When I first read through this, the word ‘rooted’ really stuck out to me for some reason. When i think of roots, I think of being strongly grounded so that nothing can shake or move you. When I take time to reflect on my faith in Jesus and just how ‘rooted’ I am in him….it is a very humbling thing. Why? Because I begin to understand just how easy it can be for the world to try to distract us. There are a million things fighting for our attention, trying to pull our eyes off Jesus, trying to ‘unroot’ us from our faith and trust in Christ. But when I think back to all the times (of course I cant remember all of them….) when I have become distracted by the world and tried to give myself (my heart) to these things instead of Christ, over and over again its the same result: I am left unsatisfied, unfilled, simply longing and thirsting for more. My heart is left thirsty and unquenched by the world. Here’s a perfect example of an area in the world that I like to give myself away to, in hopes of finding something that can really only be found ultimately in Christ: I try to find that love, security, self-confidence and approval about myself from other people. But in the end, people are only people….we are sinners who do not live like Adam and Eve once did in Paradise. Instead, we find ourselves in a broken world that our hearts and our lives were not made for. When I find myself still longing for more, it becomes obvious to me that God made my heart and made me for something more, otherwise I would not be longing for it. In a broken and fallen world, I find myself looking to find these things in the world, when they can truly only be found in Christ. I do this with relationships and friendships with others, and in the end, it is the same result: we can never fulfill for one another what only Christ can fill. When we try to fill our heart’s desire by chosing to try and let the world and other people satisfy it, we are reminded and humbled, about just how much we need Jesus and that he alone can fully quench our hearts. These other things of the world may try to ‘root’ us deeply….but they only root us in the substance and ground of this Earth, and this Earth, this world is broken…..so of course we can not be strongly rooted in a materialistic, broken, fallen, world…..We will be shaken, we will be moved if we try to root ourselves in it. The world offers worthless satisfaction, and the satisfaction lasts only for a little bit. It fails to quench our thirsty hearts. We find substitutes in the world that act to quench our thirst. But these substitutes are simply indulgences we give into….and these indulgences are simply affairs of the heart….they are what we give our hearts to instead of giving our hearts to God. And they never fully satisfy us. They only prove to leave us unfilled and disappointed.
This leads on into 2:8 when he speaks of deceptive philosophy: there are countless principles and teachings that the world unveils to us that are abusively deceptive. They wound us. They break us. They leave us longing for more. It is a form of knowledge….but it is worldly knowledge rather than the truth and wisdom that comes from Christ alone. I can’t help but think about how many times I have sat in my philosophy classes listening to the lectures and reading the philosopher teachings…..they are all deceptive, fruitless, and are simply worldly knowledge, created by man….because we are longing for something more. We live in a world that we were not meant for…..and this proves to be extremely true when we find ourselves trying to discover for ourselves and for one another some sort of truth and wisdom. We search, and hunt, and thirst for the truth….but we look to the world for it. Philosophers (many of them) spend their lives searching for some sort of truth that the world offers, only to find that there is no truth that we can rest assure of in this world! So after spending years of searching for some version of the light…..they are still left in complete darkness, realizing that the truth does not exist in a worldly form. But many of us are philosophers….in fact, I think at one point or another we all try to be philosophers. We search for wisdom, truth, light that the world is hiding from us. We search as if on some great expedition, looking for something more. And why do you think we are looking for something more? What does this tell us? It tells us that our heart is thirsty for more! That deep down inside of us, at the core of every person’s heart….we long for something real, something more than what this world has to offer us. Think about it this way: If we are spending so much time looking for something in the world only to find that the world fails and cannot satisfy us, that it cannot provide us any real truth or light…..then why do we continue to look so hard for it? We act as if the world is hiding something so deep in its core and crust, that if we simply search a little bit harder, then maybe we will find what we are looking for. But stop! Listen to your heart! What is it telling you? Your heart is crying out…CRYING out for more! And why? Because when man and woman were first created by the hands and breath of God….we were created for something so much more than this broken world….we were created for Paradise. But because of the fall, we find ourselves in a broken world. The cries of our heart, the desires and deepest longings of our heart for something more are extremely real….they are still there, and they cannot be extinguished. We look to the world to satisfy and answer these cries. Or we try to find a solution to extinguish the deep, deep desires of our hearts. So whether we look to the world to quench our thirst, or we look to the world to extinguish the desires we were created to have….we fail both ways. Sure, the world offers countless remedies to quench or extinguish the thirst and desires we have: Lust, Money/wealth/materialism to fill in as a personal comfort, grades/academics/resume, physical appearance, ect….the list simply goes on and on. All of these substitutes, these little indulgences, these affairs of the heart prove to be a worthless and unreliable remedy. They do not solve the problem. They do not give us what we our crying out for.
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