Jesus alone can fulfill our desires. God created us to crave —
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” — Gen. 2:15–17
Man has needs that were intended to be satisfied by God. The trigger of sin happens we begin to look to things of this world to satisfy us apart from God. When we try to find satisfaction apart from God we lose God and gain the treasures we were to enjoy with God, not without him.
Somehow, we have thwarted this idea as we run to the Giver to get the gifts, rather than enjoying the Maker. We marvel at all the gifts God gives us, forgetting in him alone is where we find our satisfaction. True satisfaction is not found in the gifts, but the giver. You come to God to get God. You trust in God so you can have God- not to get the stuff. Even the best things in this world do not compare to the satisfaction in God. Clearly God is not enough for us when we look at how much stuff we have. When we live like everyone around us, we show the world that God is not enough for us. We will gorge our stomachs, and our emotions that we are so full when we come to Christ that there is little taste left. Jesus alone can fill our desires.
Jesus can transform our tastes. We conquer sin by trusting in him. Let Jesus fill you, not your works. he will transform the way we live. We overcome sin by letting Christ overcome us. We run to the world to fill us then run to Jesus- we have it mixed up. Jesus should fill us and then there would be no room for the world to even be appetizing to us. When you feast on Christ as your satisfaction you begin to be disgusted by sin. We are conquered by a superior satisfaction. My prayer is that our desire for pleasure would be increased. C.S. Lewis wrote, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Jesus alone can guarantee satisfaction. He is the Almighty, the Creator on high, who better knows how to draw us in? He allures us, and through his grace he seeks us. When everything in this life is taken from us, will we still be satisfied in knowing we have eternal satisfaction? Every pleasure of this world is fleeting, we no longer live for the pleasures because we have found total satisfaction in the person of Christ. It completes our joy to express the praise of what we worship- it is delight, the overflow of our affections.
We must constantly be more aware of God’s grace than our sin. If our knowledge of God is unclear than our confidence in his forgiveness will be too. When we see the cross we see it was by us, and for us. My sins sent him there, but love took him there. We did the worst possible thing, me, I killed Jesus. That is the worst crime to commit. Yet, even the act of killing the innocent Son of God can be forgiven, therefore so can all of my other sins.
“We can be intemperate about lots of things… someone who devotes all their thoughts to something is being just as intemperate as someone who gets drunk every night. Of course it does not show on the outside so easily… But God is not deceived by the externals.” — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity