LIVING WATERS
For the proclamation of the Gospel and the edification of the Body of Christ
Christ, Full Satisfaction
The day a man is born again is unforgettable. His whole life is turned upside down. The life of God has entered his life and enriched it. He wants to serve God and allows himself to be guided by believers of greater maturity and responsibility to do so. Then he is filled with activities.
However, after a while, the believer's situation usually returns to the initial dissatisfaction, even though he now knows that he has God in his heart. He tries to remedy the problem by reading, praying, fasting. He seeks methods for a victorious walk, but nothing comes of it. His attempts to please God fail one after another, but something inside him tells him that he must persist. Everything around him loses luster, the world is a desert, human affections do not fill his heart, his eyes grow tired of looking at the vanity of the world.
Then God manifests Himself to him, and light begins to shine in his anguished heart. Something is uncovered, a dam disappears, the eyes are opened. And the first thing he sees surprises him tremendously: that for every need of the believer, for every spiritual hunger and thirst, God has only one answer: Christ. Every new victory in his daily walk consists in some aspect of Christ's victory on the cross.
In Christ, the source of unfathomable blessing, is found all the fullness of the Godhead (Col. 2:9), all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col. 2:3). Until now, all that the believer had been doing, that which had been keeping him busy, was not Christ, but things about Christ. Even many of them did not even amount to that. For that reason they could not satisfy his soul or bring peace to his heart. He had been imprisoned in his many works.
But now Christ is revealed to his heart. He sees that the pleasure of God is Christ, in whom he has perfect contentment. Then Christ, the true light, the abundant life, is constituted in all the Christian's good!
When the light of dawn is opening, the shadows fall away, the diffuse outlines of things take on definite forms and become clothed in color. Thus, as Christ is revealed to the heart, new accents of his marvelous Person become clearer; his work consummated on the cross takes on greater prominence, and its eternal scope becomes the believer's heritage. It is marvelous! How many wounds are healed, how many questions answered without words!
God's will for the Christian is to draw us to Christ so that in him alone we may find full satisfaction. So that we may say, like Augustine of Hippo: "My soul finds no rest, Lord, except in you".