The Heart is a Vacuum

Connecting an intimacy with God with our desire for God

[Note: This post continues our two-month-long series through the month of July on the topic of “desire” and “longing” in concert with my recent book on the topic. As mentioned, I’m riffing on some of the broader themes and ideas that have percolated since its publication—with some cool stuff from the biblical text. Also, I recently preached a sermon on the Holy Spirit and will provide some promised resources at the end for those who want further study on the topic. Thanks for reading. Enjoy!]

---

I have recently begun a foray back into some of the first writings from the initial stages of Pentecostalism in the early 20th century. These testimonies—often written by women, people of color, and cultural ‘nobodies’ from that world—narrate what can best be described as an effusive and unencumbered emotional experience, an experience described by countless who were personally moved by the Holy Spirit revival that was sweeping the world. The language is passionate, all-consuming, and beaming. Two examples stick out. One comes from a woman named Alice Flower (1890-1991) who would eventually be known as “Mother Flower.” She writes,

All I seemed to sense was a deep craving for the overflowing of His love in my heart. At that moment it seemed I wanted Jesus more than anything else in the world.¹ 

Another woman by the name of Zelma Argue (1920-1969) described being filled with a deep and abiding hunger for God that she claims felt almost insatiable:

My whole heart seemed to be just one big vacuum craving and crying for God.²

The heart is a vacuum! Powerful language. But odd at the same time. Testimonies like those of Flower’s and Argue’s can have a way of driving us to some odd responses. They may drive us to a kind of cold, skeptical intellectualism. “That’s just emotionalism,” our minds tell us, “these are clearly just people losing their minds for God.” But we should be on guard against such a cynical reaction. A cerebral retreat, I’ve sadly discovered, is often the heart’s clever way of not having to be moved by God. We begin to think that if we keep things logical with our heads in the sky, then our hearts are safe from transformation down here on earth.

Or, further, testimonies like these can drive us to jealousy. I’ve not been immune to this. In years past, as little revivals have swept my University town of Eugene and caused new churches to explode with growth and converts, I often find myself loaded down with jealousy of others’ experiences who are experiencing the powerful hand of God. Like Cain, I dismiss the passionate sacrifice and offerings of my younger brothers and sisters as a way to not have to look at the absence of my own. In jealousy, I’d rather dismiss one’s life with God than have it wake me up to the parts of myself that are dead. This is the very heart of all religious jealousy. “Since I cannot kill God,” one New Testament scholar once wrote, “I will kill those of whom he approves.”³ This is the Cain move. Perhaps we don’t do it physically. But we often do it emotionally. 

Seeing someone else’s intimacy with God does funky things to our hearts—something I began to notice in myself as I read the accounts of Flower and Argue. True intimacy can be threatening when we see it elsewhere. When I see the intimacy some fathers have with their sons—fishing and hunting and doing all the ‘man stuff’ together—I’m left wondering if my son sees the very thing I see; that I don’t do that ‘stuff’ very well. If at all. Or when I see someone else’s marriage in the throes of passion and love, I'm reminded how many months it’s been since I took my wife on a simple coffee date. And when we see someone living into a fresh and enlivening relationship with God, we are often pushed to jealousy because we may not be experiencing that at the present moment. 

Photo by Wynand Uys on Unsplash

Scripture sees a desire for God and intimacy with God as interconnected. Psalm 63 is a psalm of desire.⁴ The author of Psalm 63—likely David who is fleeing from either Saul or Absolom—wants us to see, among other things, that there remains an intimate relationship between one’s desire and one’s intimacy with God. Even after a brief read of the Psalm (which I’d encourage you to do before continuing), the reader will be struck by a number of enlivening impressions. Namely, that to enter into intimacy with another—especially with God—requires that we be vulnerable to desiring that intimacy. Intimacy is impossible without true desire. Five core themes rise to the surface in the sacred poem. 

