Andreas Latossek,
Church at the train station, Frankenberg, September 10, 2023
Longing for God –
Only God satisfies your longing
I am inspired by stories of people who have experienced something with God.
That’s why I love reading about persecuted Christians, even if they are sometimes very bad situations.
I’m currently reading a book about 365 important figures in church history, a double page spread every morning. In addition to what moved them, it is also really exciting to see how they experienced God and how they lived their relationship with God. I notice that this inspires me, that it is good for my own faith to see how God works, that he is alive and can be experienced even today. That’s why I like it when we tell each other how we experience God in our everyday lives, whether in small or big things. God is interested in the little things in your life as well as the big things that concern you because He loves you.
I am particularly fascinated by reports of revival movements that have taken place over the last millennia.
These are movements where God has worked through his Spirit in a special way.
Awakening has something to do with waking up, waking up, and it almost always started with the believers and then it spread and many people became believers.
These movements were very different. Some were large, some were very local. For some, many miracles happened, for others the focus was on sermons that affected people. But what they all had in common was that people reached out to God with a longing for him and he worked in a supernatural way – and that is something we cannot do.
God is also here this morning and working, but in these movements it was special again.
Many of us have experienced something like this at certain points in our lives when God speaks to you, here in a church service, while reading the Bible at home or somewhere else, and you realize that God is here right now and he means me personally. This goes beyond normal knowledge. when people feel that they are being particularly supported and strengthened by God in a situation that they cannot explain.
At the beginning of the year, the news in some Christian circles was abuzz with something that happened in the USA in a town called Wilmore.
This is a small town in Kentucky, smaller than Frankenberg. There is a university, Asbury University, and a small community on campus, mostly students, who met normally for a service in the university chapel, which held around 1,000 people and was also used as an auditorium.
The room: nothing special. I looked at that. The music is nothing special either. I would say I like our music better, just a simple service that ends with a prayer: Lord, awaken us.
Lord, awaken us.
And then another song was sung.
That was not planned. That would probably not happen to us Germans. And after that another song was sung, and another song, and another song. And people noticed that suddenly something was different here and nobody wanted to go home anymore. People sang, prayed, people told what they had experienced with God, others were grabbed and publicly or kneeling in front of the stage, alone or with a pastor, confessed sins and cleaned up their lives.
This service was to last two weeks, day and night. Without break.
There was a state of emergency.
The university has canceled lectures. People met on campus because the chapel was too small and people streamed what was happening over the internet, word got around and a lot of people went there. Sometimes you have to wait over 2 hours just to get into this chapel. There are reports of people saying I just wanted to take a quick look and thought I was there for 20 minutes, but in reality it was 6 hours. People have said that they literally felt the presence of God, even people who are not normally so emotional, they were moved by God.
I don’t know what you think when you hear something like that.
I know there are also critical sides. In some revivals people were just looking for a feeling and not Jesus himself and not much changed in their lives. Some revival preachers have gone crazy and abandoned all theological foundations.
And here in Asbury such a hype has arisen, not in Asbury itself but all around, where some Christians literally jumped on it and said that now it’s going worldwide.
That’s why I was very careful about what happened there.
But when the whole thing died down, it continued all around and the result, at least as I read it, is that Christians began to follow Jesus with a new seriousness and joy and that people came to faith. This wasn’t a flash in the pan in a pushed atmosphere, which some might think when they hear it.
For me it’s not so much about what happened there but about experiencing it here now.
As I said, we can’t do that anyway and God can do whatever he wants with us in Frankenberg. But do you know what that triggered in me? A longing for more of God, more of God in my life, more of God in the life of our community, more of God in the life of our city and in our country. And you know what, I think so? I believe that we need that, more of God, and I would like people to sense from us that we have a longing for God and for more of him and it’s a principle in the Bible that where people strive for Reach out to God wherever they give themselves to him, where they give him the honor that he also acts in a special way.
Longing for God is the name of our new service series for the next three weeks.
We want to get to the bottom of this longing. Next week it will be about how we can live so that God feels at home with us and in two weeks we will deal with the question of what actually happens when we don’t have this longing, what hinders it and how we can fan it .
Longing.
I made my first point this morning:
- Our longing points to God.
In Psalm 42:2-3 we read:
My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?
Do you know when you were out and about and you had nothing or too little to drink and you got really thirsty?
I’ve told you before that Jasmin and I went on a hike during our honeymoon. We didn’t have any decent maps with us and people had told us it would take about 2 hours to get to the mountain.
Normally we are faster than all the times given, but this was obviously wrong because after 2 hours we were just at the foot of the mountain because the valley was completely drawn out. The sun was burning, the water bottle was almost empty, and we would have had to go all the way back. So we decided to turn around. When we arrived we were so thirsty. I don’t know if it was like a deer but we were craving fresh water.
