Ps 34:8 – “O taste and see that the Lord is good; how blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!”
As I write this it is well past lunch time. I was working on a message for Sunday and lost track of time. The gnawing in my stomach tells me it is time to eat. Before I go off to lunch though, I have this burning question that keeps biting into my soul. What am I really hungry for in life? The nature of this question is spiritual and not physical. It is a question posed to all people? What are you truly hungry for? What are you trying to fill your life with to take away the hunger pangs of your soul in your search for significance and satisfaction?
It is comical and tragic at the same time to view the things people fill their lives with in an attempt to find happiness, contentment, and fulfillment. Sports, building wealth (which as we have all seen recently can be easily snatched from us), houses, cars, clothes, cosmetic surgery, awards, recognition, love, the applaud and approval of people are all things people seek grasping for anything and everything to fill a void in their lives.
After these futile pursuits, are people any happier? Marriages still end even by those who seem to have everything this world can offer, sports records get broken and every athlete sooner or later plays his or her last play. Wealth can be earned over a lifetime and lost in a matter of months due to bad investments or fraud. You can eat at the best restaurants, wear the latest fashions, and fill your life with the extras of this world, but in the end find your soul is still hungry for something or someone. This search leads people to look for love in all the wrong places. The end result is more hunger pangs, sorrow, and disillusionment. Life then becomes a futile quest to survive and to fake happiness on the outside as we masquerade the pain and discontentment on the inside.
Life is fragile and can be seized from us without any warning. Let me illustrate. In 2003 actress Natasha Richardson told the Daily Telegraph newspaper, “I wake up every morning feeling lucky, which is driven by fear, no doubt, since I know it could all go away.” By “all” was she referring to a lifestyle of the rich and famous? There were accolades, glamour, wealth, resorts, and a luxurious lifestyle. She was in Quebec at a resort skiing like thousands of people do all over the world. She fell, hit her head, told people she was fine, but within an hour she no longer felt fine. She was taken to a hospital in Quebec and flown to another hospital in New York where she died on Wednesday. She was only forty-five. In the last moments of her life was she hungry for another gourmet meal, another shopping spree, or to hear the applause of people while standing on stage one more time? What was she hungry for?
Many live their whole lives and never come to the simple understanding that God has set eternity in the hearts of people. [Eccl 3:11] Many will search anywhere and everywhere but the one place where they can find what they have been hungering for all along and that is a relationship with God.
The Psalmist exhorts us to try God and see that He alone satisfies the soul above all things. What does it mean to taste God? It means to try God or to perceive God or to savor God. When we do so earnestly we find fullness, nourishment, and contentedness like we have ever known from any other source. We were created with a hunger for God and only God can satisfy that hunger. Seeking to feed a spiritual hunger with physical and temporal things will never produce the desired results. As we taste God and see God through spiritual eyes and the truth of the Bible, we will find that God is valuable beyond all estimation. He is pleasant and excellent and any person, who trusts in Him, surrenders their life and will to Him, and who cries out to Him for the forgiveness of sin and salvation, that one will be blessed. That does not mean that those blessings may always take the shape of material abundance and prosperity but it does mean that the gnawing hunger in our souls will be sated. We will find fulfillment in Him and our needs will be provided.
It is my hope and prayer that the gnawing hunger in our souls will draw us to Jesus Christ that we may taste for ourselves and see for ourselves that He is good, worth living for, and worth more than all the riches of this world. I hope that tragedies like the death of Natasha Richardson will again remind us that life is fragile and all the trappings of success and glamour cannot help us in the day when we face eternity. I hope that on that day, our hearts will be hungrier for God than ever and without regrets we can say goodbye to this world and hello to Him whom we have tasted over and over again in devotions and divine encounters and whom we have seen in our experiences that He is good. It will be on the day of our death that we will come to find out if what we were hungry for really mattered and really satisfied.
I hold up Jesus Christ above all material possessions, all earthly relationships, and every conceivable accolade as infinitely more valuable and eternally more satisfying. If you have never done so, will you not taste Jesus and see Him for yourself? What are you hungry for?
