Only God Can Satisfy Quotes & Sayings

In using all means, seek God alone. In and through every outward thing, look only to the power of His Spirit, and the merits of His Son. Beware you do not get stuck in the work itself; if you do, it is all lost labor. Nothing short of God can satisfy your soul. Therefore, fix on Him in all, through all, and above all ... Remember also to use all means as means-as ordained, not for their own sake ... — John Wesley

The Bible describes a God who is a thousand things to His children, even though some of these are beyond our ability to understand. So when people insist on humanly reasonable theologies to satisfy their need to believe, the lesser god they're buying is not the God of Scripture. We must beware of recreating an image of God that makes us feel better. — Beth Moore

The mind was designed not to defend what we want, but to discover what is ultimately true, which should shape our wants and satisfy them more deeply with God. The purpose of the mind is not to rationalize subjective preferences, but to recognize objective reality and to help the heart revel in God. — John Piper

The paradox of soul-satisfaction is this: When I die to myself, my soul comes alive. God says the wrong approach to soul thirst is through human achievement and material wealth. So soul-satisfaction is not about acquiring the right things but about acquiring the right soul. It is not something you buy, but something you receive freely from God. Hear these great words of the prophet Isaiah: "Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and [your soul] will delight in the richest of fare." And it will be satisfied. — John Ortberg

Nothing seems to satisfy. Not politics, not education, not material goods. Some who refuse to turn their hearts toward God have created the New Age movement, with all of its aberrations. This is actually not new but only the latest attempt by man to place something other than Christ inside himself in a futile attempt to satisfy spiritual longings. — Billy Graham

Dear God, I don't want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don't want to have created God to my own image as they're so fond of saying. Please give me the necessary grace, oh Lord, and please don't let it be as hard to get as Kafka made it. — Flannery O'Connor

This life we have is a process of becoming holy. Though Christ is the redeemer, it's up to us to have a relationship with God. Without a relationship, we'll always be lacking and trying to find fulfillment in this world, and we know what the world offers can never satisfy our need. — T.K. Chapin

O Lord, only you can satisfy my soul. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Intuition is a one-way communication from God, who never seems inclined to satisfy our curiosity, perhaps because, given the chance, every one of us would be like a child on a family road trip, endlessly asking Are we there yet? or the equivalent. — Anonymous

Just as water is the only thing that can relieve thirst in the desert, the provision of God's Word is the only thing that can satisfy our spiritual thirst. — Jim George

God has created you and me with a heart that only God's love can satisfy. And every other love will be partial, will be real, but limited, will be painful. And if we are willing to let the pain prune us, to give us a deeper sense of our belovedness, then we can be as free as Jesus and walk on this world and proclaim God's first love, wherever we go.2 — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Saw him where?"
"While I was sitting outside with one of my half aunts."
This seemed to satisfy Ronan was well, because he asked, "What's the other half of her?"
"God, Ronan," Adam said. "Enough. — Maggie Stiefvater

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He also has planted eternity in men's hearts and minds [a divinely implanted sense of a purpose working through the ages which nothing under the sun but God alone can satisfy], — Anonymous

Behold, I am at the point to die," cried the reckless, self-indulgent hunter, "and what profit shall this birthright do to me?" And for a dish of red pottage he parted with his birthright, and confirmed the transaction by an oath. A short time at most would have secured him food in his father's tents, but to satisfy the desire of the moment he carelessly bartered the glorious heritage that God himself had promised to his fathers. His whole interest was in the present. He was ready to sacrifice the heavenly to the earthly, to exchange a future good for a momentary indulgence. — Ellen G. White

Today, our challenge is not so much atheism as the need to respond adequately to many people's thirst for God, lest they try to satisfy it with alienating solutions or with a disembodied Jesus who demands nothing of us with regard to others. Unless these people find in the Church a spirituality which can offer healing and liberation, and fill them with life and peace, while at the same time summoning them to fraternal communion and missionary fruitfulness, they will end up being taken in by solutions which neither make life truly human nor give glory to God (89 — Anonymous

The nonexistence of God makes more difference to some of us than to others. To me, it means that there is no absolute morality, that moralities are sets of social conventions devised by humans to satisfy their needs. — Bertrand Russell

