God created you with certain needs of
the heart which only He can fully meet.
I, and my staff have seen that these needs are universal, whether here
in the USA, or in places like Zimbabwe, Chile, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan,
Croatia, Ukraine or England.
Every person needs love because God is
love. Every person needs acceptance
because that is what unconditional love from God truly is. Every person needs worth because we are
valuable enough for God to create us and for Jesus to die for us. Everyone needs security because we need to
know we can’t mess up the love we have and only God’s grace in Christ can
provide that. We use the acronym LAWS to
help people remember their needs.
I want you to imagine four plastic
buckets sitting in front of you. Each
one has a different name on it. The
first says LOVE. The second says
ACCEPTANCE. The third says WORTH. The fourth says SECURITY. God made you to live with those buckets
full. In fact, you can’t live very well
unless they are full. Yet, because we
don’t know they are already full, we work hard at trying to fill them
ourselves.
What are some of the ways we do
this? We may perform so people will like
us. We may manipulate people. We may expect people to meet these needs such
as in marriage and when they don’t, we get angry and start an argument. We may look on Facebook to see what people
are saying about us. We may try to get
our kids to meet these needs by making us proud for the wrong reasons. We may try sex outside of marriage. We may fantasize through porn. In other words, we try to control our
personal universe by living independently of God, by looking to others or
things in trying to meet these needs.
God says it this way in Jeremiah
2:13. For
My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, The fountain
of living waters, To hew for themselves cisterns,
Broken cisterns That can hold no water. (NASB)
God was speaking of Israel at the
time, but it’s still an applicable illustration of what our flesh wants to try
to do for us. First, we turn away from
our real Source who will abundantly satisfy our heart like living waters. Second, we work hard to get our buckets filled
but our buckets have holes in them just like Israel’s cisterns did. (A cistern was a hole you dug into the ground
and hoped rain water would fill so you could have water to satisfy your thirst. But Israel’s had cracks in them so that the
water didn’t stay very long.)
You can’t satisfy your own needs for God
given LAWS, no matter how hard you work or who you try to get to meet
them. The little that you do strive for
will not last and you will have to go out and work hard the next day to get it
again.
If you are a Christ follower, you are
united to the God who is love and He created you so He could love you. Do you believe that? We all get tested in this area when someone
disappoints us or we disappoint ourselves.
Why don’t you thank God this week that
He is the only one who can adequately meet those needs and ask Him to make them
real in you?
Believe it! It's the Gospel.
Live Free In Christ,
Mark Maulding, President and Founder
www.GraceLifeInternational.com All Content Copyright © 2015 Mark Maulding but feel free to pass it on!
