Between the Two Ponds
One passage. One idea. A few quiet minutes. Short devotional readings for people being formed by grace, written from a small chair beside still water in Falcon, Colorado.
Pull one up. Read slowly. There is no hurry here.
Eating, and Never Full
That is one of the most accurate sentences ever written about the human heart, and God says it about people who are getting exactly what they went after. This is not a verse about deprivation. They are eating. They are getting the thing.
"They shall eat, but not have enough; they shall play the whore, but not multiply, because they have forsaken the Lord to cherish whoredom." (Hosea 4:10)
They will eat, and never have enough. It is one of the most accurate sentences ever written about the human heart, and God says it not about people being starved but about people getting exactly what they went after. This is not a verse about deprivation. They are eating. They have the thing in hand. And it is doing nothing.
That is why a person can gather everything he ever wanted and arrive at the end of it hollow, saying, I have all of it, and I am still empty. We assume the appetite means we have not yet found the right thing. The appetite means we are trying to fill the wrong kind of hole. The works of the flesh are not first about wickedness. They are about emptiness. Faithful love pours out of the fullness a person already has in Christ. The flesh runs the other way, driven from one desire to the next in the effort to fill a lack that only Christ can fill.
And it does not matter which substance you choose. For some it is the obvious things. For others it is religion itself, the serving and the attending and the performing, and those souls are as empty as anyone at the bar. You cannot fill a hole with the wrong substance. You can only keep pouring.
Oswald Chambers wrote that the springs of love are in God, not in us. Not in us. That is the whole diagnosis in four words. So stop asking why you are still hungry after being fed. Ask instead what you have been eating, and whether you have gone yet to the only spring that was ever going to fill you.