How Do We Fill the God Shaped Hole in Our Lives?

That’s Easy…We put God in it

I loved doing jigsaw puzzles growing up (and still do for that matter). I remember when getting near the end of a puzzle the level of excitement would begin to ramp up. In the accelerated push to get it finished more people would get involved. In the rush, often a piece would get lost.

If you’ve ever done a jigsaw puzzle, you know how frustrating it is to get to the last piece…and you can’t find it anywhere. This is the same frustration we experience when feeling that something is missing in our lives.

Often in life we try to fill the hole where the missing piece belongs with things like drugs, work, love, alcohol, perfection, etc. Not all of these are bad. Some are actually good, but when we try to force one of them into the hole where the missing piece belongs, things just don’t fit.

Finding the missing piece and putting it in makes the picture complete.

In Acts 17:16-34 Paul was in Athens, a city full of idols. The people worshipped all types of different things. One of the idols had an alter with the words, “To an unknown god”. Paul pointed out that they were worshipping so many things that they didn’t even know what they were worshipping.

Like the people in Athens, we tend to worship too many wrong things.

Paul went on to tell them about the unknown God. “This God made the world and everything in it. He is Lord of heaven and earth, and he doesn’t live in temples built by human hands. He doesn’t need help from anyone. He gives life, breath, and everything else to all people. From one person God made all nations who live on earth, and he decided when and where every nation would be. God has done all this, so that we will look for him and reach out and find him. He isn’t far from any of us, and he gives us the power to live, to move, and to be who we are.

We naturally have a feeling of being incomplete or inadequate, and this leads to looking for that missing piece. The problem is that if we don’t know what the piece is or make the effort to look for it…then we’ll never find it.

The hole in our lives can only be filled with the one and only piece that fits it. Finding God and putting Him in the empty spot makes our lives complete.

When We Ask God Man-sized Questions, We Are Limiting the Answers We Get

We Need to be Asking God Sized Questions Instead

Asking a man-sized question is a sure way to get a man-sized answer. As humans it makes sense that we think in human terms, because we are human after all. But what could be possible if we quit limiting ourselves? Because when we incorporate these limitations, we are limiting God’s answer.

This is a little bit like the cute little girl who went into the pet store and shyly asked the store owner for a small rabbit. The store owner asked her what color she would like. “We have black ones, brown ones, white ones. What color would you like?”

The little girl said, “It doesn’t matter, my python won’t care.

The store owner asked a man-sized question. He made some presumptions about what the little girl’s plans were for the rabbit and then asked the question. We do this kind of thing all the time when asking questions of God. We limit His answers with our small questions.

God has a lot bigger plans for us than we have for ourselves.

In Luke 20:27-38, the Sadducees, who didn’t believe in a resurrection, asked Jesus a question about a woman who was childless when her husband died. According to the writings of Moses, the husband’s brother should marry her. In this story the brothers kept dying and the next one would marry her.

The question from the Sadducees was, “In the resurrection, whose wife would she be?”

This is one of those man-sized questions.

Jesus goes on to explain to them that marriage is a worldly thing designed for companionship, family and filling the earth. In Heaven there will be no need for marriage. We will be like the angles.

We need to be thinking bigger, out of the box questions and then have faith that God will answer them. This doesn’t mean that the answer will be what we think or expect. We need to change our simple-minded thinking.

We need to quit holding God back with our small questions.

In Mark 11:23-24, we are told that if we, “…tell a mountain to be lifted up and thrown into the sea, and don’t waiver, that it will happen”. I don’t know about you, but my small man-sized brain finds this hard to believe.

The first vision that comes to my mind is the mountain being lifted from the earth and floating to the nearest ocean and being dropped in. The Scripture doesn’t get into the specifics. Maybe it could involve some big excavation equipment or new technology.

Think about President Kennedy when he said that we would put a man on the moon…and we did. That sounded pretty far fetched when it was said, but it happened. President Kennedy had faith. This doesn’t mean that it was easy, or that a man just magically floated up to the moon.

This was a God-sized idea that required the faith and hard work of a lot of people.

We need to think bigger and have more faith. If we align our man-sized thinking with God’s and remove our human-sized limits, we will be amazed when that mountain is in the sea.