A paradox of the soul is that it is incapable of satisfying itself, but it is also incapable of living without satisfaction. You were made for soul-satisfaction, but you will only ever find it in God. The soul craves to be secure. The soul craves to be loved. The soul craves to be significant, and we find these only in God in a form that can satisfy us. That's why the psalmist says to God, "Because your love is better than life ... my soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods." Soul and appetite and satisfaction are dominant themes in the Bible - the soul craves because it is meant for God. "My soul, find rest in God. — John Ortberg

Why would God create people with all these desires and curiosities and then punish them for trying to satisfy them? — Belle Blackburn

God bless you and utterly satisfy your heart ... with Himself. — Amy Carmichael

I received in inheritance neither god nor a given spot on earth from where I can draw the attention of a god: no one either legated me the well disguised fury of the skeptic, the Sioux guiles of the rationalist or the burning innocence of the atheist. So I dare not throw the stone neither at the one who believes in things which inspire me only doubt, nor at the one who cultivates his doubt as if it was not, just as well, surrounded with darkness. This stone would hit me myself because I am well certain about one thing: the need of consolation that dwells within the human being is impossible to satisfy. — Stig Dagerman

Who is God? Who are we? What is our purpose? All these questions remain unanswered. I want to reach the genuine seeker of spiritual well-being. My goal is to satisfy the hunger and longing for those who are seeking the truth. — Ravi Zacharias

God is God. I dethrone Him in my heart if I demand that He act in ways that satisfy my idea of justice. It is the same spirit that taunted, "If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the Cross." There is unbelief, there is even rebellion, in the attitude that says, "God has no right to do this to five men unless ... — Elisabeth Elliot

Actually, only God can satisfy a Christian's heart; man cannot. The failure of many is to seek from man what can be found only in God. All human affection is empty; the love of God alone is able to fully satisfy one's desire. The moment a Christian seeks a love outside God his spiritual life immediately falls. — Watchman Nee

Do not be content to skim through a chapter [of the Bible] merely to satisfy your conscience. Hide the Word of God in your heart. — Billy Graham

None but God can satisfy the longings of an immortal soul; that as the heart was made for Him, so He only can fill it. — Richard Chenevix Trench

Back when I had a little, I thought that I needed a lot. A little was overrated, but a lot was a little too complicated. See, zero didn't satisfy me. A million didn't make me happy. That's when I learned a lesson that it's all about your perception ... THERE'S HOPE. It doesn't cost a thing to smile. You don't have to pay to laugh. Better thank God for that ... — India.Arie

Worship-based prayer seeks the face of God before the hand of God. God's face is the essence of who He is. God's hand is the blessing of what He does. God's face represents His person and presence. God's hand expresses His provision for needs in our lives. I have learned that if all we ever do is seek God's hand, we may miss His face; but if we seek His face, He will be glad to open His hand and satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts. — Daniel Henderson

Don't get angry towards God, when your lovers don't satisfy you — Natalia Silva

All the hungers we have for love, for union, for happiness are given by God to lead us to him. The difference between a saint and the greatest sinner is where they go to satisfy that hunger. — Christopher West

In the mind of the ordinary peasant the Tsar was not just a kingly ruler but a god on earth. He thought of him as a father-figure who knew all the peasants personally by name, understood their problems in all their minute details, and, if it were not for the evil boyars who surrounded him, would satisfy their demands. Hence the peasant tradition of sending direct appeals to the Tsar. — Orlando Figes

Nothing satisfy the soul than Truth. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Numerous Christians do not know how to glorify God in their eating and drinking. They do not eat and drink simply to keep their body fit for the Lord's use but indulge to satisfy their personal desires. We should understand that the body is for the Lord and not for ourselves; hence we should refrain from using it for our pleasure. Food ought not hinder our fellowship with God since it is to be taken purely to preserve the body in health. — Watchman Nee

The idea of being the Substitute in offering an atonement to satisfy the demands of God's law for others was something Christ understood as His mission from the moment He entered this world and took upon Himself a human nature. He came from heaven as the gift of the Father for the express purpose of working out redemption as our Substitute, doing for us what we could not possibly do for ourselves. — R.C. Sproul

