Come to terms with the idea that we have capacities for joy and satisfaction in God that are enormous and cannot be satisfied by the American dream of health, wealth, marriage, family, sex, retirement, relationships, a good job, hobbies, sports, recreation, fame etc…and a pain-free death. Augustine said it 1600 years ago and it is as true today as it was then; “You have made us for Yourself and we are restless until we find our rest in You.” We may stuff ourselves with all that life has to offer and pour ourselves into all the noblest causes, but the great cavern of human longing can never be filled with the tiddly winks of temporal pleasure because we were made for eternal and infinite pleasure, and only God in Christ can give it. If we do not get our minds around this massive reality that God must become central in our affections, we will continue as pinballs, banging around from one diversion to another until one day we die, exhausted, having wasted the one life we have been given.
So beg and plead with God to open your spiritual eyes to creation glory and Word glory. When you see a rainbow, do not settle on thrilling merely at the rainbow’s glory, but ask God to show you the profound and soul-stirring glory of His ownership of the rainbow. Ask that the physical beauties all around you would serve to continually point you Godward. Ask to be able to see far more deeply into Christ Himself, and not to settle merely on the echoes of His glory. For example, I described earlier the sun in the sky; bask in that magnificence, but recognize that the sun is merely an echo, a faint echo of the God who made it. How much greater must be the soul-satisfying glory of Jesus who, “upholds the universe by the word of His power,” which includes our little sun, 93 million miles away. If the sun holds such power over the earth so that it does not hurtle off into space, but is glad in her orbit, cannot the Son of God exert that kind of sway in your life?