Satisfaction in God

I had a close friend recently that asked me whether or not I thought we could ever be truly satisfied in God. His question was concerning a constant feeling of inadequacy in the knowledge of the Bible and a feeling of needing to learn more, pray more, and cry out to God more. The back story is because of people we’ve both been exposed to in our lives that have expressed this total discontentment in their own knowledge of the bible or time they spend on their knees. But it got me thinking…what does it mean to be “satisfied in Christ”?

Does it mean that we spend hours upon hours reading the Word? Does it mean that we spend hours upon hours on our knees in prayer crying out to God? Maybe it means that we spend every waking moment serving somewhere and pour all we have into a ministry without asking anything in return. I think different people have different ways they try to attain satisfaction in Christ but until we become content with our own journey I don’t know that we’ll ever get there… Matthew 5:16 says “Even so let your light shine before men; that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” Our job is to glorify God and magnify HIM! John Piper talks about this in his book Don’t Waste Your Life when he says “He is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” This makes me believe that what we should be is totally satisfied in God. Not to become complacent but to become content in HIS glory and HIS might and HIS power.

Complacency causes us to become apathetic to our own personal and spiritual growth which is a dangerous tool that the devil uses to cause us to slowly slip further away from where we should be. Although we should become satisfied in Christ, that by no means that we should ever stop stretching and reaching to bring ourselves into an ever-closer walk with Him. As Brennan Manning said in The Ragamuffin Gospel “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.” We must reach the point in our life where we are so engulfed by His grace that we are able to walk in satisfaction with Him and allow Him to guide our path. In the words of Julian of Norwich “The greatest honour we can give Almighty God is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love”. I love this statement because I think it engulfs the very essence of living in satisfaction of the grace and mercy that God has given us. By living in satisfaction with the grace he has given us we are truly bringing glory to His name and to what he has done both for us and through us.