Unsatisfied, Yet Too Satisfied

Are you secretly too comfortable with this world to truly hunger for the next?

“All the toil of man is for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied” (Ecclesiastes 6:7 ESV).

One of the primary truths in Ecclesiastes is that nothing in this world totally satisfies our yearnings. Try as we may to experience things that will make us happy, we still find ourselves longing for Something More. Human life is a bittersweet business. Even our best joys are blemished — our experiences rarely meet our expectations, and unpredictable disappointments undermine our happiness. Solomon was merely being honest when he said, “All the toil of man is for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied.”

And yet, it’s also true that we’re too satisfied. This world may not be perfect, but we like it very much — the thought of leaving it anytime soon is most unwelcome. Our preachers tell us we should be more content, but most of us have the opposite problem: we’ve settled down in this world so comfortably that it’s rare for us to feel any “groaning” like Paul’s in 2 Corinthians 5:1,2: “For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven” (NKJV). In the “advanced” countries of the world, we think heaven might be nice — after we’ve enjoyed all we want to in the material world. The fact is, we’re too satisfied with what we’ve got right now. When it comes to true treasure, we’ve settled for pitifully little.

So our outlook is paradoxical. Deep in our hearts, we’re still unsatisfied, yet we’re more satisfied than we should be. Dangerously empty, we deny (or ignore) that fact and tell ourselves that we’re full enough. Indeed, we suppose that we’re getting along fairly nicely.

The Problem of Pretense

Most of us do a lot of pretending. We pretend that our happiness in this world is more fulfilling than it really is — and we don’t long for our inward character to be perfected as much as we say we do. But a Day of Judgment is coming. “God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil” (Ecclesiastes 12:14). Whatever delusions about ourselves we may have harbored, that Day will be a revelation of what God knows about our hearts: how much a perfect relationship with Him really mattered to us. I don’t mean this life’s relationship, but the sinless relationship that eternity alone can make possible. God will know — and reveal to the rest of creation — what kind of people we truly were in this world. Were we people who “hungered and thirsted” (Matthew 5:6) for a heart perfectly submitted to God, yearning for that with an aching emptiness? If so, we will be filled. But what if we were people for whom it was enough to attend friendly church services and have lovable grandkids? We will be banished — God’s creation having been what we wanted all along, and not God Himself.

Consider the question of spiritual growth. It is a gradual process for all of us, of course, but how intense is your longing to “grow up in all things into [Christ] who is the head” (Ephesians 4:15)? Is it a desperately felt need? Many of us would lose more sleep over a financial shortfall than a spiritual deficiency. Perhaps we hold a view of grace that says we don’t need to work very hard at “perfecting holiness in the fear of God” (2 Corinthians 7:1). Without intending to, maybe our theology has bred complacency, making us more comfortable with the present condition of our hearts than God wants us to be.

Strangely, Christ’s letter to the Laodicean Christians doesn’t disturb us today, even though the parallels between their material affluence and our own are striking. Are we as out of touch with our condition as they were with theirs? Are we satisfied with our prosperity and our “religion” but not bothered by the distance we’ve kept between ourselves and God? The Lord’s letter to Laodicea ought to unsettle us: “Because you say, ‘I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing’ — and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked — I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire, that you may be rich; and white garments, that you may be clothed, that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed; and anoint your eyes with eye salve, that you may see. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Therefore be zealous and repent” (Revelation 3:17-19).

The Eternal Kingdom

Granted, we have been “saved.” But that is true only in a preliminary sense. Our greater — and more important — salvation will be in eternity. The kingdom in which we now participate is, if I might put it so, the “foyer” of a kingdom into which we’ve not yet been given entrance (2 Peter 1:11). And in 1 Peter 1:5, the apostle spoke of a “salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” In our teaching on salvation and the kingdom of God, I suggest that more emphasis needs to be placed on the eternal dimension of these things, which is the heart of the gospel’s hope (1 Peter 1:3,4). To be content with less is to sell out, lowering our sights from the exalted kingdom that Christ is going to deliver to His Father in the end (1 Corinthians 15:24-26).

The question of “unsatisfaction” has profound implications for evangelism today. As wealth and material comfort spread around the globe, more and more people will live in denial about the limitations of temporal happiness. They may admit the present world is not perfect, but as long as they believe it is adequate, they’ll have little interest in “salvation.” C. S. Lewis said it well in a memorable quote: “A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world — and might even be more difficult to save.” The tragedy is not that earthly happiness fails to satisfy, but that it satisfies just enough to keep us from seeking anything more. Like candy, it dupes us into thinking we don’t need anything to eat.

For this reason, God sends hardship into the lives of all whom He wishes to save (i.e., everybody). He makes even His own blessings “unsatisfying” to us, often withholding the fulfillment we expect to receive from created things in order to pull us toward Himself, the Creator. He did this with Israel in the wilderness: “So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord” (Deuteronomy 8:3). Loving us as He loved Israel, He uses hardship the same way today (Hebrews 12:5-11; James 1:2-4). But do we get the point any more than Israel did?

Conclusion

If we’re content with fulfillments that are inadequate (Luke 12:19), we’re in trouble. In the end, every source of happiness we’ve experienced, except God, is going to fall away from us. Where will we be then, if we haven’t learned — through the hardship, suffering, and discipline God has sent our way — that He is all we need? For our benefit, may God withdraw from us right now any blessing that has made us stop growing or made us think we’re doing better spiritually than we are.

Here are some suggestions:

• Be honest enough to say to God that what you enjoy of Him right now is not enough, that you hunger for more than you have — or ever could have — in a world like this one.

• Appreciate that the hardships God sends into your life are to make you let go of this world.

• Give up the silly idea that if you’re a Christian this world’s “vanity” doesn’t apply to you.

• By permanently giving up a few of the pleasures that you’re most hooked on, prove that you’re not addicted to enjoyment.

We certainly need to be “content with such things as [we] have” (Hebrews 13:5), and I think we should delightfully enjoy the simple happy things that occur from day to day. But God forbid that we should think that anything in His creation — not even the local congregation or our families — will quench our thirst. Only He can do that — and it is only in heaven that He plans to do so.

Until then, I hope that every gap in your spiritual maturity will disturb you and be an irritant that moves you toward “perfecting holiness in the fear of God” (2 Corinthians 7:2).

There will be time enough for rest later on. Right now, what we need is growth . . . and satisfied people don’t grow!

“Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure” (G. K. Chesterton).

Gary Henry - WordPoints.com