God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I feel him in the sunshine or rain; and all mingled with a delicious restfulness most nearly describes my feelings. I talk to him as to a companion in prayer and praise, and our communion is delightful. He answers me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken that it seems my outer ear must: have carried the tone, but generally in strong mental impressions. Usually a text of Scripture, unfolding some new view of him and his love for me, and care for my safety…. That he is mine and I am his never leaves me; it is an abiding joy. Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste.
~William James (1842-1910)
Whom have I in heaven but You?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides You.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
For behold, those who are far from You shall perish;
you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to You.
But for me it is good to be near God;
I have made the Lord GOD my refuge,
that I may tell of all your works.
~ Psalm 73:25-28
Beloved, we are desperately needy people. There is nothing in us to get us through this life. Apart from Him we can do nothing.
There is still in us, though, this desperately tenacious idea that G_d is just enough. Yeah, enough like He is some option on the menu. Like we could actually choose something else and still get by.
Could we tonight put this idea aside? Maybe tonight we could just fully abandon the foolish notion that there is anything big enough to fill the hole in our souls. Each of us – without G_d – live lives of incredible desperation. The needs in us are chasms of nearly infinite proportion.
We hurt.
We are alone.
We are needy.
We are hungry.
We yearn for connection.
All of this is too big to be filled by anything else. We need an infinitely Big Solution.
But when we figure out that He is not just Big Enough, He is rather Everything. He is our All in All. And in understanding this, we no longer say that G_d is simply enough. We come to understand that He is exceedingly, abundantly enough for anything we could ever even hope or imagine to believe we might possibly need in life.
This is very good news!
Today I entered on my eighty-second year and found myself just as strong to labor and as fit for any exercise of body or mind as I was forty years ago. I do not impute this to second causes, but to the Sovereign Lord of all. It is he who bids the sun of life stand still, so long as it pleases him. I am as strong at eighty-one as I was at twenty-one; but abundantly more healthy, being a stranger to the headache, toothache, and other bodily disorders that attended me in my youth. We can only say, “The Lord reigneth!” While we live, let us live to him!
~John Wesley (1703-1791)
