Empty?

Do you ever feel empty – like there’s nothing in you anymore? I think that sometimes we all feel that way, especially as we age. 

Today I want to look at that feeling – that feeling of emptiness, in a different way.   I believe that being empty is not always a bad thing.

When we are empty handed, God’s hands fill all our needs.
When we can’t even do the little things, we may find God doing everything.
When we don’t have the strength to move, God will hold us up.

When our hearts and lives feel empty our loving Savior will fill those empty places with His Spirit.

When I think about being empty, of course I think about a cup of coffee.  I love my coffee.   But, if the cup is half full and it’s been sitting around, and we fill it up with hot coffee – all the coffee in that cup becomes lukewarm and loses its flavor.  

But when the cup is empty, and we fill it with fresh hot coffee – it’s wonderful! 

So, Being empty is not always a bad thing.

Maybe we need to empty ourselves – to get rid of the idea that we can handle everything without God’s help. We struggle to solve life’s problems, but resting on God’s goodness and love is really what we need to do.

Much of the time we have the idea that we can do life on our own.  Maybe when we realize that we don’t have the answer to the troubles that haunt us and realize that our storehouse is pretty empty, then we can open our hearts and minds to what God wants us to know.  Then He will fill us.

When you think you’re in control, you become so full of yourself that there is no room for God to come into your heart and fill you.

In the Bible, John 4 tells us about a woman at the well.  Jesus asked her for a drink of water, and she asked him why He, a Jewish man, would ask her, a Samaritan woman, for water.

This is what John writes.

Jesus answered her. “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?  . . . “

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water (in the well) will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Jesus told us that we never need to be empty.  He will become our spring of water welling up to eternal life.  As we fill our minds with the knowledge of our Savior, as we trust in Him to provide love, and friendship, comfort, direction, strength, and peace, we will feel the warmth of His unfailing care and we will be filled.

Empty is when there is nothing left but God and you discover that He is all you need.

Unless we give control to Him

our zest for life is stilled.

Unless we know our emptiness, we never will be filled.

 

The Wall

 

God walked with the man and woman in the garden.  He knew their stride, the way they moved.  He knew their strengths and limitations and they knew Him.  They felt him there. They heard Him.  He was close. They were His children. They were held in the arms of their Father.  They were family.

But as they grew familiar with life they decided they didn’t need His direction and they didn’t necessarily want Him to know them.  They wanted to walk alone.

They left Him of their own free will.  They weren’t forced away from home.  They built a wall that would stand between them and home – between them and their Father, their Creator so they left Home behind the wall they had erected.

God couldn’t live inside that wall.  It wasn’t His wall, so He wouldn’t climb it or tear it down.  He told His children they were to leave the freedom of the garden.  He would no longer be right there in their sight – because of the wall they had built.  

But He also promised that someday, when “The fullness of time” had come, He would send a carpenter to carry that wall away. 

That carpenter would be the Son of God, and of His own free will, in His humanity, He would be the perfect one to destroy the wall

The carpenter would walk with mankind.  He would feel their humanness.  He would know of their desire to live with the wall.  He would live as a man, but only as God had originally planned for them to live.  The carpenter would live as a clear unblemished, see-through man, and that would remind them of the goodness they had shut out with the wall.  And they would then see the Father, once again.

And it happened!  When the fullness of time had come – it happened.

God sent His Son (fully divine), made of a woman (fully human.) 

He sent His own Son to tear down that wall.  The Son pulled the wall down on himself.  He chose to take that wall on his own shoulders, and it killed Him.  That wall made of the bricks of sin and self we humans want to love, or use, or keep, again and again. 

Those bricks that men love killed the Son - the Rescuer, the perfect One.

But the wall doesn’t need to separate men from God any longer.  Man can stop building because Jesus has already torn that wall down brick by brick. 

If we come back home to our Father, we can walk with Him in the garden again.  And, even though the Son, the carpenter, gave His life to destroy the wall, that was not the end. 

He rose again.  He not only overcame the wall of sin, but He overcame the death that was the result of that sin, the result of man walking away from God’s presence.

Again, God walks with His people, the children who understand His love and His compassion and His willingness to welcome them home – if only they look up and take a step toward his welcoming arms.

Love Diane