CONCERT OF PRAYER

Pray Week 899

“Is That All There Is?”

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? (Matthew 16:26)

Jon Krakauer writes in his book, Into Thin Air: ‘Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet…I’d been fantasizing about this moment for months. But now that I was finally here, actually standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, I couldn’t summon the energy to care…I snapped four quick photos…then turned and headed down from the peak…I had spent less than five minutes on the roof of the world.’

We can be a driven people – driven to achieve, attain, and acquire. Having goals and the drive to achieve them is not necessarily a bad thing. Such drive becomes detrimental however when it usurps our relationship with family, friends, and especially our relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

Apart from Jesus Christ, we are an empty people existing in an empty way of life. When we deny Christ, we deny the imperishable gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit and we then seek to fill the resultant void with the perishable items of this world.

Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them. (Psalm 115:4-8)

Like the silver and gold that we idolize, we place ourselves in a vault of fear, afraid of theft and loss of value. Our sense of security is always shaken and our inner peace is stolen from us. Like the money we strive for and care about above all else we become spent, worn out, and devalued as a result of shallow life relationships.

Whatever the ‘idol’ we seek to fill our emptiness with, we will become like it. Addictions – physical or chemical – leave us as empty as when we began and left unchecked, the addiction results in our being used up and cast aside like the paraphernalia associated with it.

Do you feel emptiness in your life? Perhaps you have accepted Jesus Christ in years past but the pressures and cares of this life have choked off your relationship with Him. Perhaps you have struggled to fill an emptiness in your life with anything or anyone but Jesus, only to find the emptiness becoming increasingly worse. Like Jon Krakauer you achieved, and now that you have, you cannot summon the energy to care.

If you have chased the things of this world and are now asking ‘Is that all there is?’ then ask Jesus to fill your emptiness and make you whole. Seek to revive your heart with a fresh infilling of God’s Holy Spirit.