Starvation

Too many Christians are starving.
Let me explain. Do you know when God first mentions the concept of love in the Bible? He doesn't use as His example the love of a man for his wife or vice versa. He doesn't use as His example the love of a mother for her child. He doesn't even use the example of God's love for man or a man's love for God. What He uses as His first example of love--it's found in Genesis 22--is a father's love for his only son. Abraham's love for Isaac.
Do you know when God first mentions love in the New Testament? In Matthew, Mark, and Luke the first time love is mentioned is the same example. God, the Father, speaking from Heaven, says, "This is My beloved Son." Then, in John, the first time He mentions love is this: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son." That always takes my breath away. And I pray it always will. The vast feast of God's love for me.
And in Galatians 2:20 it goes even deeper. There Paul says that God didn't just die for the world but that He loved me--the individual me--so much that "Christ lives in me, and the life that I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and delivered Himself up for me." How can I fail to bask, to live a life of rejoicing, in such a personal love from the God of infinite love?
And yet we do. We are starving. We live lives of spiritual famine--lives of grumbling and complaining. Why? Because, I think, we change the focus from Him to us. We somehow take that eternal love that He has freely provided and diminish it into the idea that God owes us--that life is all about what God should do for me. And if God is not doing what I think He should be doing for me right now, if He is not providing my every whim, I claim He's a failure--a Father who doesn't really love His children--and me in particular. Incredibly, we who are filled with God's power and love--the very person of His Son "who loved me and delivered Himself up for me"--live empty, joyless, murmuring lives. He has given us all things that pertain to godliness. And godliness with contentment is great gain--incredible riches--a genuinely full to overflowing life. A cup running over life.
How then do I keep from living a life of spiritual starvation? By coming to a simple realization. Life is not about what God is doing for me, but what He wants to do through me. Life is about God using me to demonstrate to acquaintances, to friends, and to family the love that is willing to give up His only begotten Son for a hopeless, empty world--and each individual in it. Life is about God using me to demonstrate the love that is anti self-centeredness, anti self-defensiveness, and anti placing expectations on the lives of others as a way for them to earn being loved as God loves me. My ability to love another person is not dependent on the depth of their spirituality but on the depth of mine. Such love is not a sentimental response to God's love for me, but a courageous, dynamic, self-denying, self-sacrificing love just like His. It's the only way to live a full and fulfilling life.
Are you feasting on His great eternal love for you? Or are you--as His dearly beloved child--living a life of spiritual starvation and famine? Each day do you "taste and see that the Lord is good?" Or do you walk through the day with the bitter taste of self in your life, secretly angry--or maybe even openly angry--that God who gave you His Son somehow owes you more than His grace has already provided--forever. The only way to feast--to be filled with His joy--is to let Him use you to pour out His love on others. Any other life is a self-imposed famine.
Thankfully, when we have that bitter taste in our mouths there is this promise: "When you are far from Me, wallowing in self-love, famished for godliness and contentment, desperate for joy, I AM not thinking 'How can I dump this guy and find someone who will rest in Me and My moment-by-moment love for him'? What I am thinking is 'What will it take to bring them back into intimacy with Me? What will it take to get them to feast at my table of love and provision again?'"
Whatever it will take, His love will not hesitate to do. Yes, the very thing that is happening in your life that you think is evidence of His lack of love for you is instead evidence that He is lovingly reaching out to you to lavish you with His joy and to enable you to rest in His love so that you can be the lover of others that He desires you to be. It is the thirsty deer that pants after the water.

"I am thine, O Lord, I have heard Thy voice, and it told Thy love to me; but I long to rise in the arms of faith, and be closer drawn to Thee. Consecrate me now to Thy service Lord, by the power of grace divine; let my soul look up with a steadfast hope and my will be lost in Thine. Draw me nearer, nearer, nearer, blessed Lord, to the cross where Thou has died; draw me nearer, nearer, nearer, blessed Lord, to Thy precious, bleeding side. . . there are heights of joy that I cannot feel till I rest in peace in Thee."