What is the Best Strategy for Getting Your Needs Met?
As human beings (Homosapien, sapien), we’re created with profound needs. Our soul/spirit needs are for belonging, for significance/purpose, for love and intimacy — to be truly known/understood/appreciated and accepted. The more sensitive a person is the more poignant these needs feel. This was meant to drive us to God to DRINK DEEPLY of His sufficiency. But in this fallen world we have distortions about God, and turn to created things, including other people, to find life, instead of to our Creator, Jesus Christ. Our needs affect us at every level (i.e. spiritual, soulistic, psychological and biochemical) and the provision that comes from Christ also applies to the psychological and biochemical. We either turn to Jesus as Lord… or our addictions rule over us.
There is no middle ground between being ruled by Jesus or addiction, so let’s not fool ourselves. We are DRIVEN by these needs, whether we admit it or not. But how we choose to meet those needs… in other words WHERE we turn to look for deeply satisfying life — to the world or to other needy people, pleasure, compensations, or to God, etc. determines frustration or success, life or death, abundance or barrenness. God is more than enough and has more than enough for you.
But His provision is most often met through you ACTIVELY PARTNERING with Himself. That partnership means a trust relationship where you align with God as His INTIMATE ALLY. You provide the trust an willing obedience; He supplies the grace power to give up broken strategies for a true and deep wholeness.
Do you have a strategy of going to the Vanity Fair of Babylon, or to Jesus for your needs?
That answer is Jesus and that is simple, but not simplistic. This is not immediate gratification. It is a relationship, not a formula. So, to keep trusting Jesus during this training process called life, requires faith.
Jesus will take us into a journey of our real desires and an honest exploration of what is driving us, peeling away our falseness and woundedness to grow us into more and more worship of Himself so that we grow in our capacity of loving deeply. We thus move from needy and insecure child, to wounded, reactionary and unconscious, to aware/giving/loving — not because we are so mature and smart and enlightened and self-accomplished, but because we have conformed to the image of Christ that frees us to be our most real selves. We could call that becoming
We don’t stop needing, in fact the more we grow, the more we need. In fact, what we experience, if we are to be true to our own hearts, is that we become more and more clear that what we need most is what only heaven can provide.
Buddhists try to repress their suffering by suffocating their true needs. Pretending they can ignore or escape their desires. That is the Buddhist strategy to stop the suffering of unmet needs. Their strategy of becoming enlightened thus also means becoming fake — pretending they don’t desire what they actually desire is inauthentic… and hundreds of years of history hows that in practice, it has made their culture a shithole, not great or glorious. This is easily measured in thousands of metrics. But the real answer is to be honest about your needs, and take them to Jesus ongoingly. That vulnerability is the humility and trust that saves us AS we take ourselves to God, trusting that what Jesus said about his power and ability to save us is real.
