Sunday Leftovers (10/8/06)

A leftover thought (or two) from Sunday's sermon.....

Near the end of the sermon on Sunday, I made the statement, “If Christ is not satisfying to you, you have likely never really tasted of His greatness and goodness.”

If Christ doesn’t quench your thirst and make you happy and glad with Him, then you probably have been drinking from empty and broken cisterns (Jer. 2:13), not to mention polluted well (Prov. 25:26).

So our task is to learn to be satisfied with Christ.

As I mentioned, one way to do that is to read the gospels, returning to our first love (Rev. 2:5) by filling our minds with the unsurpassed greatness of Christ.

Another way is to read books and listen to sermons of people who bask in the delight of Christ. Here are the kinds of writers and comments that stimulate that in me:

• “Believing in Jesus means coming to him for the quenching of our soul’s thirst. Faith in Christ is being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus.” [John Piper]
• Contemplating Matthew 21:31, C. S. Lewis wrote, “Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous are in that danger.”
• “The first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord.” [George Mueller]
• “…if Christ is the most majestic reality in the universe, then what must his love to us be? Sure not making much of us. That would not satisfy our souls. We were made for something much greater. If we are to be as happy as we can be, we must see and savor the most glorious person of all, Jesus Christ himself. This means that to love us, Jesus must seek the fullness of his glory and offer it to us for our enjoyment. That is why he prayed, the night before he died, ‘Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory’ (John 17:24). That was love. ‘I will show them my glory.’” [John Piper]
• “The endless stream of new goods and services which keeps us running at ‘breathless pace’…looks utterly worldly, and yet inscribed all over it is a misdirected desire for God.” [Miroslav Volf]