Thirsting: Quenching Our Soul's Deepest DesireSample

A Love Story

I imagine you’re reading this because, like me, you either thirst for God or thirst to thirst for Him. More importantly, you’re here because the Holy Spirit has drawn you. Because the very existence of your thirst, your desperation, is the sign that God is already beginning to meet it.

Even if you’re numb, barren, or lost, the groaning of the Spirit is crying out for more of God on your behalf, interceding for you “with wordless groans” (Romans 8:26). If you’re afraid God may not hear your cries for divine hydration, you can know with certainty He will hear His own.

Nothing has marked my life more than my wholehearted pursuit of God, and nothing has wounded me more deeply. Because God, in His extravagant love, will refuse anything within us that would hinder us from our full engulfing in his astronomical want of us. Love, by nature, refuses to be separated in any way from its object. God wants our all.

That sounds romantic until He comes for the things in us we don’t want to give away: our insecurities, our fears, our self-protection. Often what we think of as off-limits in our hearts is exactly where Christ will venture to free us even more.

Love is liberation, but we’re prone to loving our chains.

In this world, great treasures cost us the most. Be they gold, jewels, Olympic achievements, or the love of our lives. If an athlete has to give up everything else to obtain gold, and if in marriage we say no to every other person on earth that we may have our yes with the one, then how much more will receiving the whole of Love cost us as we “throw off everything that hinders us and the sin that so easily entangles” (Hebrews 12:1).

But the good news is, giving over to this Love is far more like winning the lottery than entering a prison. Because whatever we give up, whatever we go through, pales in comparison to the inconceivable love and freedom we’re returned in the presence of the Beloved.

Once we get a taste for this Love that desires us, we discover in us a thirst to give ourselves wholly over to it. The cost evaporates. We’re free to become more free.

How do you respond to the idea that you thirst for God because God is thirsting for you?