I picked up my phone again this morning before I'd even prayed. I do that more than I'd like to admit. And when I actually stopped to ask what I was reaching for, it was never really information, or entertainment, or news. Something underneath all of it was reaching for a person, not content.

Augustine said our hearts are restless until they rest in God, and for years I read that as a nice way of saying we're all a little dissatisfied. I don't think that's what he meant anymore. I think he meant the restlessness itself is the desire for God, just aimed at everything except Him. Every scroll, every second helping, every hour spent on something that promised to satisfy and didn't, isn't proof that we don't want God. It's proof that we do, and we haven't figured out where to put the wanting.

We live inside a way of being human that trains us, almost from the moment we wake, to consume. We consume news before our eyes are fully open. We consume images of other people's lives before we have looked honestly at our own. We consume teaching, worship music, sermons, opinions, entertainment, and even our own spiritual growth, as though the soul were a kind of stomach that simply needed to be kept full. And when we are full, we call it a good day. When we are empty, we go looking for something else to take in.

I do not say this to shame you. I say it because I have lived there and because underneath every appetite I've ever chased is the same misdirected ache: not a desire to consume, but a desire to commune, aimed at the wrong table. You were not made to be a mouth. You were made to be a dwelling place.

Before there was a command to obey or a law to keep, there was a garden, and in the garden there was a sound: the sound of God walking in the cool of the day, coming to be with the man and the woman He had made. He wasn't there to inspect them or extract worship from them. He was there to walk with them. Genesis does not open with religion. It opens with a relationship. The first thing lost in the fall was not innocence in the abstract. It was that walk. Adam and Eve hid, and communion became distance, and distance became the story of every human heart since.

Almost everything that has gone wrong in me, when I trace it back far enough, has been an attempt to solve the ache of that distance by consuming something instead of returning to Someone. Comfort instead of presence. Achievement instead of belovedness. Even ministry, even service, even the good and necessary work of building something for God, can become a way of consuming approval rather than resting in communion. The strategies change. The ache underneath them does not.

Here is what I want you to hear today, as plainly as I can say it: God did not send His Son merely to forgive what you consumed wrongly. He sent His Son to restore what you were made for.

Paul says it in a way that should stop us every time we read it, if we let it: Christ in you, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27). Not Christ near you. Not Christ available to you on request. Christ in you. The distance that began in a garden was closed when God Himself took up residence in the very people who once hid from Him.

Paul takes this back further than the moment you actually believed it, though. Before there was a fall to rescue you from, before there was a law to keep or break, Ephesians tells us God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him (Ephesians 1:4). Look closely at the verb there. It doesn't say chosen to become holy. The word Paul uses is simply to be, the same word you'd use to say something already exists, not something still arriving. Holiness was never scheduled to show up at the end of your progress. It was written into the choosing itself, before there was a world for you to fail in.

This is what I mean when I say the gospel is bigger than forgiveness. Forgiveness deals with what stands between us. Union deals with the distance itself. You have been joined to the very life of God: he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him (1 Corinthians 6:17). That is not a metaphor to admire from a distance. That is your actual condition, right now, if you belong to Christ. Just as you did not achieve being joined to Him, you did not achieve being holy either. Both were settled before you existed to agree to them. You're already one spirit with the Host, not a guest waiting for permission to come inside.

I think we are often more comfortable with forgiveness than we are with union, because forgiveness leaves us in charge of ourselves. We can receive forgiveness and still run our own lives, still perform, and still consume our way through the ache, only now with less guilt attached. But union will not leave us alone like that. Union says, as Paul says of himself, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me (Galatians 2:20). That is either the most freeing sentence in Scripture or the most frightening one, depending on how tightly you are gripping the wheel of your own life.

I have found it to be freeing. Not easy. Freeing. Because if it is no longer I who lives, then my worth is no longer something I have to go and consume from the next achievement, the next relationship, or the next season of growth I can point to. It is already given. It is already secured. I'm learning, slowly, to live from a union and a holiness that are already mine instead of still striving toward them like a reward still out of reach.

This is where the Spirit becomes so much more than a doctrine to affirm. The Spirit is the One who makes this union real to us, moment by moment, rather than a truth we simply hold in our heads. He is not a force we access. He is the Person who was given so that Christ would not be a memory or a distant historical figure but a present reality, closer, Scripture dares to say, than our own breath. When you sense the pull to be still, to pray without an agenda, to sit in the quiet without immediately reaching for your phone to fill the silence with something else, that pull is not weakness. That may well be the Spirit, drawing you back toward the garden, back toward the walk, back toward communion.

I want to be honest about what this has meant practically for me, because I don't want to leave you with a beautiful idea and no bread to eat.

It has meant learning to distinguish, in my own life, between rest and reward. Reward tells you to become something first and be accepted after. Scripture flips that order completely: you were chosen to be holy before you could do a single thing about it, and Christ has already done what reward was trying to earn. Now walk from that finished work rather than toward it. I still fail at this often. I still catch myself treating prayer like a task to complete rather than a place to abide. But I am learning, slowly, that sanctification isn't becoming something I currently am not. It's my actual life slowly catching up to something that was already finished and true about me before I ever noticed it was there.

There's also a suspicion I've had to build toward my own appetite for consumption, even religious consumption. I can listen to five sermons in a week and be no closer to God than when I started if what I am doing is feeding a habit rather than meeting a Person. So I have had to ask myself, again and again: am I taking this in to fill a silence, or am I coming to Someone I actually want to be with?

And on the days I feel nothing at all, I try to remember that communion with Christ does not depend on my sense of it. A married couple does not stop being one flesh because one evening feels distant and quiet. You are one spirit with the Lord whether you feel the nearness of it today or not. That is not a call to spiritual numbness. It is an anchor for the days when feeling is not available to you.

If you have spent years trying to consume your way into feeling close to God, more content, more conferences, more information, and more striving, I do not think you are foolish. I think the hunger you're feeling is entirely real, and entirely right. It's just aimed at things that were never built to satisfy it. Consumable things run out by design. You finish them, and you're hungry again within the hour. But what's starving in you isn't something information can fill or an achievement can settle. It's a spiritual hunger, and no amount of anything physical, however good, was ever going to reach it. It wasn't meant to be consumed. It was meant to be entered. You are not outside the house, pressing your face to the window, hoping enough good behavior or enough spiritual effort will finally let you in.

You are already in Christ. Christ, by His Spirit, is already in you.

The rest of your life isn't a project to finish so that this becomes true one day. It's a lifetime of learning to walk, the way Adam once walked, beside the One who was never trying to get away from you in the first place.

Spend it, walking with Him.

Grace and peace,
Until Christ is formed in us,
Aben