Spiritual Vaccums

I have never thought about this before. But it definitly made me think. I hope it makes you think.

Purpose Driven Life Daily Devotional August 4th 2006

Spritual Vacuums
by John Fischer

Everybody worships something or someone. Worship may be a new emphasis for the church these days, but it is not new for human beings. We have been doing it since we were created. That’s because we were created for this purpose. But God did more than create us and tell us to worship him. He created us with a NEED for worship.

Blaise Pascal, the brilliant French physicist of the seventeenth century who had a dramatic conversion to Christ and went on to write some of the most famous apologetic for the Christian faith in history, is the one who came up with the idea of a God-shaped vacuum in every human heart. That’s because he studied the vacuum and noticed that whenever a vacuum exists something by nature has to rush in and fill it. It seemed to him the perfect picture of how God created us, as constantly pulling in something. Think of yourself as a giant spiritual vacuum.
Now the thing about a vacuum is that it will pull in anything that is within its reach. Like me, you may have heard this concept before, and like me, you may have assumed its work was already accomplished in your life by becoming a Christian. God created us with a need for him—a hole inside us that is in the shape of God so nothing else satisfies that need but him, and once I respond to Christ, that hole is filled and I am spiritually satisfied. But this description doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t show that we are continuing to need him. God doesn’t plug up the hole so we can go on and indulge in whatever we like since this foremost thing is taken care of. He has made us with an enduring need to keep filling ourselves up with him. In other words, we not only have a vacuum, we are vacuums—always on, always sucking up whatever is near the heart.
Whatever you put near the door of your heart is going to be sucked in. Think of the number of things cluttering our spiritual core simply because we have not kept God and his truths close to our hearts at all times. This is why Jesus said we couldn’t serve God and something else. In order to live with our primary purpose fulfilled, we need to keep God as the focus of our worship and nothing else—not pride, or money, or material things, or even people.

What are you placing near your heart today? That is what you worship, and that is what will be sucked into the core of your being—the place where only God belongs, because only he can satisfy.