When our fluid levels drop, the warning signs light up: dry mouth, thick tongue, dizzy head, weak knees. Our body tells us when we don’t have enough fluids. Our soul tells us when we are not providing it with enough spiritual water. Dry hearts send desperate messages: imbalance, inner turmoil, guilt and fear. Hopelessness, meaninglessness, insomnia, bitterness, irritability and insecurity are warning signs, symptoms of inner dryness.
Maybe we’ve never seen it like this before. We assumed that these things were somehow part of life: depression, inner turmoil and tormenting feelings of guilt.
The offers to quench this thirst are seemingly endless.
And we let it cost us something. Some invest everything in career and recognition, in health, in fulfilling a lifelong dream, or invest everything in relationships and family. Others seek happiness in new relationships over and over again or run from event to event. Some try an alternative lifestyle, even asceticism.
If we enjoy a good glass of wine, success at work, beautiful sexuality, money in our wallet, delicious food with lovely people, a nice vacation, then that is also in the spirit of God, who gives us gifts.
But when we want to satisfy our longing for life, we realize that these sources don’t last long. We then run faster and faster from one to the other, but it seems to be possible to quench our thirst in ever shorter notice.
C.S. Lewis said: When we discover within ourselves a need that cannot be satisfied by anything in this world, we may conclude that we were made for another world.
Our longing points to God
- Jesus can satisfy your longing
There is an incident in the life of Jesus that does just that.
The conversation takes place at a well in Samaria, we have just heard the story.
Jesus is alone, worn out and tired from his journey. It’s around midday in late spring. The heat is bothering him. He is thirsty but cannot quench it. Although it is leaning on a well, the spring water is 25-50 meters deep. You can only get fresh water with a bucket that you can lower into the well hole.
A woman approaches from the village. She carries a bucket of water with her. Jesus turns to this woman with the request: “Give me a drink!” He wants to quench his physical thirst and needs this woman’s help.
Jesus knows how we feel when we are exhausted and tired, when we reach our limits and need help. He himself became one of us in order to be close to us, to understand us and to meet us. “Give me a drink!” he asks.
A conversation develops and we notice how Jesus is no longer primarily concerned with his physical thirst, but rather with the personal situation of the woman who came to draw water.
Jesus “sees through” their lives. He is not only human, but also God. He sees that she – consciously or unconsciously – longs for a fulfilled and eternal life. He recognizes their thirst for forgiveness and peace, their thirst for support and security, their thirst to be loved and accepted by someone, their thirst for salvation and eternity.
Jesus tells her ( John 4:13-20 ):
13 Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: 14 But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. 15 The woman saith unto him, Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw. 16 Jesus saith unto her, Go, call thy husband, and come hither. 17 The woman answered and said, I have no husband. Jesus said unto her, Thou hast well said, I have no husband: 18 For thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly. 19 The woman saith unto him, Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.
When the woman notices that Jesus looks deeper and knows her life in a way that he can’t actually know it, she feels deeply uncomfortable at first.
She starts a diversionary tactic and wants to discuss. But Jesus doesn’t let up and lovingly speaks again to her inner thirst. Then the woman left her water jar, returned to the city and said to the people: Come here, look, there is a man who told me everything that I have done: is he perhaps the Christ? So they went out of the city and came to him.
This woman who is so ashamed that she goes out at lunchtime when no one else is at the well because it is simply too hot to draw water, is suddenly open about her mistakes.
A man who told me everything I did. The whole village was probably silent about her. But you immediately feel a change within her, an inner healing that begins. Peace, being loved, no longer dependent on the opinions of others. Social contact has been restored. There is so much that triggers this encounter with Jesus, the source of living water.
Jesus doesn’t just see what other people discover in us.
He also knows about our wishes and longings. He sees what it looks like deep inside us. He sees our thirst for life and knows our withered hearts. And he also says to us: If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. ( John 7:37 )
Jesus can satisfy your longing
- We often look in the wrong places
Jesus describes himself as the source of life.
Behind your longing for life there is actually a longing for God. Only HE can deeply satisfy your longing. Because God originally created us humans for this relationship with him. In this relationship we get everything we need for life: love, acceptance, meaning and much more.
But man has chosen to try without God, and so we look for all these things elsewhere. And even as people who already live with Jesus, we do this again and again.
God compares the apparent thirst quenchers of our lives to cracked cisterns, well-like repositories of water. Once he says to his people in the OT:
For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. ( Jeremiah 2:13 )
Who would draw stale water from a cracked cistern when there is a fresh spring bubbling next to it? And yet we do this again and again in our lives. Maybe now that I’m talking about it, you realize where you’ve been doing that lately too. I believe we have to learn to go to Jesus again and again and to talk to him about our longing.