The church doesn't exist to satisfy the religious tastes of its members. Nor does it exist for institutional self-preservation. Nor does it exist to provide clergy with fulfilling employment and generous remuneration and an unparalleled retirement package. But rather it exists to join God in God's self-giving for the sake of the world. — Kelly Bean

Water and petrol both come from the earth, and though they seem to be alike and even the same, they are in nature and purpose exact opposites, for the one extinguishes fire and the other adds fuel to it. So also the world and its treasures, the heart and its thirst for God are alike His creation. Now the result of the attempt to satisfy the heart with the wealth and pride and honours of this world is the same as if one tried to put out a fire with petrol, for the heart can only find ease and satisfaction in Him who created both it and the longing desire of which it is conscious. — Sadhu Sundar Singh

God's Word is the only thing that can satisfy your spiritual thirst. — Jim George

In salvation, God both declares us guilty and pays our debt. Only he can satisfy his own requirements. A savior less than God would be disqualified; God must do it himself. — Erwin W. Lutzer

Lord, You have told me who You are, You have in mercy revealed Yourself to me, I know You to be that blessed 'gift of God' which alone can save and satisfy my soul. The depth and compass of heavenly love are manifested in You, and You have shown me, not my need only, but the sufficiency of Your grace and power to meet it. I am an empty sinner, You are a full Christ! — Susannah Spurgeon

There are only two ways that God's justice can be satisfied with respect to your sin. Either you satisfy it or Christ satisfies it. You can satisfy it by being banished from God's presence forever. Or you can accept the satisfaction that Jesus Christ has made. — R.C. Sproul

If the ills of humanity were caused by culture, they could certainly be cured in no way other than by culture.4 But the ills we have in mind are native to the human heart, which always remains the same, and culture only brings them out. With all its wealth and power, it only shows that the human heart, in which God has put eternity [Eccles. 3:11], is so huge that all the world is too small to satisfy it. Human beings are in search of another and better redemption than culture can give them. They are looking for lasting happiness, an enduring eternal good. They are thirsting for a redemption that saves them physically as well as spiritually, for time but also for eternity. — Anonymous

Sounds a little like my quote for the week. Do you want to hear it? This is by Augustine: O soul, He only who created thee can satisfy thee. If thou ask for anything else, it is thy misfortune, for He alone made thee in His image can satisfy thee. That's rich, isn't it? — Robin Jones Gunn

Only God can fully satisfy the hungry heart of man. — Hugh Black

But I am all for love, and I am against marriage, particularly the arranged kind, because the arranged marriage gives you satisfaction. And love? - love can never satisfy you. It gives you more and more thirst for a better and better love, it makes you more and more long for it, it gives you tremendous discontentment. And that discontent is the beginning of the search for God. When love fails many times, you start looking for a new kind of lover, a new kind of love, a new quality of love. That love affair is prayer, meditation, sannyas. — Rajneesh

This truth may be handled either sinfully or profitably; sinfully as when it is treated on only to satisfy curiosity, and to keep up a mere barren speculative dispute ... This point of election ... is not to be agitated in a verbal and contentious way, but in a saving way, to make us tremble and to set us upon a more diligent and close striving with God in prayer, and all other duties. — Anthony Burgess

We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds in the name of destiny and in the name of God. — Don Henley

The Gospel announces that Jesus came to acquit the guilty. He came to judge and be judged in our place. Christ came to satisfy the deep judgment against us once and for all so that we could be free from the judgement of God, others, and ourselves. — Tullian Tchividjian

There is no man on the face of the earth who can satisfy the deepest longings of a woman's heart
God made us in such a way that we can never be truly satisfied with anything or anyone less than Himself — Nancy Leigh DeMoss

Every natural longing has its natural satisfaction. If we thirst, God has created liquids to gratify thirst. If we are susceptible of attachment, there are beings to gratify that love. If we thirst for life and love eternal, it is likely that there are an eternal life and an eternal love to satisfy that craving. — Frederick William Robertson

Go to God with your coal, and He will set them to blazing fire. — Anthony Liccione

