By Tim Rowe

Are you consumed with God? What an intriguing and life-changing question! Or is God just another contact in your Rolodex of life that you mean to catch up with and try to fit Him in your schedule, but the busyness of life has just swept away this opportunity. It is unfortunate to say, but most of us are more consumed with our grocery list than we are with God. God has pressed this question into the very fiber of my soul, and as I examined my life with an open and honest eye I would have to say I have fallen woefully short of being consumed with God. We are consumed with our television shows, consumed with our music, consumed with our movies, consumed with our schedules, consumed with our careers, consumed with our education, consumed with our politics, consumed with our family, consumed with our health, consumed with our success but how many of us are consumed with God? We are just too busy for our Creator and would rather spend time at a Starbucks with some latte rather than in the throne room of the living God becoming intimate and acquainted with God Almighty. 

Just think of all the people we would offend if we were consumed with God! We would be labeled a wacko, a religious nut, an intolerant fool, a misguided idiot and an unenlightened, dogmatic jerk if we dared to be consumed with God.  We have so “evolved” in culture, science and behavior that we just don’t need to be consumed with God anymore or so we are told. Who needs God anymore as long as I have my iPod? Who needs God when I have the world at my fingertips from my computer in my cozy house? Who needs God when I have Netflix, iTunes, DroidX and Xbox? Who needs God when I can TiVo? God has to be more than just on our mailing list. God has to be more than just on our wish list. God has to be a living, burning fire in the depths of our heart. God has to be more alive, more real, more present, more close and more looked to than any earthly thing. An electronic device may fascinate you for a moment, but it can never bring you peace, love, joy or true satisfaction. It is a sad characteristic to this “enlightened” world that God is so dead in the hearts of people.  

We have a whole religious culture in society today, but God is most often a million miles away as its heartbeat long ago quit being synchronized to the heartbeat of God. Unfortunately there is no place where God may be deader than in the church. We rationalize that we go to church for 60 minutes a week and offer sporadic thirty-second prayers to God throughout the week and that is enough as I just have too many other things going on. My schedule is packed. I am overwhelmed with everything I HAVE to do. You just don’t understand. 

It is sad to say that there are Ten Thousand and Eighty (10,080) minutes in a week and Five Hundred Twenty Four Thousand One Hundred and Sixty (524,160) minutes in a year and we think we are doing God a favor if we spend sixty minutes of the over ten thousand minutes a week for Him or three thousand minutes a year of the over half a million available. Wow we are spending one half of one percent of our time with God, and we wonder why spiritual anemia and lack are rampant in our lives. We wonder why God is just not all that real to us and why we are so lacking of the demonstration of the power of God in our lives. We wonder why our heart is dead to God. 

God must become more to us then a fleeting thought or a desperate prayer when we are in trouble. God must become our life. God must become our passion. God must become what we chase after with an unrelenting tenacity of heart and soul. I dare you to be consumed with God and see how God will move to transform your life into the realm of the miraculous, the amazing and the extraordinary. Nothing compares to God, absolutely nothing. Nothing is more satisfying than Jesus Christ. We have settled for second best. We have been consumed with the counterfeit, the second-rate, the cheap thrill and the moment of glory.  We love to have our senses tickled with the latest fad. All the while God is crying out like in Isaiah 65 (Message Bible): 

“I’ve made myself available to those who haven’t bothered to ask.
I’m here, ready to be found

   by those who haven’t bothered to look.
I kept saying ‘I’m here, I’m right here’
   to a nation that ignored me.
I reached out day after day
   to a people who turned their backs on me,
People who make wrong turns,
   who insist on doing things their own way.  

How long can a nation afford to ignore Him? Isn’t it about time that we seek God with our whole heart and find Him? He has and always will be right there with His arms stretched out towards us. He always invites us to come and turn to Him and experience life, joy and peace in a new dimension far above the glitter of the world. What is holding us back? What is preventing us from being consumed with God?                                      

Do you know that God is consumed with you? Do you know that God thinks about you all the time? Do you know that God’s love for you is immeasurable and unfathomable and to such a degree that it transcends human understanding? Do you know that God longs for you to fall into His embrace and to cleave unto Him with all your heart and strength? Do you know that God wants to be wanted by you, He wants to be loved, He wants to be cherished, He wants to be adored, He wants to be treasured, and He wants to be worshipped?  The Psalmist says that God’s thoughts toward us are so many and so wonderful that they cannot be numbered. 

God has always loved you no matter what you have done. God has always been there even in your darkest hour even though you may not have ever realized it. God will never give up on you for He is a loving God and not just a fickle person (Hosea 11). God will never quit chasing you for His love for you burns deep and true. God is pleading to you, please let me be your God, your everything, your reason for breathing and let me bear my mighty arm for you and show you my goodness and glory. God has never forgotten you, not ever, not even for a second. Don’t you want to know this God? 

Are you desperate for God or does God only enter the picture when you are on your last rope with nowhere else to turn? Do we place God on shelf only to take Him off the shelf when we have tried everything else? Do we realize deep inside of every man and woman is the intense desire to know His Creator because we were all made in the image of God. This hunger is never satisfied by things or people or addictions or success, but can only be quenched by an intimate relationship with God Almighty. Is your love for God all-consuming or as affectionate as a peck on the cheek? Have we allowed the routine of life to replace the adventure of knowing the only true God whose love is boundless, whose mercy is everlasting and whose grace is abundant? Are we too busy, to tired or just too lazy to spend time with God daily? Do we run to do everything else first before we even consider time with God?  

Do you know God gave everything so you could be brought as an honored son or daughter into the family of God? Would you give all you have to Him without reservation as act of devoted love? Let us cry out like Job “My ears have heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you!” Do you long to experience God on a deeper level? Do you long to enjoy God in all the richness of everything He is? Why not be consumed with God? You will never be disappointed from now throughout all eternity. He is calling you now to come to Him and experience the healing wholeness and deliverance that is available in His Son Jesus Christ. He crushed all captivity, sin and bondage and paid the ultimate price so we might live. Doesn’t he deserve everything? Doesn’t He merit all our passion, all our love, all our devotion, all our worship, all our priorities, and all our heart? How we could advance the kingdom of God if we were consumed with God! Do you dare to take God at His Word and be consumed with Him? Your life will never be the same and the lives of all those around you. It is time to take the leap. We have nothing to lose. Let’s be consumed with God from this moment forward. Let us cry out like David with a yearning heart:                                   

Psalm 65:1-8 (NIV): 

 ¹ You, God, are my God,
   earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you,
   my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
   where there is no water.

 ² I have seen you in the sanctuary
   and beheld your power and your glory.
³ Because your love is better than life,
   my lips will glorify you.
⁴ I will praise you as long as I live,
   and in your name I will lift up my hands.
⁵ I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods;
   with singing lips my mouth will praise you.

 ⁶ On my bed I remember you;
   I think of you through the watches of the night.
⁷ Because you are my help,
   I sing in the shadow of your wings.
⁸ I cling to you;
   your right hand upholds me.