We’ve become a culture of substitutions. We drink Coke Zero instead of real Coke, use margarine instead of butter, Splenda instead of sugar and low-fat everything. It happens in other areas of our life, too, not just in our nutritional choices.
How did we get so adverse to the “REAL THING?”
We are all longing to be understood and to be loved. Only God can completely fill this hole that burns within us. It is a God-shaped hole and no matter how hard we try to fill it up with false gods like money, impressive houses, and our own brand of success, we fail. As hard as we try, there is always a little of the emptiness left over when we try to fill our hearts with anything but God; the REAL THING.
We substitute human intimacy for our true longing to know God. We depend on another person for all our happiness and our holiness. Then they fail to be everything to us and we bolt; another person has disappointed us, again.
We substitute physical intimacy for emotional intimacy. We’re physically intimate by the 3rd date, or we’ve moved in during the first month of courtship, “playing house” in our desire to be loved. We long to be connected with our hearts and emotions and we substitute our bodies instead.
We long so much to be loved by someone we’ll do almost anything to feel it, even give up God.
The only REAL THING is how much God loves us. He is a perfect fit for that God-shaped hole that we all have in our heart.
Randy Elrod says it plainly in Sex, Lies and Religion, “God understands that we tend to search for love in all the wrong places….Sometimes, it longs for God in the most paradoxical ways. Could it be, as one writer puts it, that every knock at the door of a brothel is actually a knock at the heart of God?
First we must know and love God above all else, and then we can go out and love others.
Praying for you to come one step closer to knowing the REAL THING and feeling God’s love for you today.
Blessings,
Agatha