We live in a broken, fallen world. It’s all around us and within us. Deep down, everyone desires to be saved from the effects of it and our own contribution to those effects.

We don’t like the pain, sadness, shame, heartache, boredom, disappointment, loneliness, and loss we feel, so we look for a way out, something to save us.

We hope.

We wait with bated breath, hoping Tim Cook and the team at Apple will come up with some new product that will save us.

We get chills watching the latest movie trailer, because the excitement of the story and the thrill of the visual effects gives us hope that it might save us, at least for a moment.

We put on our headphones, desperately hoping that the music will save us from where we are, and take us to a better place.

We buy the t-shirt, watch the game, cheering for our team to win, hoping, just hoping that they’ll win, and that somehow their victory will be our victory, that their salvation will be our salvation.

And yet every time we’re left with a cruel emptiness.

But for a second, or an hour, or even a day, or maybe even a week, it felt so good. It was as if we touched something real, and transcendent. For that brief moment in time, we didn’t feel the pain. We forgot about the loneliness. Our heartache was gone.

What was that?!?

Was it more than a product? More than a story?  More than a game?

It was.

We touched a desire inside of us that we’ve lost sensitivity to.

God put in each and every one of us a desire for an all satisfying pleasure, and then showed us the place to get it – in himself.

We lost our sensitivity to what it was that alone could give us the pleasure we long for and were created for, and we started looking elsewhere. We began believing and putting our trust in a myriad of other things to save us from our pain and give us lasting pleasure, and they all came up short.

The crazy thing is that we still keep coming back. Why?

It’s because deriving some pleasure from other things combined with the loss of sensitivity to what truly alone can satisfy us, deceives us into thinking that we just need more of what we’re experiencing. More or newer gadgets, movies, music, sports, porn, sex, alcohol, success, money, etc. are what become our drugs of choice.

But they don’t satisfy. In fact they barely take the edge off.

“Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.” (Eph 4:19 NIV1984)

The truth is that nothing this broken and fallen world has to offer can save us from the effects of itself.

God sent Jesus to do what a new phone, album, movie, or sporting event could never do. He sent Jesus to save us.

Jesus took on the full weight of all our brokenness, sin, sickness, sadness, loneliness, and even the worst effect of our fallenness – death itself, and dealt them one final and fatal blow with his resurrection from the dead, so that all who turn from their sin and put their faith in him, can now wait in hope, with eager anticipation, for the day when he returns and we are fully satisfied for all eternity.