You may never know that Jesus is all you need, until Jesus is all you have. ~Corrie ten Boom. …. And when Jesus is all you have, He becomes all that you want.
~ Unknown
Keep Me safe, My God, for in You I take refuge. I say to the Lord, ‘You are My Lord; apart from You I have no good thing.’ I say of the holy people who are in the land, they are the noble ones in whom is all My delight. Those who run after other gods will suffer more and more. I will not pour out libations of blood to such gods or take up their names on my lips. Lord, You alone are My portion and My cup; You make My lot secure. The boundary lines have fallen for Me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance. I will praise the Lord, who counsels Me; even at night My heart instructs me. I keep My eyes always on the Lord. With Him at My right hand, I shall not be shaken. Therefore My heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure, because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead, nor will you let your faithful one see decay. You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.
~ Jesus, speaking of the resurrection through David, in Psalm 16
Oh beloved, it is so true. We are willing to insert anything other than Him into the vacuum that can only be filled by Him. And it is not that we even try to fill it with things that are bad. But, the horrible truth we find is that anything other than Him does not fit, will not fill and only bites us.
We, those consecrated to the cross He has laid on us, sometimes even overstep the blessings of relationship He has given us with the other wonderful people in our lives. And it is in this unintentional overstep that we can make one our biggest missteps in our walk along the path of Life which He has laid before us.
We sometimes make an enormous mistake. And we do this when begin to place our trust in people we Love. Nowhere in Scripture are we given the mandate to hang any of our trust or fulfillment in the fulfillment we might receive from others. To be sure, it is a joy to trust a friend or a lover and have them follow through on a commitment they have made. But, the exceedingly larger portion of unconditional love is that we love people without regard to whether they perform in a manner we can trust – or even predict.
There is this real (and good) need within any human being to both know and be known by another. And this need is so strong that we are both tempted and willing to short cut the path to fulfilling that need by proxy. As Blaise Pascal said, “There is a God-shaped vacuum within every man, that only God can fill.”
Some may call this cynicism. And refusing to trust anyone or anything can rapidly fall into this trap, if we are motivated by fear or flesh or the shielding of ourselves from pain. But, in the spirit, the refusal to trust anyone but Him is the path to actually building solid relationships with other people.
Can we see it? If we are trying to gain anything, anything at all from a relationship with another human being, we are setting them up as some sort of adulterous, idolatrous object from which we try to suck some sort of life.
If however, in the spirit, we reach out in bonding Love to another, and pour the Life He has given us, out onto an into them – we find that there is this amazing dynamic that begins to work. The Love we pour out tends to splash right back onto us sweeter and stronger than when it left us. And even if it doesn’t; even if the love or trust or other goodness is not returned, it simply does not matter. For the point was to Love, not to be loved.
G_d, in the Person of Jesus Christ, showed this Love perfectly in the passage above. Jesus had just been going through – literally – a hellacious time. He had been betrayed, whipped, beaten, crucified, and then deserted by His own Dad – and eventually His best human friends. And still this same Jesus counted on the ONLY ONE who ever could or should or would fulfill His need for fellowship anywhere in all creation.
And in trusting that G_d was His only portion, G_d proved He was, is and will be exactly that. Oh when will we trust Him alone, like Jesus trusted Him alone? Dive in beloved! Anyone who ever has, has never been disappointed.
