Full vs. Filled

If you love retail therapy, this article is for you! It analyzes our attempts to fill various forms of emptiness with money and material goods. Aligning your perspective, on spiritual fulfillment, with Scripture will save you from collecting debt and things you really don't need. More importantly, it will point you to Jesus, the only one who can truly fill you.

If you had to guess how many ads you saw/heard each day, what would your number be? Before I looked up some stats, I guessed about 20, which is apparently a huge underestimation. Digital marketing experts estimate that most Americans are exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day (Forbes). When I read that I thought, “no way!” However, when you start to really notice and count how many ads you see everyday, you will be amazed. They are everywhere….any sort of music/video/audio streaming, app notifications on your phone, online article, mail/email, social media, etc.

While technological advancements have made it a lot easier for businesses to market their products, it has also resulted in an overwhelming amount of ads that we are exposed to. One of the downsides to all this marketing noise (besides the fact that it’s super annoying) is that it can normalize false ideologies in our culture. We become so used to hearing their messages that eventually, we stop questioning them. One of marketing’s popular underlying messages tackles the concept of fulfillment. Almost every marketing technique presumes a form of emptiness in their target customers. A business then markets to that void and offers a temptation to fill it: whether it be a new car, new makeup, a bacon cheeseburger, latest cellphone model, or family adventure. This [insert your material temptation] will make you happy. This [insert your material temptation] will fill you. This marketing technique is tried and true because most consumers buy into the idea that material-based fulfillment works.

Kyle Idleman, in his book The End of Me, ties the correlation between our emptiness and consumerism,

“The presumption of emptiness is the fuel that runs a consumer-based economy. In consumerism, we buy into the concept that our personal sense of fulfillment is directly related to our ever-increasing consumption of goods. A simpler way of saying it: if I feel a little down, I need to consume a little more” (121).

Guys, I have done this. I have often excused it as “just a little retail therapy.” I love shopping, finding pretty things, and going to TJ Maxx on a bad day. While it’s fun for a moment, it’s merely just a distraction or a bandaid to a deeper issue. It doesn’t actually heal the pain from a bad day or satisfy that lingering emptiness inside your soul. In fact, it just makes you financially poorer (sometimes further into debt) from a purchase that usually ends up in a Goodwill donation bag not far into the future. You will inevitably feel that emptiness again. And maybe, after reviewing your credit card statement, you will feel even more empty than you were before.

Full (Physical) vs. Filled (Spiritual)

Mother Teresa, as many of you know, dedicated her life to help and live amongst those in severe poverty in Calcutta. While there, she distinguished two types of poverty: physical poverty and spiritual poverty. While the people she lived with had more physical poverty, she pitied the Western world (that includes us) because of our much greater spiritual poverty. She says,

“The spiritual poverty of the Western world is much greater than the physical poverty of our people in Calcutta. You in the West have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness. They feel unloved and unwanted. These people are not hungry in the physical sense, but they are in another way. They know they need something more than money, yet they don’t know what it is” (Wooding).

Mother Teresa’s point is that many Americans expect the things in our physical world to heal our spiritual poverty, which includes feelings of loneliness, emptiness, brokenness, and rejection. Temporarily, this can seem like it works, but physical things were not made to satisfy us. For example, if you do Thanksgiving like my family, you stuff your face with turkey and mashed potato goodness and feel so full and happy that you could never eat again. You feel satisfied…probably a little too satisfied. But isn’t it embarrassing that maybe a couple hours later, we gladly accept a piece of pumpkin pie? The physical things in the world cannot even satisfy our physical bodies, so why do we expect them to fill our soul?

Jesus also distinguishes our physical thirst from our spiritual thirst. In John 4, a Samaritan woman asks Jesus for some water, to quench her physical thirst. Jesus, however, responds to her spiritual thirst and answers,

“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 in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13-14).

Though they had never met, Jesus knew this woman before she came to the well. He knew of her sexual immorality and that she has had five husbands. This implies that this woman was trying to use a man’s affection to fill that emptiness inside of her heart. One guy didn’t fill it so she would move onto the next guy until she felt empty again. So rather than temporarily quenching her physical thirst, Jesus offers her something far more valuable, life-changing, and fulfilling. He satisfies her spiritual thirst with eternal life.

The Takeaway

Now, I am not going to judge you for being a consumer. We all have to be one, at some level or another. I am also not going to condemn you for having or buying nice things. However, I am asking you to guard your heart against the idea that money or material goods will satisfy an emptiness that only the God of the Universe can fill. In fact, those things can easily become barriers to your reliance on Him. They often prevent you from turning to the one who truly satisfies every craving and ache in your soul. Lysa Terkeurst, in her book Uninvited, writes how pursuing worldly things make us forget God's power to fill us,

"If we become enamored with something in this world we think offers better fullness than God, we make room for it. We leak out His fullness to make room for something else we want to chase...But at some point, every one of those things will reveal inability to keep us full. And then, since we denied God's power to lead us, we forget His power to hold us" (63).

Essentially, when we turn to something in this world to fill us, we are replacing and rejecting God's fulfillment in our lives. When that worldly or material thing stops making us feel full, instead of turning back to God, we usually forget his all-fulfilling power and just go onto something else. This is why material-based fulfillment is especially dangerous to any financial situation. Fulfillment is not a one-time purchase. We will always have to spend more and more money, no matter how much we have, to feel sustained. When our latest purchase stops making us full, we don't turn to God, we just move onto the next transaction. The simple truth is that no amount of money in the world can buy what God offers freely to you everyday. So stop killing your finances trying! Stop ignoring Jesus, who wants and even longs to fill you. If you give Him the chance, He will fill you with a healing, peace, joy, and contentment that you cannot get from anything else.

So, before you buy that new upgrade or purchase something that you really don’t need, ask yourself these questions:

Is this purchase an attempt to make me feel better about something?

Will this purchase in any way inhibit my financial goals?

Is there someone on my heart who could put this money to better use?

Have you prayed about this purchase and actually listened to what God has to say?

These questions allow you to reflect and have a heart-check before you complete a purchase. That heart-check will save you from collecting things you don’t need and probably can’t afford. More importantly, it also allows you to ask yourself if a form of emptiness is motivating your purchase. Then, I hope and pray, you will turn to God in your time of need rather than the physical world. Let Him fill you.