The Pain of Longing
“Longing is the compass on the journey” – Dana Candler
God creates longings.
God awakens longings.
God sustains longings.
God ANSWERS LONGINGS!
Psalm 42:7 AMP “[Roaring] deep calls to [Roaring] deep at the thunder of Your waterspouts; all Your breakers and Your rolling waves have gone over me.“
God delays the answer of the longing in order to cultivate the heart to receive the desire he placed in it. The deep ache comes with deep power. The two most influential influences on the human heart are pain and beauty. The beautiful God imparts transcendent longings upon the human heart. This wonderful and awful pain shapes the heart and increases the capacity for fulfillment.
- In the Garden, Adam named all the creatures, cultivating the ache which God answered with Eve
- God promised the Seed, the one who would crush the serpents head, in the garden of Eden. Jesus Christ was born, the minister of the new covenant, thousands of years later. To this day we are 2000 years into longing for Him to return.
…and there comes the revelation. God is love, and love is patient. You are never more alive when you are aching with longing. To be patient is to suffer long, which in it’s truest sense is the very definition of longing. We experience this truth daily in the form of hunger, you long for food and it’s answered when you eat a meal. What you will discover though, is that if you skip a few meals, all the sudden food tastes alot better!!! Go for a jog in the sweltering heat, and come home and chug an ice cold glass of water! Wow, what an experience, but the ache of the hunger and thirst is what made the possiblity of pleasure.
We as a generation have been deceived that instant gratification is the answer to our longings, and it is only producing dullness, boredom, and emptyness within our beings. The slightest discomfort sends us running to media, relationships, food, entertainment, anything to answer the cry of our hearts. Even in the church, we see epidemic of spiritual dullness and we are FULL of all the secondary forms of satisfaction. But Jesus addressed this in John 4, lets take a look at it.
The chapter starts out with the disciples going off to town to get food (seeking the answer 
to their hunger) and Jesus was tired and sat down by Jacob’s well. A Samaritan woman is at the well and Jesus asks her for a drink (brings up the subject of thirst). She asks why a Jew would ask a Samaritian for a drink. Jesus answers and says ‘If you had only known and recognized God’s gift (answer to her longing), and who it was your talking to, you would have asked me for a drink and I would have given you Living Water.’ Jesus also explains to her that if she drinks from this well she will thirst again, but if she drinks Living Water, she will NEVER be thirsty again, but the water will become a spring of water flowing continually unto eternal life. He goes on to give her a word of knoweldge (awakening fascination, and kindly leading her to repentance), tells her the Father is seeking worshippers in spirit and truth, and tells her He is the messiah. She leaves her water jar and runs off to town. Then the disciples show up and try to get Jesus to eat. He tells them his food (nourishment) is to the will (pleasure) of the Father.
A couple points to consider in this passage:
- Like the disciples, our natural response to longing is to seek a quick answer apart from Jesus. (not saying the disciples getting food was wrong necessarily)
- We do not recognize Jesus as the answer to our longings.
- Jesus invites us to ask Him for a drink, that we will never thirst again. We likely have prayed this and felt nothing. We likely stand before him as this woman did not even realizing who in the world Jesus is!? As we mentioned before, it’s the delay in time, the patience and long suffering of love that we experience when we come before Him and ask Him for more. The pain when we read His word and pray and sing to Him but feel nothing. You are coming smack dab into contact with your own cold, dull, unmoved heart. STAY THE COURSE. Do not give up, do not give into instant gratification, keep pressing in till it hurts. Till you can’t stand it anymore! When you can’t take it anymore, start fasting! Become more hungry. Allow your heart to begin to truly tear, and allow yourself to be brought to tears because of the lack of His presence in your life. When you keep pressing in, you are making a place for Him! You are cultivating a capacity to receive and experience transcendent love like you have never known. Don’t wait for the power of God to give and serve and love and seek Him out, if you do you lost the point!
- If you look closely, the conversation has little to do with water and more to do with the thirst of the spirit. Jacob’s well is representative of the Jewish history and faith. There was a momentary answer to the cry of the heart in the Jewish religion, one God provided through His promises, but one that was incomplete. Judaism was never intended to be an end in itself, but actually something meant to create a longing God fully intended on satisfying in Messiah. It was designed by God to cultivate longing, but provided no sustaining answer, the peoples relation to God was distant and required maintenance through the sacrificial system. Imagine how powerful it is that the promised Messiah, the wondrous one who would shed His own blood for this woman, was standing right in front of this woman!? She is actually thirsting for Him, His love. The truth is you don’t have to imagine it, by the Holy Spirit, God has never been nearer! He is yearning to be a fire inside of you, to be the great ache inside of you because He desires to answer that pain with deeper revelations of the love of Jesus upon your heart!
- I believe “never thirst again” does not speak to us never drinking water again. I also don’t think it means that our spiritual desires are just always answered. I believe what Jesus is speaking of is the Holy Spirit, the very capacity within us to experience nearness to God without the guilt or shame of our sin because of the blood of Jesus. We will never be dominated by our flesh nature’s drive to seek instant gratification to answer our true longing apart from God.
- The Father is SEEKING worshipers! Is that not amazing?! Does that provoke wonder in your heart? Jesus was seeking to bring her into relationship with a God that is pursuing her, and desiring her worship! This is a critical revelation your soul is yearning for whether you are aware of it as you read this or not!
- Jesus opens up to the disciples a whole new realm of true hunger and the true answer. Jesus found sustainance and nourishment by seeking to answer the FATHERS longings! To fulfill the Father’s pleasure?! When is the last time you got home from a rough day of work and recognized that you would find more satisfaction and nourishment in seeking to bring pleasure to the Father then by eating dinner? This isn’t romantic language! Jesus actually said this, not to set Himself in a league of His own, but to INVITE US INTO IT!
I am writing this because I am coming off a profound week of encountering the Love of God, experiencing profound breakthrough in the Spirit and in my heart, and seeing worship arise in my heart. The truth is…I am experiencing a profound ache in my soul, and emptyness in my heart. I am longing to fill it with ANYTHING. I want to surf facebook, try to connect with someone, play a video game, make music, anything to distract myself. Anything to rot my brain! I am longing and all the Word and worship is doing is awakening my heart to it’s barrenness and it’s painful. Typing this out maybe gave me some instant gratification, but it served as a reminder.
The pain is good.
The ache is there for a reason.
God is faithful always.
He will answer the longings of my heart.
…..in due time.
with love,
Rob
