Longing and Fulfillment

I have been thinking more about longing and the role that it plays in our spiritual lives. When I am longing I want one thing…fulfillment of that longing, and I want it soon. We love testimonies of fulfillment when God meets a need or desire in dramatic ways. Our spirit celebrates those testimonies because they clearly display the presence of a good and loving God. Our flesh is also able to celebrate those testimonies because somebody got what they were longing for.

God promises us the fulfillment of all our longings for justice, goodness, and beauty, and our longings for Him, in the new heaven and earth. What Peter calls our inheritance in 1 Peter 1:4. But while we are on this earth and in this age, I think God is more interested in longing than He is in fulfillment.

This is not something that appeals to us. I maintain that if you look at any expression of Christianity that is extremely popular, it will focus on a God of fulfillment. The heart of the message will present God as desiring to provide more fulfillment for our longings in our present lives when we seek Him with our whole hearts (whatever that means or looks like). The end or goal of the seeking is fulfillment in our lives here on this earth.

But what if longing is what God wants for us in this life, not fulfillment? This would make sense out of the experience of only rarely receiving the fulfillment of our longings. Those experiences are not given to satisfy our longing but rather to increase it.

Look at the example of supernatural physical healing. Celebrated healing ministries have numerous testimonies of genuine supernatural healing, but only for a small fraction of the people they minister to. If God is a God of fulfillment for the longing for physical healing, then the vast majority walk away from that healing ministry without encountering God and possibly feeling forgotten or abandoned by Him. But if God is a God of healing, ultimately in the new heaven and earth, then experiencing sporadic supernatural healings is a taste of the new age that increases our appetite, or longing, for what is real, but not yet.

We are to engage our work as people who long for a better world. So we are to try and make the world better. But if we are looking for fulfillment of that longing in our work lives, and especially looking to God for fulfillment of that longing, I fear that we will face a lot of disappointment and disillusionment. I also fear that pursuit of fulfillment makes us vulnerable to the temptation to engage in ungodly behavior that appears to provide fulfillment as an end that justifies the means.

You have heard… we are called to be faithful and not necessarily successful. That can also be expressed as, we are called to display longing and not necessarily fulfillment. Further, consider that success does not negate faithfulness, but fulfillment does negate longing. So if God really does want us to be a people of longing, then we will not experience fulfillment in this life.

This is true of physical health. Everyone will experience increased longing for physical health the longer they live. Any fulfillment that they experience through supernatural healing is temporary at best. The longing for a new body without any disease or decay will never be satisfied in this age and the felt experience of desiring or longing for that new body only gets stronger as we age.