Where Do You Find True Satisfaction?

So where do you go, who do you go to, or what do you do to find satisfaction?  And, depending on your answer, a follow-up question is – Does this place, person, thing, or activity bring true and lasting satisfaction? Or is it short-lived and potentially laced with major or minor negative consequences?

Would eating this mound of Hershey’s chocolate with several miniature candy bars, surrounded with mouth-watering fresh berries, bring you satisfaction?

The Rolling Stones, a well known rock band in their prime several decades back, sang a song “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction…”  They tried.  Girls, money, fame–yet the song from their mouth indicated a dissatisfaction with what the world had, and has, to offer.

Prior to the Rolling Stones by a few thousand years, the wisest man that ever lived, apart from Jesus, wrote a whole book evaluating the dissatisfaction with life, the places, people, and happenings of life.  His brief summary of each topic was – Meaningless.  But, in Ecclesiastes 12:13 he concludes by saying the only thing that makes sense of all this is, “Fear God and keep His commandments”.  God brings meaning and satisfaction in a world that can, in itself, provide neither.

Jesus, God in the flesh, shows up in Matthew 5:6 and says “Blessed (happy) are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”  What does this mean?   It means that true and lasting happiness and satisfaction comes only through a right relationship with God.  Hungering and thirsting for righteousness, like Psalm 42 talks about, occurs only after God has done a work in a person’s heart. Only after a person has placed his or her faith in Christ alone, the living water (Jn.4) and the bread of life (Jn.6), for salvation, will a person ever truly experience genuine satisfaction, both here on earth (Rom.5:1-5) and for all eternity (Rev.7:14-17).

The opposite of this satisfaction is where many find themselves, like how Jeremiah described God’s people 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 hold no water. ” We forsake God.  We creatively, deceptively, and possessively craft our own fantastical path to pleasure and satisfaction…only to find out how empty, broken, and riddled with pain and disappointment that imaginary path really was.  The pleasure of the moment is then swallowed in the pain of reality.  Kind of like taking a bite of Chocolate Berry Mountain dessert to find out it’s surrounding a heap of dog crap.  That’s right.  The dessert you are looking at. It has dog feces in it.

God provides us with the real thing that gets better with knowledge, time, and relationship.  The world’s offerings are exactly the opposite.  So, are you satisfied?  Do you hunger and thirst for righteousness?  Christ offers true satisfaction.