Winning The Jackpot - More of Him
Should you play the lottery and unexpectedly win the jackpot, what would you do with all that money? While some would bunker the loot and invest it to earn even more, many would spend it on things on their bucket list: a new car, a bigger house, a European vacation, or a cottage on a lake.
What if I told you that you can win the lottery today with the currency that you have, the currency of longing or desire?
In the Bible we are confronted with two types of blessing, one inferior to the other. Second class blessing are the good things that God gives us to enjoy – health, a conscience unburdened, clothes, food, shelter. Things take the back seat to primary blessing. When God goes all out and decides to pull all the registers, he blesses us with himself. God’s greatest gift to his children is more of himself.
At the end of the passage in Luke chapter eleven where Jesus introduces the Lord’s Prayer, he interprets the prayer in verse thirteen. “If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children (i.e. secondary blessing), how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! (i.e. primary blessing).”
The Holy Spirit is just like Jesus. The Spirit of God is Jesus incognito, invisible, yet experiential. This passage in Luke is full of imperatives; ask! seek! Knock! It is Jesus’ invitation to us is to be bold in our praying. Praying boldly means asking God for more of him above asking God for more from him.
What we want is in most cases not what we need. We often want more things from God. But that’s not what we need. We need more of him and not more things from him.
It is not that longing in and of itself is wrong. It isn’t. It is that we are too easily satisfied with what we have when we’ve gotten it. What enamors us initially is too weak in its staying power once we have it in our possession. The notion that what we long for is what will satisfy us is an invention of our own imagination. We were made for more fullness than even our wildest dreams could conjure up. As C. S. Lewis has written:
“If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday by the sea. We are too easily pleased.”
If we are too easily pleased, what then is the point of pleasure? Pleasure is a guide on our wilderness longings intending to take us to the source of perfect satisfaction. When hunger is satiated, thirst is quenched, desire has been fulfilled, and we are then left with a gnawing feeling that asks, “Is that all?” Appetite quenched is a harbinger of a greater hunger waiting to be satisfied.
Go for the jackpot. Win it big. Ask God for more of Him. Don’t settle for second best – good things. God wants to give you more than more of what you want. He wants to lavish himself upon you. Is that your desire?