HOW TO FIND SATISFACTION IN GOD
Isaiah 55:1-3
Ho! Every one who thirsts, come to the waters;
And you who have no money come, buy and eat.
Come, buy wine and milk
Without money and without cost.
Why do you spend money for what is not bread,
And your wages for what does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good,
And delight yourself in abundance.
Incline your ear and come to Me.
Listen, that you may live;
And I will make an everlasting covenant with you,
According to the faithful mercies shown to David. (Isaiah 55:1-3).
Satisfaction guaranteed! You hear that promise so often that it has become a byword. We love the idea of satisfaction. Yet are we ever really satisfied?
We talk about...
ƒÝ Customer satisfaction
ƒÝ Job satisfaction
ƒÝ The Rolling Stones bemoaned the fact that ¡§I can¡¦t get no satisfaction, and I try, and I try and I try and I try.¡¨
God WANTS us to be satisfied, but He wants us to be satisfied in that which is satisfactory. HE is the satisfactory One. As John Piper tells us, ¡§God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.¡¨
How can you find satisfaction? Real satisfaction in God?
1. YOU HAVE TO BE THIRSTY: Ho! Every one who thirsts, come to the waters (Isaiah 55:1).
The first step to satisfaction is dissatisfaction. To be satisfied, you first have to be unsatisfied. To be filled, you first have to be empty. To have your thirst quenched, you first have to be thirsty.
This passage starts off with the most universal possible term. It is addressed to ¡§everyone.¡¨ It does not matter if you are rich or poor, black or white, male or female. This is something that is offered to all. Or is it? As I look at this passage, I am struck by the fact that there is indeed a requirement for those who would come. The requirement is that you must be thirsty.
Our problem is that we often do not recognize our thirst or, when we do, we look for the wrong sorts of things to fill it.
She was a woman who had been around and it showed, if not on her face, then in the deeper resources of her heart. It wasn¡¦t the years; it was the mileage. When it came to picking men, she had plenty of experience and all of it was bad. One relationship after another had ended in disaster.
Then one afternoon, she went down to the well to draw water and found a Galilean rabbi there. The last thing she wanted was to get into a religious discussion, but she was drawn in spite of herself when he began speaking to her about her need for living water -- a lasting, spiritual, never-ending source of spiritual water that would refresh her tired soul.
You know the story and you know that there came a point in the conversation where Jesus said to her, ¡§Go get your husband and birng him here.¡¨
I can feel her wince at the mention of the topic.
¡§Why did He have to go and mention that?¡¨
¡§I have no husband.¡¨
Why did Jesus go there? It was to show her need. It was to make her thirsty for that which only He could satisfy.
He does the same thing to us today. There are things that the Lord brings into our life that are designed to increase our thirst.
As a fire fighter, I know a bit about generating thirst. I¡¦ve been in some hot situations where the temperature was so high the you walked out and could hardly wait for a taste of cool, refreshing water.
Has the Lord been turning up the heat in your life lately? It might be that He is at work in your life to create a thirst for that which only He can satisfy.
2. YOU HAVE TO BE WITHOUT RESOURCES: And you who have no money come (Isaiah 55:1).
To be satisfied, you not only have to be dissatisfied, you also have to be unable to satisfy yourself with that which you have at hand.
Jesus said, Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:3). Poverty is when you don¡¦t have something. It is the down side of the ¡§have¡¦s¡¨ and the ¡§have nots.¡¨ Of course, we know that poverty can be a bit relative. There are poor and there are very poor. This is not speaking of the one who is merely part of the lower middle class. It speaks to the one who is spiritually bankrupt and destitute.
It is only when you come to terms with the fact that you are spiritually bankrupt that you can even be saved. Salvation begins with the admission that you are unsaved. Redemption begins with the realization that you are a slave. It is only when you admit your spiritual poverty that God gives to you all of the riches that are in Christ Jesus.
On what are you depending for your standing before God? If you were to stand before God this morning and He were to ask you why you should be allowed into heaven, to what would you point? If your answer was to have anything to do with your own goodness and spiritual worth, then you are lost. The only one who ever gets to heaven is the one who realizes that he doesn¡¦t deserve to be there. Christ didn¡¦t come to save good people. He came to save the lost. And you can only find His true happiness and blessings when you come to understand that you are spiritually impoverished.
Jesus is saying, ¡§You who have no money and you who have nothign to recommend yourself and you who have no spiritual resources, COME!¡¨
You can never really come to Christ unless you have a sense of your own spiritual bankruptcy. He does not allow you to come unless you realize that you are unworthy. His salvation is not for the self-sufficient. They have no reason to trust in Christ. God does not save the self-sufficient. He only saves those who have found their sufficiency in Christ.
Jesus once commented on how hard it is for a rich man to be saved. That ought to hit each one of us on a very personal level because, by world standards, nearly all of us are financially wealthy.
Why is it hard for a rich man to be saved? Because such a man has gotten used to trusting in his riches for his daily needs instead of trusting in the Lord for his daily needs.
