The human heart has an infinite capacity for happiness and an unending need for love, because it is created for an infinite God who is unending love. The desperate turn is when we bring the aching emptiness of our hearts to one another with the hope, the plea, “Make me happy. Fill this ache.” And often out of love we do try to make one another happy, and then we wonder why it never lasts.

It can’t be done.  You will kill yourself trying.  We are broken people, with a famished craving in our hearts. We are fallen, all of us. It happened so long ago, back in the Garden of Eden, so early in our story that most of us don’t even realize it happened. But the effects of the Fall are something we live with every day, and it’d be best for all of us if understood what it’s done to the soul of a man and a woman.

The Evil One lied to us about where true life was found ... and we believed him.  God gave us the wondrous world as our playground, and he told us to enjoy it fully and freely. Yet despite his extravagant generosity, we had to reach for the one forbidden thing. And at that moment something in our hearts shifted. We reached, and in our reaching we fell from grace. Our glory faded, as Milton said, "faded so soon."  I have learned many years ago not to look for affirmation from others.  Instead get it from the One who created me and loves me unconditionally. God will never play the games that we do with each other. God is love. He has loved me and has a plan for my life that gives me purpose.   

Something has gone wrong with the human race, and we know it. Better said, something has gone wrong within the human race. It doesn't take a theologian or a psychologist to tell you that. Read a newspaper. Spend a weekend with your relatives. Pay attention to the movements of your own heart in a single day. Most of the misery we suffer on this planet is the fruit of the human heart gone bad. This glorious treasure has been stained, marred, infected. Sin enters the story and spreads like a computer virus.

By the sixth chapter of Genesis, our downward spiral had reached the point where God himself couldn't bear it any longer. The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. (Genesis 6:5-6)

Any honest person knows this. We know we are not what we were meant to be. Yet God never gives up on us. The 23rd Psalm promises us that goodness and mercy shall pursue us all the days of our lives and we will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. Look no further than God. While even our closest relationships will fail us, God never will!

Pastor Dave