“My soul yearns, even faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.” Psalm 84:2
There is in each of us that deep longing for something more than this earth can give. As one friend said recently, “There is a question that keeps coming up inside, ‘Is this all there is?’”
God has given us a yearning for Him, a gift we often don’t recognize. This longing can be disguised as an undercurrent of dissatisfaction, or a realization that no matter how well things go, there is still some emptiness inside.
We tend to confuse this longing for God with our desires for material things, accomplishment or human relationships. However, no matter what we do about it, this longing is there, showing us the emptiness of life without Him, pulling us towards Him.
If we pay attention to and cultivate this longing, it can become a positive passion, the burning “first love” that draws us deeper into our relationship with Christ.
Ignoring this yearning means we will be like the Ephesians who, Christ said in Revelation 2, would be judged for losing their first love and falling from the high place God had for them. Jesus said to them “Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.”
And what were those things we did at first? With passion we read and memorized the Word; we went to church with pleasure; we prayed with power; we shared our faith with compassion and joy; we remembered how much we have been forgive and cultivated a heart of thankfulness.
If we continue with joy in these, we will nurture our first love for Jesus and walk in a way pleasing to Him. Let us remember where we were (in the dominion of darkness) and where we are now (in the Kingdom of Light) and love the Lord who brought us here.
