Filling the Void

This post is loosely inspired by Ecclesiastes 3:11: ^“11He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

There is a giant gaping eternal-sized hole right smack in the middle of my heart. It is ravenous, and insatiable; it hurts, and aches, and groans. My whole life I’ve tried to fill this void with all sorts of things with the hope that I might plug, and clot the loneliness, and the emptiness. But of course,  temporal things were and will never be enough. My soul cries for something more. It longs for eternity. An eternal hole takes an Eternal God to fill. It takes Jesus Christ, beaten, bloody, and alone, nailed to a Cross for all my sins, so that I might know Him, and be whole in Him.

With that massive truth in mind, let me try and outline my idea for yet another series. By the grace of God, I am now continually striving to find my identity, and my satisfaction in Christ with the goal that He alone would fill the voids in my heart. Here an important question arises: what of the other things, which I formerly used to fill the voids? As I stated earlier, I have sought satisfaction in a variety of pursuits, the foremost of those being relationships and achievement. These things are by no means bad. Quite the opposite! They are gifts from God. We fall into sinful idolatry by letting the gifts usurp the Giver.

When we find the entirety of our worth in Christ, it is not as if we lose all the gifts of God; rather, they are restored to their proper purpose. They become what God intended for them to be. The gifts can be fully enjoyed. Things like relationships and achievement are no longer ultimate things, but means to glorify and magnify Christ. C.S. Lewis puts it like this:

“To sacrifice the greater good for the less and then not to get the lesser good after all–that is the surprising folly. . . Every preference of a small good to a great, or a partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice was made… You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.”

I want to write a few posts on the restoration of secondary things to their proper place in light of the reality of Christ.With the start of college especially, it is quite easy to let good things become gods in my heart. Hopefully this will be beneficial to myself, and you all as well as I seek to keep first things first!

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“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matt. 6:33)