October, 2016
Emptiness and Thirst
Isaiah 55:1 “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.
2 Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.”
One legendary beer commercial has this tag line: “Stay thirsty, my friend.” Turns out that’s good advice but NOT for the reason the beer commercial implies.
What led me to Christ at age twenty was a thirst in the soul for “something” that all my efforts couldn’t quench for more than a few days. Slaking thirst that way only seemed to magnify the thirst.
As a Christian we also have thirstS, yes, plural.
We have the old “thirst” that wants to feel better now at any cost, legitimate or illegitimate. We say “no” to that thirst.
We have deeper thirsts: we thirst for God. We thirst for the kind of man or woman he made us to be. We thirst for a sense that our lives have meaning when we relate to the people around us, for their benefit, to give them a taste of God.
We have another “thirst” that is sometimes felt (and much of the time not felt) that is deeper, a mostly inconsolable ache that is only occasionally “filled.” As Christians we unfortunately see this as a “problem to be fixed.”
But what if this kind of thirst is meant to be, not a problem to fix, but a DOORWAY to something deeper and richer?
When we come in touch with a thirst for God and to reflect Him well, it spurs us in better directions:
- It gives us hope of what, someday, in heaven we will finally and fully have: Fullness.
- Thirst anchors us in God’s redemptive story.
- We start to realize that what we call this kind of “thirst” is what is most associated with a different kind of “happiness” we most want. Chew on that statement a while…
Seth