Imagine
this: you’re at your big family together for Thanksgiving. You didn’t eat any
lunch in anticipation for the big feast you are going to indulge on that
evening. But as the day goes on, you become hungrier and hungrier until you
give in to your hunger and finally eat a snack. That seems to satisfy your
hunger for now, but ten minutes later, you need another. You keep eating snacks
to keep your hunger at bay for the big meal. Finally the feast is ready and you
seat yourself down at the table and get ready to eat it. You sit there
salivating as you stare down the turkey, the green bean casserole, all the
different types of salad, the sweet potatoes, and best of all, the desert,
pumpkin pie and ice cream. You fill up your plate as much as you can and began
to eat. After one or two bites, you realize that you’re not that hungry
anymore, that all those snacks filled you up and you didn’t have any room left
for the magnificent feast.
That is
kind of like the story of all of our daily struggle. We live in a society that
says if you can’t get it within five minutes, it isn’t good enough, it won’t
satisfy you. We start to hunger for satisfaction
and since we don’t want to wait for it. So what do we do? We sin. We choose the
temporary over the eternal, the snacks over the feast. We let ourselves fill up
so much on sin that we can no longer be near God in heaven. This is the daily
struggle of all of us. We want so bad to feel satisfied that we give in to temptation
and we sin. But that satisfaction doesn’t last long so we keep sinning and
sinning and sinning, trying to find the one thing that will satisfy us forever.
We do all this instead of just waiting to meet God in heaven and be permanently
satisfied. In those moments that we sin, we forget God’s promise to give us
eternal life and never ending satisfaction. 2 Corinthians 4:18 says this, “We
fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is
eternal.” If we just keep focused on what is unseen, what we know is waiting
for us when we leave this Earth and go home, we can forget about the temporary.
We have a tendency to choose temporary over eternal. Just look at Jesus. He
came to this earth not only to remind us that God is waiting for us, but to be
our sacrificial lamb to erase the debt to which we owe because of our choosing
temporary satisfaction. Because of the cross our stomachs are empty again and
we can feast with our family in Heaven.
Here are some Bible verses I have found that inspire
me to keep my eyes focused on eternal things instead of temporary.
“The
world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives
forever.”
-1
John 2:17
“And if what was fading away came with glory, how
much greater is the glory of that which lasts!”
-2
Corinthians 3:11
“All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the
flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.”
-1
Peter 1:24-25
As
you struggle from day to day with wanting satisfaction, just remember that at
the end of this life, God is waiting for you with open arms, ready to accept
you with open arms and forever satisfy you. Until next time, good bye and God bless!
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