“If we want our cups to be filled with joy, maybe we need to start by examining our hunger pangs. When God gives us manna, and we hunger for meat, we’re choosing slavery over freedom. Or to put it more practically, when God gives us Jesus, and we hunger for food, sex, significance, or religion, we’re choosing to have empty, filthy cups rather than full, clean ones.” – Crave by Chris Tomlinson (page 172).
Ouch! I feel as if that’s been my life lately. Wanting so much to look good on the outside, yet inside I am filthy. Wanting things that fill me up, but … How did I get so far away from craving freedom? I recently watched “Braveheart” per the suggestion of my friend. I loved it when William Wallace said, “your heart is free; have the courage to follow it.”
Sounds good. Then why don’t I?
I wanted to know more so I asked Chris a few questions about his book.
1. When did you decide to write Crave? Where did the concept come from?
Crave started as an experiment in becoming a person of good habits. I had read a book by David Crowder called Praise Habit, and in this book, Crowder talked about the concept of habit forming. He said that an action repeated for 21 days straight would become a habit. Wanting to be a person of good habits, I decided to start with something I have hated doing all my life: flossing.
I took a green sticky note, wrote out the numbers one to 21, and stuck it on my bathroom mirror. Each night, I would floss and cross a number off the list. Soon enough, the three weeks passed, and I found that flossing had become a habit.
Wanting to transform my spiritual life in the same way I had in my dental life, I wrote up a list of spiritual habits I would like to have in God’s kingdom. This listed included obedience, purity, charity, humility, love, prayer. Starting with prayer, I soon found that spiritual disciplines that had escaped me for much of my life would not be mastered by a little green sticky note. But God began seeding my life with interesting stories and thoughts that slowly took shape as chapters.
I ended up writing the first draft of the book without knowing what it was really about. But one day, as I sat on my couch and wrote, I glanced up at our TV, where my wife had taped a picture of a young, chubby boy digging into a carton of ice cream, with the word Crave written across the picture, and I realized this one word captured the heart of what I had been feeling.
So I spent the next year rewriting over half the book around this theme. And the more I wrote, the more I came to see that I was uncovering the deepest parts of my own heart. God used the writing of this book to rewrite my understanding of Him, and I have found my nascent faith has wandered into a newer, larger view of the God we serve.
2. What’s your favorite chapter?
I find it difficult to select a favorite chapter overall. I suppose many writers feel the same way about their work. Ultimately, I find that I enjoy different chapters for different reasons.
I enjoy Habit because it reminds me of my baby steps in writing. I enjoy Pager because it has the best story in the book. I enjoy Rules because it liberates me from my rule-following tendencies and captures the interplay of love, grace, and obedience in a way that I find transforming in my own life. I enjoy Hunger because it contains much of the spirit of the book and digs the deepest theologically. I enjoy Suffering because it paints a picture of God’s sovereignty over blessing and loss in our lives that is both Biblical and beautiful. I enjoy Joy because it plants the seeds for wanting so much more of God in my own life.
3. My favorite chapter is “Suffering” for many reasons, but tell me why that chapter made it into the book or why it’s so special.
The issue of suffering is an enormous stumbling block for many. There are hundreds of millions who have rejected God because of the presence of suffering in the world or who have sought out other religions that promise escape from the bondage of suffering.
Ultimately, people who will not believe in God because of the suffering and evil they see in the world are not really balking at suffering; they are refusing to embrace God on His terms and insisting on embracing God on their own. When they find God will not be bent towards their own view of who He should be, they walk away from Him altogether.
Writing this chapter was eye-opening, painful, and transformational. Seeing that the Bible calls suffering a gift from God, and seeing that God means for the church to fill up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions, and seeing that Jesus is most treasured when He is shown to be worth any manner of loss are all avenues to embracing a God who means to actually make us into the image of His Son. And with that purpose in mind, He is willing to use both blessing and loss to shape and mold us into a people who will find our greatest joy in Him.
4. What is your view on wanting more of God? I mean, is it as simple as reading a book?
I’m for it.
OK, so I actually believe that all believers want more of God. If Jesus doesn’t have your heart, He doesn’t have you at all. Having said there, our journey of faith ebbs and flows with the tides, so there will be seasons in which we feel as if we don’t want more of God and other seasons of desperately wanting more of Him.
I thought the way to satisfy my desire for more of God was to do whatever I could to awaken more of this desire for Him. This led me into study and service and ministry, where I felt I would find satisfaction in the fruit God was bearing in my life.
But I found this way to be a false path. I discovered that God wasn’t simply kindling my desire for more of Him; He was uncovering the things that smothered this fire in the first place. I imagine this breaks some sort of rule of humility or grammar, but I’ll include a sentence from the final chapter of the book that captures this idea:
I’ve realized what was happening was not so much an addition of something that intensified my cravings for God but rather a stripping away of the things that smothered them.
There are a thousand different ways God can do this kind of stripping away. Reading a book may be one way. Living and sharing life within Christian community can be another. Sitting under gospel-centered teaching is still another. And certainly prayer and soaking in the Scriptures are primary means for God to uncover sin or wrong views of Him or a misguided understanding of what it means to follow Christ.
But the important point is that God is the one who is doing the work of creating this desire for more of Him and satisfying it with Himself.
5. What are some things you do when you are “craving” more of God?
There are two ways to answer this.
First, what I typically do when I am craving more of God is to revert back towards a works-based mentality of try to learn more about Him or do more for Him. I will feel the need to spend more time in the word, or to pray more, or to share my faith more, or to start a new ministry, or to look to others for confirmation that what I am doing on behalf of God’s kingdom is worthwhile.
But these kinds of doing are at odds with the grace-filled gospel and with the heart of this book. Craving more of God means embracing first what He has done for us on the cross, recognizing our inability to create or satisfy our longings for more of Him, resting in the mind-blowing knowledge that He loves and approves of us because of who we are in Christ, and submitting to the Spirit who fans the flames of our soul’s deepest longings to know and be known by God. In that kind of posture, God receives the glory, we the joy, and others the fruit of His work in and through us.
