God-Shaped Hole
If we try to stuff anything but God into that God-shaped hole in us, we’ll end up dissatisfied, restless, and discontent.
God-Shaped Hole (Written by guest writer David Peterson)
Jesus arrives in Jerusalem to attend the Feast of Booths. While speaking in the temple, He refers to Himself as The Living Water.
He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, “From his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.” —John 7:38
The phrase “innermost being” translates the Greek word koilia, meaning a hollow place or belly, but figuratively the deepest part of a person—the heart.
Jesus describes our spiritual emptiness as the source of our spiritual thirst and the divine solution is to fill it with living water from the Holy Spirit. This living water then flows out of believers, bringing blessings to others.
This “God-shaped” hole is biblical, and the concept has been expressed beautifully by Blaise Pascal, a 17th-century French philosopher, who captured it this way: “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.” If we try to stuff anything but God into that God-shaped hole in us, we’ll end up dissatisfied, restless, and discontent. But fill that God-shaped hole with God, and what do we find? Love, joy, peace, contentment, tranquilitya and serenity!
John Newton wrote the hymn “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken” in 1779. The second verse reads:
See, the streams of living waters,
Springing from eternal love,
Well supply Thy sons and daughters
And all fear of want remove.
Who can faint while such a river
Ever flows their thirst to assuage?
Grace, which like the Lord, the Giver,
Never fails from age to age.
Newton reminds us that The Living Waters come from eternal love, with grace, to supply believers without fail.
Let us pray:
God, may all this living water supernaturally flow from us today. We pray for the fruit of the Spirit to flow from our lives. We pray that Your Word, by the power of Your Spirit, would fill us and flow from us today. We pray that living water through our words would flow to others—brothers and sisters in Christ—and help to fill their own God-shaped holes. Amen.
