No More Hungry Hearts

When Jesus came, he confronted the lie that we can fill our hungry hearts through doing things to acquire life on our own. The fact that God himself became a human and died for our sin reveals that we do not have the ability to satiate our hunger. If we had the ability, it wouldn’t have been necessary for God to go to this radical extreme. Jesus reveals that, despite our sin, God remained desperately in love with us and as a result opened up the way for us to enter into the eternal relationship that will actually fill us.

In Jesus, we discover the unsurpassable and unconditional worth, significance, and security our hungry hearts were created to enjoy. And thus we are empowered to break our miserable addiction to idols (see previous post).

For most, this occurs like the growth of a mustard plant, which starts from the smallest seed. Jesus taught:

Jesus said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade.” (Mark 4:30-32)

Just as God’s kingdom begins as a mustard seed and slowly grows to take over the whole earth, so the kingdom begins as a mustard seed in our own life and gradually grows to take over our entire existence. We become citizens of the kingdom the moment we genuinely surrender our lives, but we experience and manifest the true life of the kingdom as we learn to yield to him on a daily basis.

This means that our hunger is filled by Jesus as we grow in our ability to allow him to fill it. As the kingdom grows in us, our addiction to idols wanes, and therefore the idols lose their power and appeal. When a person truly is filled by the experience of unsurpassable worth as a child of the King, what could all the wealth, power, sex, or fame in the world possibly offer?

To the extent that our longing for worth, significance, and security is satisfied by our relationship with Christ, our hearts crave nothing and fear nothing. We are literally a people who have nothing to gain and nothing to lose.

While others live out of the emptiness that forces them to acquire and protect their idols, those who seek the kingdom aim to grow in the fullness of Christ that frees them to live with abandon as they focus on carrying out God’s will “on earth as it is in heaven.”

May your life be found in Christ today!

—Adapted from The Myth of a Christian Religion, pages 41-43