeless word of His promise; teaching him to wait patiently on Him for orders, and not to look to human authority or direction; and so singularly releasing him from military service for life, and mysteriously withholding him from the far-off mission field, that He might train him for his unique mission to the race and the ages to come!

These are a few of the salient points of this narrative, thus far, which must, to any candid mind, demonstrate that a higher Hand was moulding this chosen vessel on His potter's wheel, and shaping it unmistakably for the singular service to which it was destined!”