As I write this it is well past lunch time. I was working on a message for Sunday and lost track of time. The gnawing in my stomach tells me it is time to eat. Before I go off to lunch though, I have this burning question that keeps biting into my soul. What am I really hungry for in life? The nature of this question is spiritual and not physical. It is a question posed to all people? What are you truly hungry for? What are you trying to fill your life with to take away the hunger pangs of your soul in your search for significance and satisfaction?
It is comical and tragic at the same time to view the things people fill their lives with in an attempt to find happiness, contentment, and fulfillment. Sports, building wealth (which as we have all seen recently can be easily snatched from us), houses, cars, clothes, cosmetic surgery, awards, recognition, love, the applaud and approval of people are all things people seek grasping for anything and everything to fill a void in their lives.
After these futile pursuits, are people any happier? Marriages still end even by those who seem to have everything this world can offer, sports records get broken and every athlete sooner or later plays his or her last play. Wealth can be earned over a lifetime and lost in a matter of months due to bad investments or fraud. You can eat at the best restaurants, wear the latest fashions, and fill your life with the extras of this world, but in the end find your soul is still hungry for something or someone. This search leads people to look for love in all the wrong places. The end result is more hunger pangs, sorrow, and disillusionment. Life then becomes a futile quest to survive and to fake happiness on the outside as we masquerade the pain and discontentment on the inside.
Life is fragile and can be seized from us without any warning. Let me illustrate. In 2003 actress Natasha Richardson told the Daily Telegraph newspaper, “I wake up every morning feeling lucky, which is driven by fear, no doubt, since I know it could all go away.” By “all” was she referring to a lifestyle of the rich and famous? There were accolades, glamour, wealth, resorts, and a luxurious lifestyle. She was in Quebec at a resort skiing like thousands of people do all over the world. She fell, hit her head, told people she was fine, but within an hour she no longer felt fine. She was taken to a hospital in Quebec and flown to another hospital in New York where she died on Wednesday. She was only forty-five. In the last moments of her life was she hungry for another gourmet meal, another shopping spree, or to hear the applause of people while standing on stage one more time? What was she hungry for?
Many live their whole lives and never come to the simple understanding that God has set eternity in the hearts of people. [Eccl 3:11] Many will search anywhere and everywhere but the one place where they can find what they have been hungering for all along and that is a relationship with God.
The Psalmist exhorts us to try God and see that He alone satisfies the soul above all things. What does it mean to taste God? It means to try God or to perceive God or to savor God. When we do so earnestly we find fullness, nourishment, and contentedness like we have ever known from any other source. We were created with a hunger for God and only God can satisfy that hunger. Seeking to feed a spiritual hunger with physical and temporal things will never produce the desired results. As we taste God and see God through spiritual eyes and the truth of the Bible, we will find that God is valuable beyond all estimation. He is pleasant and excellent and any person, who trusts in Him, surrenders their life and will to Him, and who cries out to Him for the forgiveness of sin and salvation, that one will be blessed. That does not mean that those blessings may always take the shape of material abundance and prosperity but it does mean that the gnawing hunger in our souls will be sated. We will find fulfillment in Him and our needs will be provided.
It is my hope and prayer that the gnawing hunger in our souls will draw us to Jesus Christ that we may taste for ourselves and see for ourselves that He is good, worth living for, and worth more than all the riches of this world. I hope that tragedies like the death of Natasha Richardson will again remind us that life is fragile and all the trappings of success and glamour cannot help us in the day when we face eternity. I hope that on that day, our hearts will be hungrier for God than ever and without regrets we can say goodbye to this world and hello to Him whom we have tasted over and over again in devotions and divine encounters and whom we have seen in our experiences that He is good. It will be on the day of our death that we will come to find out if what we were hungry for really mattered and really satisfied.
I hold up Jesus Christ above all material possessions, all earthly relationships, and every conceivable accolade as infinitely more valuable and eternally more satisfying. If you have never done so, will you not taste Jesus and see Him for yourself? What are you hungry for?
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