947 Fill 'Er Up

As a little girl I remember my mama pulling up to the full service gas station in our green 1972 Monte Carlo and telling good ol’ Bill to “fill ‘er up”. There wasn’t a worry in the world when we had a full tank of gas. Today, we need to fill ‘er up. We’re running on empty. Our lives have become filled with negativity. There’s one way to flush the negative out of your life … fill ‘er up! Fill your life with so much goodness there’s simply no room for anything else. When you’re eating all the healthy food, you’re so full you can’t eat the cookies and pint of icecream. When your mind is consumed by positive voices and readings of hopeful truth, there’s no space for the negative to come bombard your awareness. When you surround yourself with healthy relationships, those toxic ones naturally get crowded out. This is a matter of choice. It always is. You don’t have to exert all your willpower avoiding the bad when you’re dwelling in all the goodness God intended for you. When there’s no leftover space for the negativity, for the toxic, for the unhealthy, for the temptation, then it must move along and look for another space, because yours has already been filled with predestined goodness. Choose wisely how you fill the spaces in your life, then those choices will deflect everything else that doesn’t fit. Romans 15:13 “I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.” Fill you COMPLETELY. Not kinda sorta, give you a little bit. No, completely. May you be filled completely with joy and peace. Why is that? Because you have an enemy in this world who is lurking in the shadows and he is continually drying to deal his darkness, his despair, his overwhelm, his fear and his worry. That’s what he has to give you. Check yourself sister, are you carrying around dealings of the enemy? Have the spaces of your heart and mind been filled with this darkness? You feel it, don’t you? He came in and occupied any empty space you had with his worry. Any crack has been filled with overwhelm. Despair has been poured into the void. Fear crept right in. Why is that? Because there was space for him to fill, so he did. There was an availability, an open door, and he came right in. This is what happens every time we allow emptiness. Emptiness in our thoughts. Emptiness in our day. Emptiness in our habits. Anything left unprotected is vulnerable. The time you are not intentional with often falls victim to nonsense, and in that nonsense is the devil’s foothold to gain a little more control. We waste a little piece of our lives today, then we waste a little more tomorrow. That grows and continues, and we soon realize we’re living without intention, wandering out lost without purpose, filled with anxiety and worry, and feel powerless to do anything about it. Dang … isn’t that our world today? Isn’t that the threat? Emptiness has brought us to a place of great loss. How do we fix this? We fill the space completely, intentionally, and leave absolutely no room for anything else. As you trust fully in God, allow him to completely fill you with joy and peace. Stay connected to him and receive everything he has for you. As our scripture says, when you’re filled completely, you will then “overflow with confident hope”. And girl, when you’re so filled that you’re overflowing, there’s absolutely no room for a drop of anything else to come in. More God. More of his goodness. More of his joy. More of his peace. More of his confidence. More of his hope. More and more and more to fill ever space completely. Nothing left untouched. Nothing left empty.