We pray the prayer, ¡§Give us this day our daily bread,¡¨ but more often than not, we know that we have a job that is paying the bills and, even if we lose that, there is welfare and there are savings accounts and their are government sponsored programs to take care of us. I am not putting any of these down, but I am pointing out the obvious fact that we are generally secure as to the provision of our daily bread and that security fights at the very heart of our daily need for faith.
3. YOU HAVE TO RECOGNIZE THAT FOR WHICH YOU HAVE BEEN LABORING IS UNSATISFACTORY: Why do you spend money for what is not bread, And your wages for what does not satisfy? (55:2).
We are all laboring for something and most of us have things in life for which we are expending time and energy and effort that go beyond the ¡§basic necessities.¡¨
What is it in your case?
Are you on a quest for...
ƒÝ Security?
ƒÝ Significance?
ƒÝ Youth?
ƒÝ That special someone in your life?
ƒÝ Pleasure?
There was once a man who tried it all. Wealth. Relationships. Pleasure. Knowledge. He had it all and he tried it all. He was a man who drank deeply from the well of human experience. His name was Solomon. When he was done, he looked back over his life and he summed it up in a single word: ¡§Emptiness.¡¨
How long will it take before you come to the same conclusion? How many mirages will you chase? How many fantasies will you pursue? How many dreams will you chase only to find that having is an empty echo of wanting?
For what are you laboring? If it is anything less than the Kingdom, then it is a lost cause. Labor to enter into the peaceful resting place that only God can provide. How do you do that? That is answered in our next point.
4. YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO GOD’S GOOD NEWS: Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, And delight yourself in abundance. Incline your ear and come to Me. Listen, that you may live (55:2-3).
Notice the verbal commands that are given in these two verses:
ƒÝ Listen.
ƒÝ Eat.
ƒÝ Delight.
ƒÝ Incline your ear.
ƒÝ Listen.
I want to suggest that these are all describing the same thing. They are describing the act of listening; not just hearing, but really listening. There is a difference between hearing and listening. Everyone who has ever had children know the difference.
You say to the child, ¡§It is time for bed.¡¨ They may hear, but to they listen?
On the other hand, you whisper the word, ¡§Cookie!¡¨ and they both hear and listen.
Cookie! Cookie! COOKIE!
Real listening is more than the auditory impulses upon the ear. It sends a message to the mind and it responds in action.
That is what we see in this passage. It is a call to listen -- a call to eat -- a call to delight -- a call to BELIEVE.
The parallel passage to this principle is found in John 6 where Jesus says that all who come to Him must be willing to eat of His body and to drink of His flesh. This brings us to an important distinction: Jesus not only BRINGS the good news; He IS the good news.
5. YOU HAVE TO ENTER INTO A COVENANT RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD: And I will make an everlasting covenant with you, According to the faithful mercies shown to David (55:3).
When you say the word ¡§covenant,¡¨ there are likely a number of aspects that will come to mind. A covenant involves...
ƒÝ A contract.
ƒÝ A binding agreement between two parties.
ƒÝ Promises and oaths.
But at the very heart of a covenant, there is the idea of RELATIONSHIP. That is why we often describe marriage as a covenant. It is a covenant relationship, binding for the life of the two parties. We say, ¡§Till death do us part,¡¨ not, ¡§Until divorce we divide.¡¨
This is a bit off the topic, but let me give a charge to you men. You determine that there are no escape routes from your marriage. If you are married, then be a man of your word. You pledged yourself to your wife for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, all the days of your life and you keep that promise that you have made before God and before witnesses.
That is what God has done for you. He has entered into an eternal relationship with you. He loves you and has given Himself for you and He calls you to do the same toward your wife.
Can I tell you something about my wife? She is my lover and my confidant and my friend and my companion and my playmate and I take any and all possible occasions to praise her name from the gates of the city. You are called to do the same thing. Speak words of love to her and about her. Love her as Christ loved His church.
That is also the relationship you are to enjoy with your Lord.
Do you love Him? Does that love for Him manifest itself in a desire to spend time with Him, praising Him and listening to His still, soft voice? Or are you like the marriage partner who is so busy doing and perhaps even doing for your spouse that you spend no time in communion with that spouse?
It is possible to be so caught up in doing ¡§Christian things¡¨ that we forget to spend time with Christ.
Martha was like that. She and Mary and their brother Lazarus were having Jesus over for dinner. Martha wanted to go all out for the event. Everything had to be perfect. She had planned a seven course meal and she tried to keep up with every detail, working herself to the point of exhaustion.
Meanshile, her sister Mary sat and the feet of Jesus and listened to Him and talked with Him.
Which one received the commendation of the Lord? Was it Martha and all of her worrisome preparations? No, it was the one who came, not to do a work of service, but to receive the grace of God.
Is there anything in your life that can be described as a supernatural power at work within you, breathing in and out in what you say and do, breaking through old habits and old ways to make you into a different kind of person than you used to be? Is there a dynamic at work in you that can be described that way?
If there is not, then there is an invitation for you. It is that you come and believe the gospel. It is that you ask for the Lord¡¦s salvation. Eat and drink of Christ; entrust yourself to Him.