The sage of Nazareth may satisfy those who have never faced the problem of evil in their own lives; but to talk about an ideal to those who are under the thralldom of sin is a cruel mockery. Yet if Jesus was merely a man like the rest of men, then an ideal is all that we have in Him. Far more is needed by a sinful world. It is small comfort to be told that there was goodness in the world, when what we need is goodness triumphant over sin. But goodness triumphant over sin involves an entrance of the creative power of God, and that creative power of God is manifested by the miracles. Without the miracles, the New Testament might be easier to believe. But the thing that would be believed would be entirely different from that which presents itself to us now. Without the miracles we should have a teacher; with the miracles we have a Savior. — J. Gresham Machen

In the narrative of his third voyage Columbus wrote: "For I believe that the earthly Paradise lies here, which no one can enter except by God's leave." As for the people of this land, Peter Martyr would write as early as 1505: "They seem to live in that golden world of which old writers speak so much, wherein men lived simply and innocently without enforcement of laws, without quarreling, judges, or libels, content only to satisfy nature." Or as the ever present Montaigne would write: "In my opinion, what we actually see in these nations not only surpasses all the pictures which the poets have drawn of the Golden Age, and all their inventions representing the then happy state of mankind, but also the conception and desire of philosophy itself. — Paul Auster

We were all created incomplete and will find no rest until we satisfy the deepest hunger and thirst within us. You've tried to satisfy it in your own way. I see that in your eyes, too, as I've seen it in so many others. And yet, though you deny it with your last breath, your soul yearns for God, — Francine Rivers

For not even one person to have ever exhibited this interest in writing nor for any to have so satisfied it is bizarre. Saying this all went on in person is simply insufficient to answer the point: if everything was being resolved in person, Paul would never have written a single letter; nor would his congregations have so often written him letters requesting he write to satisfy their questions - which for some reason always concerned only doctrine and rules of conduct, never the far more interesting subject of how the Son of God lived and died. On the other matters Paul was compelled to write tens of thousands of words. If he had to write so much on those issues, how is it possible no one ever asked for or wrote even one word on the more obvious and burning issues of the facts of Jesus' life and death? — Richard Carrier

The human mind is a lucky little local, passing accident which was totally unforeseen, and condemned to disappear with this earth and to recommence perhaps here or elsewhere the same or different with fresh combinations of eternally new beginnings. We owe it to this little lapse of intelligence on His part that we are very uncomfortable in this world which was not made for us, which had not been prepared to receive us, to lodge and feed us or to satisfy reflecting beings, and we owe it to Him also that we have to struggle without ceasing against what are still called the designs of Providence, when we are really refined and civilized beings. — Guy De Maupassant

God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy. — C.S. Lewis

Only God satisfies. ONLY GOD SATISFIES. Let this truism settle down deep inside your heart. It is the unveiled truth. Feed this truth to your spirit. Force it down and command it to chase down, repel, and extricate all lies the Devil has successfully planted inside your spirit. Will it to sleigh your flesh. Forget about finding happiness and fulfillment in your spouse, friend, or child. Fulfillment comes only when you are totally invested in your relationship with God. When you are facing a trial or walking through a storm, it is God who will comfort and satisfy your soul with boundless and extraordinary love and guidance. Within God's love there is an all-embracing grace. — Cheryl Zelenka

You give because the love of God has been poured into your heart, not to satisfy the law. — Sherry K. White

The word of God is a tree of life that offers us blessed fruit from each of its branches. It is like that rock which was struck open in the wilderness, from which all were offered spiritual drink. Be glad then that you are overwhelmed, and do not be saddened because he has overcome you. A thirsty person is happy when drinking, and not depressed, because the spring is inexhaustible. You can satisfy your thirst without exhausting the spring; then when you thirst again, you can drink from it once more. — Ephrem The Syrian

The next Post brought a reply from the starets, who wrote to him that the cause of all his trouble lay in his pride. His Wrathful Outburst, the starets explained, had come about because it was not for God that he had humbled himself, rejecting honours and advancement in the church - not for God, but to satisfy his own pride, to be able to tell himself how virtuous he was, seeking nothing for self. That was why he had not been able to endure the Superior's conduct. Because he felt that he had given up everything for God, and now he was being put on display, like some strange beast.
If it were for God you had given up advancement, you would have let it pass.
worldly pride is still alive in you. — Leo Tolstoy

