Our theme for this month: “Understanding Salvation”
Our Bible verse for today: “God, you are my God; I eagerly seek you. I thirst for you; my body faints for you in a land that is dry, desolate, and without water.” Psalm 63:1 (CSB)
Our thought for today: “Our longing for God will be fulfilled.”
Psalm 63:1 is one of my favorite expressions about longing for and seeking after God. Psalm 42:1-2 is another: “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so I long for you, God. I thirst for God, the living God. When can I come and appear before God?”
Two other expressions about longing for God that I have always appreciated come from the minds of great Christian thinkers. The first is from Saint Augustine writing sometime around 400 A.D. “You have made us for Yourself, oh Lord, and our heart is restless, searching, until we find our rest in You.” The other comes from the French philosopher Blaise Pascal writing around 1650, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of man which can only be filled by God.”
All of those four expressions are consistent with what Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 3:11 that “God has placed eternity in the heart of man.” God has created human beings with an innate understanding that He does exist. We also have a deep longing to know and experience Him. That’s why every culture that has ever existed in the history of the human race has always had religious beliefs. All cultures have had a belief that there is a spiritual world, there is a God (or gods), and that there is more than just this life. That’s simply how God has designed us – to want to know and experience Him.
Today we can know and experience Him by means of a personal relationship with Jesus as Savior and Lord, and with the Holy Spirit living in our heart. That relationship goes a long way towards filling the God-shaped vacuum in our hearts and satisfying our innate longing for God. It goes a long way, but it still falls short. There is still that longing, that sense that there is still much more of God that I don’t know about or understand. The longing is still there.
But in heaven the limits and restrictions between God and His people will be removed. Then we will see Him as He is, and being in His presence will be our primary joy. It won’t be our only joy – as we have learned in this series we will spend eternity exploring and enjoying a spectacular perfected creation – but being in the presence of God and seeing Him as He really is will be the best thing about eternity. There will never be a time when you are not aware of His presence, and the longing for Him which you have always had will be fully filled. You will see God and know Him as He really is.
Tomorrow we will conclude by considering how this new and fuller understanding of salvation, which we have gained through this study, should impact how we live now.
Oak Hill Baptist Church