The God-Shaped Vacuum -- Part 3

Dear TEAMS,

In the Fall of 2011, I was a keynote speaker at our church’s Ladies’ Retreat.  I spoke about the God-Shaped hole, and how that related to addiction, and brought in my personal experience with food addiction.  This and the following posts are this same talk with minimal modifications. 

A attended the retreat and said it’s what she’s heard her whole life.  May you find this information as familiar.  And may you decide every day to allow Father to fill you when you are empty, instead of with all the earthly stuff you rely on.  Because you all have addictions as well.

Click here to read the first part of this talk. 
Click here to read the second part of this talk.

Love,

It was when I hit my 30s that I had a really big revelation.  I grew to understand that my reason—everyone’s reason--for living was because God created me to be intimate with Him.  Period.  God created all of us to be intimate with Him—it is our main purpose for being here.  If we were paralyzed on our bed for all of our lives and couldn’t do a thing for Him, but we chose to commune with Him and relate with Him all our days, we would actually fulfill the purpose we were created for.  Everything else—even the good stuff like evangelism, missions work, reading our Bibles—is secondary to that purpose.

But then I asked myself why it was, if I was created for this purpose, why I didn’t do this?  That’s when God led me to different verses and writings that showed me the answer.

What is the God-Shaped Vacuum?

Lord, you have made us
for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in You.
Augustine, Confessions 1.1.1

There exists in each of us a God-shaped vacuum.   Think of yourself with a puzzle piece in the middle of you at your core.  The only piece that will fit perfectly is the piece that is shaped just like God.  The problem is that we put other things into that God-shaped hole.  Some of them almost fit, but none of them fits perfectly the way the God shaped puzzle piece does.  Only when that piece is fitted in there perfectly do we find relief from that nagging emptiness.  

Here are a few verses from the Bible that speak of this, void that can only be satisfied by God.  I know before God really showed me this concept, I thought David was speaking about being in a mood for God.  After learning this concept, I realized it was a perpetual state we are in.  David wasn’t discussing an emotion, but a constant state of being.

Psalm 42: AS THE hart pants and longs for the water brooks, so I pant and long for You, O God. 2My inner self thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?

Psalm 63: 1O GOD, You are my God, earnestly will I seek You; my inner self thirsts for You, my flesh longs and is faint for You, in a dry and weary land where no water is. 

Ecclesiastes 3:
11 He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end. (NASV)

11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He also has planted eternity in men's hearts and minds [a divinely implanted sense of a purpose working through the ages which nothing under the sun but God alone can satisfy], yet so that men cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. (Amplified)

The great thing is that now you have a name for that feeling of emptiness, dissatisfaction with life, discontentment, restlessness, despair, depression you may experience.  When you know this is the source of those feelings, you can set things aright fairly easily, though sometimes it will take time and all the time it will take work.

Once I got ahold of this concept, and how it was the source of my frustration and discontentment of life, God redefined things for me.  I actually didn’t believe it at first, because it seemed too simple, much like in Psalm 119:130 which says, The unfolding of Your words gives light; It gives understanding to the simple.   But more and more, He showed me that really, accepting this Truth could solve a lot of my life issues, if I was willing to do the work associated with it.  Once I accepted this Truth, Scripture took on new dimensions for me.  One big way it did was in how I defined “Sin.”  You see, I used to define sin as the things in the Bible I shouldn’t do, or disobeying God.  But once I got the concept of what the God shaped hole was, I had to redefine sin.  Sin became for me anything I put in the God-shaped hole that wasn’t Him.  

That really blew me away!  I no longer had a checklist of things I could and couldn’t do—I actually was now stuck with having to evaluate in each moment, “Am I using this thing to fill the place only God can fill to meet this emptiness I have?”  So all of a sudden, I had to evaluate my heart attitude, not my actions.  For instance, nowhere in the Bible does God speak about chocolate being evil.  However, for me, dark chocolate holds a special place in my heart and it was something I turned to for comfort.  But now, I needed to evaluate, “Am I eating this chocolate to meet a need only God can fill, or am I eating it because I like the taste of chocolate and it is pleasurable?”  And if I was, I needed to decide whether or not I was going to eat that chocolate.  If I ate that chocolate when my heart was not right, I needed to accept the fact that I had sinned.  It really put a whole new light on what matters in life.  

So, as I was preparing for this talk, I thought it would help to give you all examples of a typical day of sinning in my life.  So I got out my pen and paper, and I would like to show you a list of things I put in my God shaped hole instead of God to satisfy a yearning I had at any given moment in the day.  Remember, these things were technically sin because of what my heart attitude was, not because they are inherently bad things.  It was thinking that these things were God shaped:

• Prideful thoughts
• Comparing my body to someone else’s
• Food
• Perfectionism
• Lust
• Religiosity
• Self-improvement
• Envy
• Anger
• Dwelling on something wrong that was done to me in the past
• Accomplishing my to-do list
• Sarcasm
• Cynicism
• Fantasy
• Facebook
• Television
• Pursuing gaining a thing
• Fiction reading
• sweets

I got so tired of recording this all, that I stopped at lunch!  

When I got this new definition of sin, I noticed a pattern emerging, and that there were certain things in life that I repeatedly turned to in my life when I would have that empty feeling.  

More in the next post!