1. We are created to desire intimacy with God. 

Put simply, we are not merely created for intimacy with God. We are actually created to desire that intimacy. We were made to want God. Psychologists tell us that our brains are hard-wired for intimacy; which is why the most annoying conversations people report hearing are when we can only hear one side of a conversation as someone talks to another on their cell phone. Humans are designed—created, actually—to embody two-way communion. No wonder we get frustrated when we can only hear one side of a conversation. In the words of one psychologist: “the brain’s desire [is] to fill in the blanks; we’re troubled by what is now called a ‘half-a-logue.’”⁵

David refuses to believe that life with God is a half-a-logue. We were meant to desire far more than that. In the evocative language of vs. 7-8, David writes:

Because you are my help,

    I sing in the shadow of your wings. 

I cling to you;

    your right hand upholds me.

A passing read of these verses in English doesn’t do them justice. Notice, first, that God is called ‘my help.’ This language remains eerily similar to the creation story when the first woman is described as ‘the help’ to the man. Of course, in biblical Hebrew, this isn’t suggesting the woman is to be subjected or enslaved. Quite the opposite. To be a ‘help’ (Heb ezer) is a term of strength and protection. The kind of strength that God is described as having. The woman is a ‘helper.’ But so is God. Just as the woman was the strong helper of the man, David is saying, God is ‘my helper.’ Very intimate language.

Similarly, notice that David how he ‘clings’ to God. The verb used here (Heb dbq; pronounced dabiq) is the word the author of Genesis uses in Genesis 2.24 when it is said that a husband would leave his family and ‘cleave’ to his new wife. Clinging is cleaving. Same word. The author is using marriage language here; language that no doubt evokes a sense of deep intimacy intended with God. David doesn’t just love God. He wants God the way a lover wants their love. 

We are made to desire God. More than anything, we are intended to see as clearly as one can see that there is a pathway to love God with such a depth of passion that it bears semblance to the intimacy of a marriage.

2. God responds to human desire. 

That the author (again, likely David) has decided to narrate their deep hunger pangs for God in the biblical text is a cue to understanding God’s desire. A desire for God is good! In short, David’s desire is included in the Bible for a reason. I am reminded of the many times in Scripture that God tells his people to desire to know him, be with him, and seek him. “You will seek me and find me,” God tells the prophet Jeremiah, “when you seek me with all your heart.” (Jer 29.13) Indeed, to be intimate with God, we must want to be intimate with God. They go hand-in-hand.

That is to say that God wants us to want him. As the angelic woman (the Christ figure in the short story) in George MacDonald’s The Wise Woman says to Roseland, “When you want me, that is me wanting you.” Scripture would say this of God too! Whenever we experience moments of wanting intimacy with God, we must remember that desire is not happenstance or accidental. It was placed there. When we want God, that is God showing us his desire for us. 

3. Today’s desire should not live under the shadow of yesterday’s desire. 

Again, David is likely fleeing from Absalom or Saul. Scholars are unsure. Regardless, David has been driven out of wherever the divine space/tabernacle (called here the ‘sanctuary’) is located. David is on the run. And he remembers when he was in the sanctuary. He is vividly recalling those beautiful days in the past when he saw God in his sanctuary: 

I have seen you in the sanctuary

    and beheld your power and your glory.

Because your love is better than life,

    my lips will glorify you.

I will praise you as long as I live,

    and in your name, I will lift up my hands. (v. 2-4)

David is recalling those enthralling experiences of the past when he was in the sanctuary. But he is no longer there. The danger with entering into great intimacy with God at any point in our life is that we have the lingering suspicion that our sense of intimacy will not last forever. Which may be true. The danger becomes a kind of relational nostalgia where we constantly judge our present experience through the lens of the past experience. David refuses to do this. All nostalgia is off the table. David refuses to allow the glories of past intimacy to belittle or cast a shadow of disappointment over the experience he’s having with God in the desert while he is on the run. Intimacy with God is never geographical. God is going wherever David is going. 

4. Felt absence can make the heart grow fonder.

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Or, so they say. Let’s be clear: anyone who has experienced it knows that the felt presence of God is undeniable and leaves a mark on your life. But there is also the felt absence of God—those times when we can’t sense and feel his nearness. David is clearly experiencing this wherever he is currently finding himself. Yet, that experience is awakening a new desire for God to rescue him and show himself his mighty hand of deliverance. From time to time, in our lives, we need to feel the felt absence of God. Not that God is absent. It is just that we do not feel his presence the same way. 

