Where is your peace found? Where is your joy found? What do you seek after to find your fulfillment in life? Fulfillment is “the meeting of a requirement or condition” according to Websters. As we walk through life, we seek fulfillment in many aspects but there is only one that can meet our searching with the answers to our questions.
When Adam sinned against God back at the beginning of time a chasm was created between God and man. This distance from God would create an emptiness in every life that man would seek to fulfill. This emptiness is sought to be filled by alcohol for some, by drugs for others, by achieving success in their career, by having a successful “picture perfect” family, by trying to be a “good” person, by pornography, or adultery, or by many other things that we turn into idols and place before God. We seek after the American dream of health, wealth, and happiness, yet we still feel empty and lost. We still feel alone and often afraid. The world reaches for and grabs everything they can find to attempt to fill this void but ignore the only God that can give them that fulfillment.
We feel this way because we are trying to replace the eternal with the temporal and fill the emptiness that was left by man’s separation from God with things that will fade and that mean nothing. The only way to find true fulfillment is through the love and saving grace of Jesus Christ. We must fully surrender our lives and all that we have to Him and only then can we find fulfillment. In John 14:6 Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Jesus places us back in a direct relationship with God the Father. Through Him, that chasm is no longer there, and we are restored. We are called to not attempt to achieve temporal goods or success in this world but, 19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:19-21) To find fulfillment and to fill the emptiness we feel is only achievable by laying our heart at the feet of Jesus and allowing Him to have control of every aspect of our life. Jesus tells us in Matthew 16:25, “25 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” We must be willing to lose all we have and like Job says God gives and God takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord. This is our distinction between worldly fulfillment and Godly fulfillment. The temporal v the eternal.
If we want to be fulfilled, and reach our highest potential, then we must lay aside anything that separated us from Christ and we must lose our personal wants of our flesh, and our personal desires for our lives, and seek after His perfect will for us. Only by doing this will we find our true lives and find fulfillment. It is in Christ and Him alone that we must trust!
