If You Want to be Full Of HIM,

Increase Your Emptiness

REFERENCE: I Kings 4:3 And Elisha said, "Borrow as many empty jars as you can from your friends and neighbors. 4 Then go into your house with your sons and shut the door behind you. Pour olive oil from your flask into the jars, setting each one aside when it is filled." 5 So she did as she was told. Her sons kept bringing jars to her, and she filled one after another. 6 Soon every container was full to the brim! "Bring me another jar," she said to one of her sons. "There aren’t any more!" he told her. And then the olive oil stopped flowing.

Observation: Elisha’s command to the widow is an illustration of a very important spiritual concept; to receive all that God has for us, we need to increase our emptiness. What does that mean? Think about all the things that we fill our lives with, business, entertainment, chit-chat, hurrying from here to there, endless details and emails. There is nothing wrong with any of this, by itself. It is just the way life is. Yet, all of this "fullness" keeps us from being in a place where God can, in a more complete way, fill us with Himself.

What, practically, do we need to "empty" ourselves of?

o       Time - our time gets so filled up that there is no space to simply "wait on Him".

o       Mental Space - our minds get so full that we can not meditate on Him. We need to take time to clear our minds so that we can hear what He has to say.

o       Full Hearts - our deepest affections, the things we love the most, can get consumed with the things of this world. We can love them and love it more than we love God.

o       Anxiety - it is hard to be quiet and wait in His presence when we are full of anxiety. First ask Him for peace and then bring our peaceful state as an offering.

o       Satisfaction - when we are fully satisfied, we simply don’t need more from Him. We need to cultivate a dissatisfaction with life lived without full intimacy with our Creator.

Application/Confession: I can get full of life, more than. With a large family and a growing church, my time can get totally sucked up. One thing I do have going for me, I am not satisfied. I want more of Him. I want to know Him! My challenge is to find the time to pursue that passion as I should.

PRAYER: Lord, please empty me of myself and my self satisfactions and pursuits so that I can be a candidate to be full of you. Increase my emptiness only so that I can be full of the right things.