Are You Filled to Overflowing?
Think for a minute about the food and drink you consume on a daily basis. You hopefully eat three well balanced meals, with maybe a small healthy snack here and there to boost your energy. There are all sorts of calculations to determine the proper daily estimated energy requirement (calories) to maintain a healthy body and lifestyle. There are four main variables that go into the calculation: sex, age, weight, and activity level. You should check with your doctor or nutritionist to determine your recommended calorie intake needs.
In addition to eating properly, we need to keep our bodies hydrated by drinking water. Using several reliable resources, my hydration requirement is 96 fluid ounces per day. Most experts consider “water” to be any beverage without alcohol, sugar, and to some degree, caffeine. Even though caffeine is a diuretic, meaning it causes you to want to urinate, certain (unsweetened) caffeinated beverages like coffee and tea can in fact have a net hydrating effect.
But regardless of your level of food or drink intake, you need to keep replenishing your body in order to function and maintain proper health. You eat breakfast and by lunch, maybe even by 10 AM, you are hungry again. By dinner time, you are again ready for a good meal. You drink a cold bottle of water that soon gets absorbed into your cell membranes and bloodstream, i.e., it gets used up, so repeated drinks of water are needed to keep your body temperature regulated and your organs functioning efficiently.
Our bodies convert the food and drink we consume into energy that helps keep us running like a well-tuned machine. Just as our bodies need filled with food and drink to stay healthy, our souls also need to be filled to stay healthy. And just as we sometimes ingest unhealthy things into our bodies, we also sometimes try to fill that hole in our soul with all the wrong stuff. The hippies used to profess all they needed was “sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll” in order to be satisfied and fulfilled. Today we often try to fill our emptiness with all kinds of things, some healthy, some not so healthy. But regardless of what it is, that stuff we substitute for God, while for a fleeting moment might provide us with satisfaction, it soon leaves us “hungry and thirsty” again.
In Ephesians 3:19, the apostle Paul prays that the faithful in Jesus Christ will be “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
We read these words in Romans 15:13 – “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.”
And Jesus, in a conversation with a Samaritan woman at a well, tells her – “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13, in context, 4:1-26).
So, today, I encourage you (and me) to get the proper intake of food and drink, exercise regularly, have adequate periods of rest and sleep AND to ask Jesus to fill you with His presence, through the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:11), allowing you to be filled to overflowing with the fullness of God. Just as your body needs replenishing every day, your soul leaks and needs filled again and again too, so, never stop asking!
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