What are your cravings?

THE SEARCH FOR SATISFACTION

In 1932, 18 year-old Helen Madison held the world record for swimming. She had won 23 national championships in America, broken every world record, and won three Olympic Gold medals. Thirty years later, a newspaper editor found her in a one-room basement apartment, a lonely, abandoned woman, forgotten by the world, dying of cancer, and on the verge of suicide.
The editor introduced her to someone who was able to lead her to Jesus Christ.
Helen Madison died one year later, but she died with a smile on her lips and victory in her heart, because she had found what she had been looking for - something that wealth and fame had failed to give her - inner peace and satisfaction.
Many of us are like Helen Madison. We look for satisfaction in the wrong places. We allow the pressures and standards of the world to distort our values. Like her, we attach great importance to fleeting things like success, popularity and money, and like her we find that these are not the answer to the aching need within us. We think that what we have is more important than what we are, without realising that "the haves" are not always the happiest of people.
A few years ago, a Hindu millionaire in Singapore told me sadly:"I have everything that money can buy - except peace of mind."
A Chinese businessman in Hong Kong was boasting about his many hotels, his million-dollar shares, and his numerous wives, and in the same breath said with despair:
"...but all this is nothing, just empty nothing."
Sweden and Europe and Japan in Asia are two of the most affluent and progressive countries in the world. If material wealth, education and scientific progress are the answers to life's searching questions, the people in these two countries should be the happiest in the world. But they are not.
Statistics tell us that more people commit suicide in these two countries than anywhere else in the world. In Japan alone, about 25,000 people take their own lives every year. North America is both a wealthy and progressive, yet someone attempts to take his own life every 2.5 minutes. More people are crowding America's mental asylums and psychiatric clinics more than any other time in the history of the nation.
Why?
Basically, it is because man is on the wrath with God. He is seeking out to oust His Creator from his life. He wants to put gold in the place of God, the almighty dollar god in the place of the Almighty God. He wants to forsake the God who made him, loved him and sustains him. He wants to worship at the shrine of materialism instead. Christ's warning must be heeded.
"A man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions."
On another occasion He said:"What shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what will he give in exchange for his soul?"(Mark 8:26-37).
A man's soul is far more precious than all the riches in the world. It is so precious that God, the Almighty Creator of the Universe, was willing to sacrifice the life of His only Son Jesus Christ to rescue it from the grip of materialism and greed.
"God loved the world so much that He gave His only Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:16).
Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, made that sacrifice of His life and dignity willingly and wholeheartedly because we mean more to Him than anything else in the world. To Him, the unbearable shame and agony of the cross was a small price to pay for the redemption of our eternal souls. He died that we might live. He was forsaken so that we might never be forsaken. He suffered hellish agony to introduce us to the joys of heaven. And today, He is alive, the conquerer of death whose victory can be our victory.
Down the centuries, countless men and women have made the momentous discovery that the wealth and pleasures of the world are here only for a moment and offer only a passing satisfaction, a transient happiness, a fleeting contentment. Countless men and women have reached the end of their tethers and turned to Christ in desperation - and found Life's only treasures in Him. Countless men and women have had their eyes opened, their priorities set right, and their true sense of values restored by the Carpenter from Galilee.
You can be one of them. You, too, can discover in Jesus all that you have been looking for. He will give you every desire of your heart if you give that heart to Him. He says:"Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."(Matthew 6:33)
The proof of the cake is in the eating of it, not in admiring or arguing about it.
"Come and see" the living Christ.
"Believe and see" the manifestations of His power and glory. "Taste and see" the depths of His goodness and love to all His children.
Dont squander your life in pursuit of a transient satisfaction that will only leave you emptier than before. Dont waste your youth and energy and resources in the things that cannot ease your innermost longings. Dont throw away your eternal souls by chasing an illusive dream that will turn to dust in your hand.
Christ has the answer to each yearning need within you. Why not go to Him?
Christ speaks to you today as you face life's dissatisfactions, "Come to me, all of you who are tired from carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest."
by Dr G.D. James