Living Deep: Beyond Superficial Faith by Wilkerson Bryan

Author:Wilkerson, Bryan [Wilkerson, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-03-11T07:00:00+00:00

Aching for True Satisfaction

1 John 2:17 says: “The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.” The problem with pleasure, possessions, and pride isn’t so much that they are wrong; it’s that they’re not enough. They don’t last, for one thing. Pleasure is fleeting. Possessions lose value. And earthly accomplishments are soon forgotten or surpassed.

They are also too shallow. They cannot satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts. We’re not just looking for pleasure; we really want joy. We don’t need more stuff; we need contentment. It’s not achievement we’re after; it’s significance. These things can only be found, ultimately and eternally, in relationship with God, which is why John says, “Whoever does the will of God lives forever.”

According to C.S. Lewis, these desires are merely the rumblings of a much deeper desire. It’s a desire so deep, so profound, that even Lewis couldn’t find a word for it. Sometimes Lewis describes this inconsolable longing for something more as beauty, other times as joy, but by his own admission, none of those words quite gets at it.

The closest word he could find was the German word Sehnsucht. It’s hard to define, but we know it when we feel it. Sehnsucht combines the ideas of wanting something and missing something. It describes a deep existential yearning for something that we can’t name but know to be true. In his book The Weight of Glory, Lewis describes it as “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”

It’s the longing for every good and perfect thing all at once. It’s the longing for God and his kingdom. And until that deepest of all desires is satisfied, nothing else will ever be enough. Like Mick Jagger says, we can try and try and try and try, but we “can’t get no satisfaction,” because no earthly pleasure or possession or achievement can ever satisfy the deep longing of our souls. “The human heart was made for God,” Augustine said, “and our hearts are restless till we find rest in him.”

But once that desire is satisfied, once we have turned to God and aligned ourselves with his good and eternal purpose for our lives, we can experience earthly things as they were meant to be experienced—in relationship with him.

So whenever you enjoy a night of fine dining or a beautiful day on the slopes, you can praise God for his handiwork and for the capacity to enjoy it. When you shop for clothes or a car, you can do it with wisdom and gratitude, as a steward of God’s resources. As you pursue a career, you can do it in a way that brings God glory and advances his purpose for your life and the world.

“The world and its desires pass away,” John says, “but whoever does the will of God lives”—lives!—“forever.” And if you think this world has things to

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