We often look in the wrong places
The good thing is: Not only do we have a longing, but God also has a longing.
- God longs for us
He longs for you.
Jesus tells a parable: The parable of the prodigal sons or the longingly loving father, where a son does exactly that:
He thinks his longing for life will be better satisfied somewhere else. He turns his back on his father and tries. He enjoys the fullness of life, only to realize in the end that that wasn’t it. Things were better at home.
He must be feeling really bad first. And sometimes it happens in our lives that when things are really bad for us, we suddenly start asking about God, and that’s exactly where we recognize a longing for God. And maybe the pain you’re experiencing right now because God doesn’t seem to be there, or you’re going through something and you’re wondering why God is letting things go the way they are, is a pain that’s meant to draw you back more into His presence. a way to get you out of your spiritual lethargy.
CS Lewis once said: Pain is God’s megaphone.
The man in the parable wonders how his father will react when he returns. Will he even take him in? But then Jesus describes what God is like in this parable:
Like a father who stands at the door every day waiting to see if his son doesn’t come back, and when he sees him, starts running towards him, hugging the smelly, run-down son, not caring that he’ll be just as dirty and stinks, not a word of reproach. He reinstates him as his son and heir.
This is how God is with us. He longs for us.
I mentioned my last point:
- Get to know God more deeply
because I believe that is the key.
Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water. ( John 4:10 )
He invites us: If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Translated, this means inviting him into our lives and shaping it in close connection with him, being in conversation with him, taking in his word, listening to him. – This is the living water from the spring.
Through Jesus, through what he did for us on the cross, when he died for our sins to make forgiveness and reconciliation with the Father possible, we can come home to the Father.
The relationship that was destroyed is restored. Our longing is deeply satisfied in eternity. Because even though the relationship has been restored, we cannot see God face to face here, as was the case at the very beginning of this world, when Adam and Eve were able to walk and converse with God in the Garden of Eden.
But we can always get to know Jesus more.
As a result, our longing is fulfilled more and more on the one hand and on the other hand it grows more and more longing to finally see him completely.
It’s like a couple in love. People long for each other. You enjoy spending time together and getting to know each other more. And the more intensively and longer you do this, the more fulfilling it is on the one hand and the more the longing for the other person grows when you are not together. Therefore, the key to fulfilling our longing is to get to know Him more and more deeply.
David writes in Psalm 63 : Your love , others translate your goodness, your grace, which is clear in what Jesus has done for us, but also in everything he is and what he gives us, that means more to me than life .
And Paul writes about it:
16 That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; 17 That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; 19 And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. 20 Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us,
That in this way you will be filled more and more with all the fullness of life that is found with God.
Paul writes that my life becomes more and more fulfilling the more I understand God’s love for me, in fact it means grasping it. So it’s more than just with the head, it’s with the heart, with my whole being to understand, to feel, to know how much God loves me.
Paul writes to the Philippians that everything else is rubbish and worthless compared to this deep knowledge of Jesus. And that’s why he wants to get to know him more and more deeply.
It’s about understanding more and more what God is like and how much he loves us. This shapes us, our identity, our entire life and it fulfills us.
Moses asks God: Let me see your glory, and he shines as God passes by him and he can only look after him from behind and he says about God: LORD, LORD, God, merciful and gracious and patient and of great grace and faithfulness . Exodus 34:6
When we understand how incredible this is, how incredible God is, then our longing for more of Jesus grows. Then our longing grows for others to get to know him, then our longing grows for us to pray: Your kingdom come, because we know that if Jesus rules in our country, in our world, then that is the best thing that can happen. And at the same time we shine more and more like Moses and are filled with this love.
A businessman sits on the train in the same compartment as an elderly grandmother.
Grandma pulls a bag of hazelnuts out of her pocket and offers them to the businessman. Of course he likes to grab it and eat a few. The next day he sees grandma again, she hands him another bag of hazelnuts and it goes on like that for the whole week. Finally the businessman says:
“I can’t eat all your nuts. Surely you only have a small pension.
Grandma replies:
“Oh you know. That is allright. I absolutely love eating this toffee, with this chocolate and caramel. Only the nuts are left, I just can’t bite them anymore.
I hope that we don’t realize at some point that we have only eaten nuts in our lives.
There is so much more that God has in store for us. That’s why let’s seek more of God in our lives. Let’s tell him that we want more of him. And let’s take the time to get to know him better and deeper and to go to him again and again with our longings.
Lord, awaken us!
Amen
Bible references with kind permission: ERF Bibelserver