1553 Filled and Healed

My prayer for you this morning is that God would fill you up. Maybe you’re running on empty and your tank so desperately needs to be filled. Where are you empty? Is it your love tank? Is it your energy tank? Is it your hope tank? Is it your courage tank?

Where do you need God to fill you up today? I’m calling out to the God of Romans 15:13, the God of HOPE. “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Oh yes, fill you up to overflowing.

The processes of being filled by God is often overlooked, because it looks a whole lot more like being emptied. It’s a process of emptying of self. Yes, God has to empty me of ME so I can be filled with HIM. What a humbling process. To be emptied of my grand ideas and big picture plans, to be humbled with my own reality, all so that I can be FILLED with God. Don’t miss that in the hard times, GOD IS FILLING YOU. The emptying is in preparation for the filling.

You thought everything was falling apart – honey, it’s all been preparation for something great God wants to do in your life.

We come to God with our empty spaces searching for answers and solutions, but he fills our emptiness with himself. HE IS YOUR ANSWER. HE IS YOUR SOLUTION. God himself will fill your empty spaces. God will complete you. God will make you whole.

Have you been looking to someone else to complete you and fill your brokenness? They’ve fallen short haven’t they? You’re disappointed in the relationship because that relationship was never meant to fill you. That’s God’s place. Oh how we set every relationship in our lives up for failure when we expect them to fill us and make us happy.

Have you been looking to your career to fill you up and make you feel worthy? Ahhhhh, that’s going to be a huge disappointment. You can search and search, and it may seem to be that missing puzzle piece in your life, but soon it will grow old and the “God sent job that you hoped would fill you up” will just be a means to a paycheck. And here’s why … your career was never meant to fill you up. That’s God’s place. The identity you get from your career will lead to exhaustion and burn out because you’ll always need more. More success, more growth, more recognition and when you’ve reached your capacity, you’re left wanting.

Oh the feeling of void that empty space creates. I know that feeling. I know that disappointment. I know that exhaustion. And looking back I realize it was a result of trying to be filled by people, a career, money and things, all of which were short lived and maxed out. So, God allowed the emptying to begin, and I’ll be honest with you, it was not a fun process. Everything fell apart piece by piece. What I didn’t know then is God wasn’t behind the failure, he was behind the filling. But the emptiness of failure had to happen first. I was so full of self. So full of my career. So full of my pretty stuff and an obsession to get more of it, there was simply no room for God. I had crowded him out.

Thank God for the emptying, because it brought me to a place of wholeness I never knew existed. A place where everything else was stripped away so God could fill me. Where every empty space and broken place could be filled and healed.

Maybe that’s where you are today. A space that seems empty … a place that appears broken … a primed life for God to show up!

May the God of hope FILL YOU. May he fill you with all joy and all peace so that you may OVERFLOW.

God wants to fill you up. All the way up. More than all the way up.