The pursuit of joy in God is not optional. It is not an "extra" that a person might grow into after he comes to faith. It is not simply a way to "enhance" your walk with the Lord. Until your heart has hit upon this pursuit, your "faith" cannot please God. It is not saving faith. Saving faith is the confidence that if you sell all you have and forsake all sinful pleasures, the hidden treasure of holy joy will satisfy your deepest desires. Saving faith is the heartfelt conviction not only that Christ is reliable, but also that He is desirable. It is the confidence that He will come through with His promises and that what He promises is more to be desired than all the world. — John Piper

Before God and in conscience, Muslims cannot satisfy themselves by repeating what the texts say and then snap their fingers at daily social realities: that would be to speak of an ideal while at the same time blind themselves as to their daily betrayal. — Tariq Ramadan

We study the glory of God, and the honour and liberty of parliament, for which we unanimously fight, without seeking our own interests ... I profess I could never satisfy myself on the justness of this war, but from the authority of the parliament to maintain itself in its rights; and in this cause I hope to prove myself an honest man and single-hearted. — Oliver Cromwell

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world. — C.S. Lewis

That God only whom Christ reveals to the humble seeker, can ever satisfy human soul. — George MacDonald

Even Annie did not then know that it was the soul's hunger, the vague sense of a need which nothing but the God of human faces, the God of the morning and of the starful night, the God of love and self-forgetfulness, can satisfy, that sent her money-loving, poverty-stricken, pining, grumbling old aunt out staring towards the east. It is this formless idea of something at hand that keeps men and women striving to tear from the bosom of the world the secret of their own hopes. How little they know what they look for in reality is their God! This is that for which their heart and their flesh cry out. — George MacDonald

We are in an age of religious complexity. The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart. The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and the servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all. If we would find God amid all the religious externals we must first determine to find Him, and then proceed in the way of simplicity. — A.W. Tozer

Those who refuse His mercy satisfy His justice in another way. Without His mercy, they cannot love Him. Without love for Him they cannot be 'justified' or 'made just'. That is to say: they cannot conform to Him Who is love. Those who have not received His mercy are in a state of injustice with regard to Him. It is their own injustice that is condemned by His justice. And in what does their injustice consist? In the refusal of His mercy. We come, in the end, to this basic paradox: that we owe it to God to receive from Him the mercy that is offered to us in Christ, and that to refuse this mercy is the summation of our 'injustice'. Clearly, then, only the mercy of God can make us just, in this supernatural sense, since the primary demand of God's justice upon us is that we receive His mercy. — Thomas Merton

Then you will call, and the Eternal will answer; you will cry for help, and [God] will say: Here am I. If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. — Maurice D Harris

All the evils in the world come not because our desires for happiness are too strong, but because they are so weak that we settle for fleeting pleasures that do not satisfy our deepest souls, but in the end destroy them. The root of all evil is that we are the kind of people who settle for the love of money instead of the love of God (1 Timothy 6:10). — John Piper

Who except God can give you peace? Has the world ever been able to satisfy the heart? — Gerard Majella

All theology is a doomed but necessary attempt to express the inexpressible. God is the elusive mystery we try to capture and convey in language, but how can that ever be done? If the word water is not itself drinkable, how can the words we use to express the mystery of God be themselves absolute? They are metaphors, analogies, figures of speech, yet religious people have slaughtered and condemned each other over these experimental uncertainties. Our glory and agony as humans is that we long to find words that will no longer be words, mere signifiers, but the very experience they are trying to signify; and our tragedy is that we never succeed. This is the anguish that lies at the heart of all religion, because, though our words can describe our thirst for the absolute, they can never satisfy it. — Richard Holloway

Whether we are feasting or fasting or somewhere in between, food should have a sacred role in our lives. It can be something we sacrifice, something we savor, something we share, and through it all we can remain fulfilled because we are grounded in God, the only One who can satisfy our hungry hearts. — Mary DeTurris Poust