Tenth Avenue North - The StruggleSample

Where Life Will Never Die

This is one of those lessons I feel like I'll be learning til the day I die. No matter how many times I tell myself, I just can't seem to get it through my thick skull.

I am not home here.

I know. Big shocker, right? But it is my inability to accept this one simple fact, that leads me into a whole host of sins. It leads me into heartache. It lures me into death.

I was born for God. I was born to behold Him, to love Him, and to be known by Him. But this land of shadows where I live, this world that's cracked and rusted over, it has clouded my eyes and fooled my heart, distorting what I know is true. You see, we all have the unshakable, unnerving, unrelenting, burning in our belly that just won't be satisfied, and the deep engrained knowledge in our soul that we are made for more than a finite world can give us.

But the real problem isn't that we can't be satiated, it's that we think we can. And so we run. We strive. We bend ourselves low in worship to a world that can never give us what we're truly after.

So now the rub.

If I'm made for the One who made the world, but I'm destined to live in the world that He has made, all the while desperately looking for the satisfaction I was created for, How do I continue on without? How do I live with the ache?

Well, there's a whole host of answers to that question but I will offer you two: First, We ask Him to Satisfy Us. Psalm 90:14 says, "Satisfy me in the morning with your unfailing love." I love that. First things first, before I go running mad into this unfulfilling world, God, fill me up!" But of course, sometimes no matter how we beg and plead with the Lord we still can't seem to shake the temptations that are offered us here.

So number 2 is this: When we remain unsatisfied, we set our focus on the satisfaction that is coming. C.S. Lewis so accurately pointed out that if we find in ourselves a desire that this world cannot satisfy, the most logical explanation is that we were made for another world. And I would say that our only hope is to set our gaze fully on the world that is coming.

Last year, I had several friends confess to me that they were trapped in sexual addiction. They couldn't break away from the screen, no matter how hard they tried. Someone I'm close to committed adultery. It was incredibly difficult to offer any words of hope or any thoughts that might loose the chains and stop the bleeding, but this one verse in Hebrews 11 came leaping off the page to me; "He (Moses) considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for He was looking forward to the reward." -Hebrews 11:26

Ah, that is the rest my restless heart needed, and, it's what my friends needed to hear. We fight the temptation of pleasure with the promise of greater pleasure.

So whatever fight you're in, whatever temptation claws at the back of your mind, Look forward. The reward is coming. He is coming. And he's bringing a city with Him that is unlike anything we've ever seen.

"O tempted heart, come alive. I feel you burning inside. O weary soul, lift your eyes, to a city where life will never die. This rusted world, can't satisfy, there's nothing here that will survive, but the night will end and the sun will rise on a city where life will never die."