Monday, March 19, 2012

We Need God

I started a blog series last week called “Needy.” Human beings are creatures and as created beings we have needs. Our lives are greatly affected by how we choose to meet our most basic needs. We can go wrong in meeting our need by denying our needs and thus starving ourselves, confusing wants for needs or by meeting our needs in ways that never really satisfy us.

Our most basic need is for God. By need God, I don't mean just for him to provide for us but for relationship with him. We need to be present with him and simply allow him to speak to our hearts. CS Lewis writes that our souls have been made to run on God the way cars run on gasoline. Augustine said, “Our souls are restless until they rest in you.”

As I write that, it seems like a very Christian thing to say and yet we don’t always live our lives with an awareness of our need for God. God is so humble that he sustains us even when we live ignorant of him. Even though “in him we live and move and have our being” he will allow us to live in ignorance that he is sustaining us.

We deny and forget our need for God and wind up starving our souls. And so we turn to counterfeit gods and turn to idols when our souls desperately desire to connect with the true and living God. We turn to money or sex or pleasure or sports for what God alone can give. We try and fill our God shaped hole with anything and everything other than God. And in doing so we only find ourselves hungrier in our souls.

Personally, when I am praying and talking to God on a regular basis, I become more and more aware of my desperate need for God. Actually it is when I am praying regularly and then miss a day of prayer that my soul begins to say with David, “As a deer long for flowing streams, so longs my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” – (Psalm 42:1-2a)

When are you aware of your need for God? Why do we forget this basic need?

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