5. Displaced physical desires can awaken a desire for God. 

If it is true that David is on the run in the desert (notice the ‘jackals’ of v. 10), then he is having the unpleasant experience of not having his dietary, rest, or physical needs met. Yet, he sees in God someone who is greater than any banquet of food. He writes:

I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods;

    with singing lips, my mouth will praise you. (v. 5)

David is experiencing the benefits of what one may call healthy asceticism. David is showing us how the denial of one’s earthly desires can have the ability to awaken our desire for God. Indeed, fasting, restraint, and withholding can awaken new desires for God—so long as the withholding is done for the sake of seeking God. This is the wisdom of Saint John of the Cross when he wrote:

Deny your desires and you will find what your heart longs for.⁶

Part of intimacy with God is actually desiring God—of wanting him with our whole being. Learning how to desire God takes discipline and time. But it also comes alongside those moments in our lives when life doesn’t give us what we want. 

The truth remains: I don’t always want God with the fervor that Flower and Argue do. But I can say that I want to want that passion. That is the first step for any of us. As I write this piece, the end of the curricular calendar has arrived at the University. At the end of the year, I had the joy of baptizing three students who gave their allegiance to Jesus Christ. In two of those instances, the students were athletes. And in both cases, they were athletes who had undergone a season-ending injury. Which has sat with me.

When I think about awakening a desire for God, I’ve noticed something. It often comes when the desires for this world do not pan out or get us what we thought we should get. Time and again, I’ve found that we tend to open ourselves up to desiring God when the desires for the things of this world do not work the way we hoped they would. That is, losing ourselves can be the beginning of our finding ourselves in Christ. An injury of the soul becomes the resurrection of the spirit.

“The heart,” Zelma Argue would tell us, “is a vacuum craving and crying out for God.” And that vacuum can be filled with so many things. Opening ourselves to God is not trying to give our hearts less to take in. Rather, the way of Jesus Christ is teaching our hearts to want the right thing.

---

On Pentecost Sunday—just a week and a half ago—I had the privilege of preaching a sermon on the Power of the Holy Spirit out of Acts 2.1-12 at Willamette Christian Center in Eugene, Oregon. We had a hoot! And God did some very beautiful things in our midst. As part of the talk, I promised the congregation some helpful resources that I’d recommend for the person who wanted to deepen their understanding of the Holy Spirit on a biblical and theological level. I’ve slowly but intentionally been compiling a series of resources on the theology of the Holy Spirit (or, pneumatology). And that list will continue to grow. The ‘source’ Google Doc where you can find this can be found right here. My encouragement to anyone would be to bookmark that document and return to it from time to time as I will be adding more relevant content to it. Also, if you have any sources you feel I need to add, feel free to send it my way.

---

Last but not least: thanks for reading my work. As always, you can always find me wasting time on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or you can listen to my podcast, Slow Theology. If you found this content helpful to your journey, yay! Consider enjoying my most recent book The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War for our Wants, which was released with Zondervan in February of 2024. Within, I explore what the topic of human desire from the perspective of Scripture, theology, and experience—with particular interest to how we can be formed into the image of Christ through our desires. In short, it’s about why our cultural mandate to “you do you” is so profoundly unhelpful to the follower of Jesus. You can support my work by reading it! And sharing about your experience. Click on the image below to get yourself a copy.

1. Flower, Alice Reynolds, “My Pentecost,” in Grace for Grace: Some Highlights of God’s Grace in the Daily Life of the Flower Family (Springfield, MO: Privately Published, 1961), 20.

2. Quoted in Blumhofer, Edith, “Pentecost in My Soul”: Explorations in the Meaning of Pentecostal Experience in the Assemblies of God (Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 1989), 136. The testimonies of both women were pointed out to me in Lee Roy Martin, “Longing for God: Psalm 63 and Pentecostal Spirituality,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 22, no. 1 (2013): 54–76.

3. D. A. Carson, For the Love of God, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 4.

4. For a great overview and exegesis of the psalm, see Martin, “Longing for God: Psalm 63 and Pentecostal Spirituality.”

5. Quenqua, Douglas, “Cellphone Talkers Proved to Be Irritants, Study Says,” New York Times, March 14, 2013.

6. See saying 15 in Saint John of the Cross, “Sayings of Light and Love,” in The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington D.C.: ICS Publications, 1991).