Monday, September 28, 2009

Passing this along...

We are in the midst of preparing for our revival services at church... this was today's devotional by our pastor. I really wanted to share it... so here it is:

We all share a deep desire to be more intimate and more devoted to God. Like I mentioned yesterday, I believe we all love God, but we sometimes are not experiencing being in love with him. It often seems like there is something that gets in the way of that kind of heart-felt, devotional love. We all have the desire to give our hearts to Him, but this desire is often shared with desires for a lot of other stuff. As John Piper puts it, our decreased hunger for God is not because He is unsavory, but because we keep ourselves stuffed with other things. In other words, we are so full of food, entertainment, work, play, kids, school, friends, and life that we have no appetite left for God.

There is nothing wrong with all those things. It is not the big things that rob us of our hunger for God. It is the constant nibbling at the table of the world that leaves us so full that we have no appetite left for him! I run into this problem every Thanksgiving. I get excited about the family and the fellowship, but I really like the meal. All day long, I nibble and snack and when the main meal comes, I don’t really enjoy it.

In our lives, we are nibbling on work, family, computers, investing, TV, internet, gaming, sports, school, shopping, exercising, talking on the phone, home repair, and even our Christian walk. While all these are fine, taken together they can leave us so full that we have nothing left for God. Wouldn’t it be great to be so full of God we didn’t have room for the rest? Oh, to experience such fullness!

There's even a little more ... click on his link over on the right side of my blog to check it out!