Your longing for God will be fulfilled

Good morning everyone,

Our theme for this month: “Salvation past, present, and future”

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: “Your 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 the deer longs for flowing streams, so I long for you, God. I thirst for God, for 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 two great Christian thinkers. The first is from Saint Augustine writing sometime around 400 A.D.: “You have made us for Yourself, Oh God, 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 that can only be filled by God.”

All four of those expressions are consistent with what Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 3:11 that “God has placed eternity in the heart of man.” God 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 there is more than just this life. That’s simply how God has designed us – with an inner desire to know and experience Him.

Today we can know and experience Him by means of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ 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; there continues to be a sense that there’s much more about God that I don’t know or understand. The longing is still there.

However, 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. In that day, 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.

God bless,
Pastor Jim

(If you like what you are reading in these daily devotionals, and if you would like more content from Oak Hill Baptist Church, join us on Sundays at 10:00, in-person if you are nearby or, if you are geographically distant or if you just can’t make it, online at http://www.YouTube.com/@oakhillbaptistcrossville

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