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Fillers

For the past three years, I have faced some very difficult things.  I've had to make hard decisions, life changing decisions.  Within the past year, most of those have settled, but there have been what I call residual issues to work out.  Basically, the cleanup after the storms.  You know those regrets and if onlys that linger.  The fight to not to return to old patterns and addictions and temptations...

So tonight, I prayed, "God, I don't want to be this person.  I am so tired of struggling with these things.  I know You've said You are working things out.  In the meantime, please help me to wait!  Give me a hunger for You."  I heard, I already have.  You are trying to fill it with everything else.

Guilty!

I once heard someone say that there is a God-shaped hole in our hearts and that nothing will fill it, but God.  All the desires, all the dreams, all the plans must be His desires, His dreams, His plans for us.  Everything else is a band aid, or what I refer to as a filler.  They are temporary.  Solomon's revelation is found in Ecclesiastes 6:7. He wrote, "All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled." All the material or earthly things we try to find happiness in only "feeds" us for the moment, but when the "appetite is not filled," we continue to look for more, more, more and we never really feel satisfied. 

I liken this to a dieter's frenzy.  A person trying not to eat certain foods will gorge on foods that are allowed on the diet and rack up more calories than if they would just go ahead and eat that piece of chocolate or pie or pizza that is being craved.  The same concept applies spiritually.  Eat of the Word, feast on the Vine.  He is the All in All--the One and the Only that will fill every empty place in your life.  Matthew 6:33 tells us to seek after Him and His righteousness and all the other things will be given to us as well.  Psalm 107:9 tells us, "...He satisfies the longing soul, and fills the hungry soul with goodness."   As the saying goes, "Seek the Giver rather than the gift." 

It is my prayer that out of His glorious riches I may be strengthened with power through His Spirit in my inner being, so that Christ dwells in my heart through faith. And I pray that I will be rooted and established in love and have power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that I may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.  (Ephesians 3:16-20)


Psalm 81:9-10 "You shall have no foreign god among you; you shall not worship any god other than me.   I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of Egypt.  Open wide your mouth and I will fill it."



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