Dreaming of Dung

I know all the right answers. I grew up in church, participated in Bible drill, went to a Christian college where I minored in religion, and graduated from a respectable seminary. I promise I can give you the right answers—and if I can’t—I can find them for you. All the head knowledge in the world, however, does not help produce one ounce of heart knowledge. Having all the right answers does not change my heart or my actions.

The only thing that can change my actions is truly knowing God. Even then, my flesh still wages war against the Spirit living inside me. God has opened my eyes to view what really produces true and lasting joy, yet I often find myself longing for and pining after things that have no eternal value, are disposable, and will one day end up in the landfill.

Packer says, "What normal person spends his time nostalgically dreaming of manure? Yet this, in effect, is what many of us do. It shows how little we have in the way of true knowledge of God" (Knowing God, pg. 25). Christians have met the God who created the universe just by speaking it. Not only that, we have full, unhindered access to him any time we want. In Christ, he has promised us infinite pleasure and joy! So what do we do? We find our minds consumed and focused on worldly things. We meditate on the next thing we want to buy, the next place we want to go, or mindlessly scrolling on social media taking in endless amounts of useless information. We give the majority of our thoughts to things that will add up to nothing more than dung when all is said and done.

C.S. Lewis says it like this, "We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased" (The Weight of Glory). Why are we far too easily pleased? Because we don’t truly know God.

Packer gets at the heart of the matter when says that one can know a great deal about God without much knowledge of him and one can know a great deal about godliness without much knowledge of God. Both of these things have certainly been my experience. I played church for a long time. I knew all the right answers, but I didn’t care much about actually knowing God at all.

Even as I get older, I fight this temptation. I can be tempted to want to win theological debates rather than loving the person I’m talking with and seeing them as made in God’s image. I certainly can spend most of my thoughts on things that are the equivalent of mud pies or dung. I pursue things that will go to someone else or wind up in the trash heap rather than chasing the infinite joy found in Christ.

What's the answer? How do we get past this easy satisfaction? Packer gives us two things to do. First, Packer says that we should recognize how much we lack knowledge of God. This serves to keep us humble rather than prideful about what we do know. We need to be students of our own hearts and recognize that many of us are impoverished even when we think ourselves to know a lot. God is infinite and we can spend our lifetimes pursuing joy in him and never come close to exhausting what there is to know.

Second, we must seek the Savior. This is not a one time event. This is not something we do to fill ourselves with head knowledge. This is a daily task. Every day we must seek him. When we do so fervently, we will find him. Only in seeking Christ do we keep our cheap desires in check. Only when we pursue him and find our joy in him will we quit being satisfied with mud pies and dung.

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