Satisfied Hunger

Satisfied Hunger

You will keep on guiding me with your counsel, leading me to a glorious destiny. Whom have I in heaven but you? I desire you more than anything on earth. My health may fail, and my spirit may grow weak, but God remains the strength of my heart; he is mine forever. –Psalm 73:24-26

Have you ever heard people described as so “heavenly minded” that they are “of no earthly good”? We know what that means. These people are so focused on the next life, they’re absent from the reality of this one. Certainly it’s not healthy to go to such an extreme, but we can still set our sights on heaven in a way that changes how we interact and what we expect from this world. Longing for heaven is not a form of escapism. It is extreme realism. Those who long for heaven have embraced the reality that their search for satisfaction in this life is insatiable. They have experienced the world’s dead ends and examined their own bottomless pit of human desires. They’ve come to see every innate desire for what it truly is—a longing that will be met only in the completeness of the next life, not this one.

This is the conclusion C. S. Lewis came to, as he wrote about 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. . . . I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.”

Every hunger we have has been placed there by God. Our hunger not only for food, but for sexual satisfaction, for significance and meaning, for adventure and rest—all are God-given, and he is not surprised when we try to satisfy these desires. Neither is he disappointed when we discover that we are never satisfied. We feast and hunger again. We love and are rejected. We excel and someone surpasses our achievement. We experience the ultimate adventure only to become bored in our pursuit. Discovering that we cannot satisfy our longings in the here and now forces us to reckon with the fact that we will never be satisfied in this life. Our disappointment draws us to look forward to the reality of heaven where every hunger will be satisfied, every need will be met—fully and forever.

My eternal Pleasure, behind every pleasure in my life, I see you. With every disappointment in my life, my longing for you grows. You are leading me to a glorious and satisfying destiny. Thanks for the glory glimpses you give me.

DIGGING DEEPER