Speaker: Bonnie Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.  Psalm 34:8

Substitutes are never quite like the real thing.  They never quite look like the real thing, taste like the real thing, or feel like the real thing.  Artificial sweeteners may save you the calories but–face it–Diet Coke or Coke Light just doesn’t quite taste like “the real thing.”  The same thing goes for salt or butter substitutes.  You can’t quite compare what is churned from pure cream with what comes out of a laboratory in a plastic bottle with a picture of a cow on the label.

Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher and mathematician, wrote that there is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every person that can never be filled apart from a personal relationship with God.  But a lot of people haven’t gotten the message.

Instead of a personal relationship with God, they’ve accepted a wide variety of God-substitutes. Substitutes like pleasure, self, money, fame, power, and addictions to a vast number of things.  Ask yourself what you live for, and you’ll discover what has become your god.  People with god-substitutes are among those who are found in church almost every week and would be quite upset if you suggested that they have put their faith in a God-substitute, yet the reality is they have settled for less than the real thing.

Almost all substitutes come with side effects of one kind or another, and for those who settle for God-substitutes, the side effects include a lack of connection, an indifference to making judgments that would say, “This is right; this is wrong!”  Their world is often painted in shades of gray, neither completely black nor white.  Their values are obscure, and by and large they really worship that which they can see, taste, or feel.

But probably the most glaring difference between God-substitutes and knowing God is that substitutes never satisfy the spiritual thirst which is deep within your heart.  Whether their addiction is to money, sexual satisfaction, or things, that completely satisfied level is always just ahead, just beyond their grasp.  And no matter what they have, to be satisfied requires just a bit more.

Long ago, the psalmist threw out the challenge, “Oh taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8, KJV).  The challenge is still valid; it is something you can personally experience.

When Jesus and the disciples drew near to a village in Samaria where cool water from a deep well could satisfy their thirst, Jesus asked a woman to draw a drink of water for Him, and in the conversation which took place, He told her that if she would drink of the water which He would give to her, she would never thirst again!

A final thought.  People who expect to get the real thing and find that they have been given a substitute scream and yell, “Fraud!”  At least the man did who went into a camera store in Hong Kong and asked to purchase a wide-angle lens for his Minolta camera.  The price was OK.  It looked like the real thing.  It came out of the Minolta box with all of the wrappings.  But when he read the very tiny print on the bottom of the lens, he quickly recognized, it came with the Minolta packaging but a cheaper lens with inferior quality had been substituted.

Life at its longest is short, and when you come to the end, the one thing you never want to discover is that the god you bought into may have looked great in the packaging but it wasn’t the living One who created our world, nor the One whom you will face when you die.

God-substitutes never satisfy.  Make sure you have the real thing.

Resource reading:  2 Timothy 3:1-5