God waits for us to confess our weakness and come home to Him. The story contained in the Scriptures is the story of how God made this homecoming possible. It is the story of an infinite God in whose perfection we may find our sustenance and support.
“In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us” (Romans 8:37). To be rightly related to God is to believe that He “has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7).
We find ourselves frustrated, unable to find the complete fulfillment of our desires. Unaided by anything outside of time and space, we discover that despite short-term successes, the long-term verdict is that we’ve been “grasping for the wind.”
When we allow our lives to be driven by materialism, it must be admitted that we lead very hollow lives. Whether we face the fact or not, our hearts were made to experience much more than anything the material world can provide.
Worldliness means being preoccupied with temporal matters so that spiritual concerns are crowded out of our thinking. Paul wrote, “Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth.” This is not easy to do, given the pull of this world.
We spend our lives leaning on props rather than God. We’re hiding from the truth, of course, but as long as our props are in place, we don’t worry about our alienation. Deep down, our hearts are a lonely void, but we’re too busy to think about it.
Even if we allow Christ to bring us into a redeemed earthly relationship with God, our connections in this world will only be a foretaste of the fellowship that waits for us later. Yet this hope is the single thing in life most worthy of our pursuit.
Our foolishness has worn us out. But God has made possible our return to Him, and it’s only in such a return that the prospect of real joy can spring to life. Here is where our homesick hearts should rest. Here is where we find a perfect Friend.
Real faith has no need to pretend or run away from difficulty. Faith embraces doubt with honesty, recognizing that troubling questions are inevitable in a world where our sins have hidden God’s face from us. Doubts are what make faith, faith.
Our response both to fear and to our ignorance should be simple reverence — reverence that is determined and decisive. Whatever may happen or not happen, whatever we may know or not know, we must always say, “Speak, Lord, for Your servant hears.”
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