Why Should
We Want Jesus?
~*~
The
month before I turned twelve, I was a mess.
Five months earlier my family had moved from the suburbs where we had
lived for my whole life to a small town where the only people I knew were my
grandmother and my uncle. A decade’s
worth of friendships had been pulled out from underneath my feet. I didn’t fit into the new town as of yet, but
I knew that my old life was left behind forever. I felt pretty homeless. Perhaps the biggest shock was to discover
just how frail my settled, adjusted lifestyle had been.
I
had been so comfortable in my established life I had been able to convince myself
that I didn’t need God. When that sense
of security was blown apart by the move, I was faced with the fact that my life
was empty and had always been empty. And
it would continue to be empty unless I let Jesus fill that void.
I
know what it means to push away Christ and to pretend I don’t need Him. I did not want Christ in my life. Praise the Lord that “God’s gifts and His
call are irrevocable!” (Romans 11:29)
Why
do we need Jesus? Why should we want Him interfering in our
lives? The Westminster Shorter Catechism
attempts to answer this with its very first question:
Q:
What is the chief end of man?
A: Man’s chief end is to
glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.
Humans
were wired since the beginning of time to need the strong presence of our
Creator in our lives. Without Him we are
only shells of what we are meant to be.
To quote Saint Augustine, “Because God has made us for Himself,
our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.”
The
psalmist writes, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for
You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for
the living God.” (Psalms 42:1, 2)
C.S. Lewis adds, “All that we call human history—money,
poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—[is] the long
terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make
him happy.”
When we exclude God from our lives, there is a void
within in us that refuses to be filled by anything in this world. It is a “God-sized hole” in our hearts, as
some have called it. We can pretend that
it does not exist, but it is there.
Jesus came to earth to fill that emptiness. Of believers, He says, “I
have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:8, 10)
We should want Jesus—and through Him, God—because we
need Jesus. We were created to enjoy eternity with Him. Our sin makes us dirty and creates a barrier
between us and God’s holiness, but Jesus destroyed that barrier by taking the
penalty for our sin on the cross. Now,
He again offers us the chance of spending eternity with Him.
And that is the true prize: Not Heaven itself, per se, but to spend
infinity in the company of our glorious Savior.
We do not want Heaven because of its golden streets, but because it is
where our hearts are full. We desire
Heaven because of the presence of our God.
Because
we were made to be with Him.
finis.
Please respect my work and don't steal it. Thanks!
And sorry for some of the odd formatting -- sometimes this blog is wacky. --Rachel
