Glimpses of a Far Off Country: Unplugging U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”

Part 11 in the U2 Unplugged Series

“I Found It”. This slogan was used by an evangelistic organization back in the mid-1970s as a creative way to spread the gospel through mass marketing techniques. As a child growing up during that era, I remember yellow “I Found It” bumper stickers, t-shirts, billboards, and advertisements appearing everywhere around our home town. But as I look back at that campaign, I wonder how effective the slogan really was. There’s some truth in the message, but “I Found It” seems too simplistic and perhaps even misleading to describe the Christian faith. After all, believers aren’t immune to problems: we still struggle with addictions, experience tragedy, and make lousy decisions. We get a taste of Jesus Christ and his fantastic plans for us in the future, but never experience them fully as long as we are living in this sinful world.

In one of their best known songs from their entire discography, U2 sings about an incomplete journey of faith in “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” [Lyrics] [iTunes]. On the surface, the title may sound like a confession of unbelief. But, in reality, the song is an honest look at the struggle that all believers face as we seek a fulfilled life.

Flickers

A longing. It’s the pang in your stomach when you’re in love. You can sense it as you gaze over the glorious snow-capped peaks of the Colorado Rockies. You can feel it in your soul during a great worship or prayer time. C.S. Lewis observed that this intense desire, which he refers to as “joy”, is for something that nothing on earth ever truly quenches. You can catch a glimpse of it, but this longing is fleeting. In his poem Dymer, Lewis reflects on joy’s unattainable nature: “Joy flickers on the razor-edge of the present and is gone.” Lewis believed that was exactly how God intended it, that joy is meant to be a clue or a pointer to the fact we are made for another place, for his “far off country.”

In “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, U2 explores our search for joy, as we seek fulfillment for that deep longing inside each of us. As the song begins, Bono sings of his efforts at finding God:

I have climbed the highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you

I have run I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
Only to be with you

As believers, we can fall into the trap of thinking that our efforts alone will allow us to discover the prize we desire. If we’re just good enough or involved in enough ministries at our church, then we will be blessed by God and find total contentment.

Yet, human effort alone is a dead-end street. Even if we could somehow live a life of faith that ranks along side the best of all time, we will still fall short. Biblical greats like Noah, Abraham, and Moses each had great faith and did mighty deeds for God, but none of these men “found what they were looking for.” Hebrews 11:14 gives the sobering truth, “All of these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcome them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth.” U2 reflects this passage in the chorus of the song:

But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for

Yet, in spite of the fact that this truth is plainly evident by opening the pages of the Bible, you rarely hear this message being preached on Sunday mornings. We much prefer to hear about the “abundant Christian life” that comes to us when we surrender our lives to Jesus Christ. We don’t want to admit that despite a steadfast faith and our best efforts at obedience, none of us have fully found what we’re looking for. We’re driven to seek, but we never fully find it on earth.

Christ’s purpose in our lives is never to offer total fulfillment today. Instead, Jesus heals us from the past, provides joy and contentment in the present, and offers certain hope that our deepest longings will be fulfilled in the future.

Detours

When we fail to recognize that the longing is pointing us towards God and his future kingdom, we take detours looking for joy in things much closer to home. In the song, U2 highlights three common substitutes that we turn to instead of God.

First, we seek fulfillment in physical and emotional relationships. Alluding to Proverbs 5:3, Bono sings in the second verse:

I have kissed honey lips

Felt the healing in her fingertips
It burned like fire
This burning desire

We can look for meaning through a blissful romance or for satisfaction through something cheaper and easier. We can be driven by “this burning desire” and think we’ve found “Heaven on Earth.”

Second, we get trapped in spiritual experiences. Bono sings that he “spoke with the tongue of angels”, perhaps alluding to the time Bono, Edge, and Larry were part of the charismatic group Shalom in the early 1980s. Within the church, sometimes we can get so caught up with experiencing God through emotion-driven spiritual expressions of faith, such as “speaking in tongues”. However, when “experience” becomes our preoccupation and source of fulfillment, then it detours us from God himself.

Third, we look for fulfillment in the world apart from God. “I have held the hand of the devil,” sings Bono. We can hold the devil’s hand and sell out our faith when we look to the world as our source for joy. Not only do big ticket items like career success, money, or fame derail us, but also the everyday things like shopping, hobbies, or our obsession with our favorite sports team.

Each of these areas offers partial fulfillment, so much so that you can get lost for decades searching for completeness in them. Lewis recognized that when we experience joy in real life, the danger is putting your focus on the wrong things. He writes in The Weight of Glory:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; [joy] was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things…are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of the worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.

In the end, when you take a detour apart from God, you’ll always end up sounding like Mick Jagger, saying “I can’t get no satisfaction”, since nothing but God will truly quench our thirst for joy.

Pressing On

In the final verse of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, U2 identifies a surprise twist for Christians with “I Found It” stickers on their bumpers: The more you grow in your faith, the more you realize your inevitable incompleteness in this life. Bono sings of his steadfast belief in Jesus Christ and his sacrificial death on the cross. However, in spite of that faith, he finds himself “still running”. The lyrics go like this:

I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
But yes I’m still running
You broke the bonds
You loosed the chains
You carried the cross
And my shame
And my shame
You know I believe it
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for

Some Christians listen to this part of the song and conclude that Bono is turning on his faith — complaining that he’s still not satisfied even after coming face to face with the reality of Jesus Christ. Yet, far from saying anything radical, Bono is simply expressing the same thoughts that the apostle Paul wrote Philippians 3:12-14:

Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

Like Bono, the apostle Paul made it clear that he still hadn’t found what he was looking for. Instead, his focus was to strain forward to what is ahead and press on towards the goal of joy in Jesus Christ.

Action Steps

U2’s classic “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” is an honest, heartfelt account of a believer who realizes that he won’t find true joy on this earth. As you consider your faith, check out the following action steps:

Get out a piece of paper and jot down five areas of your life in which you seek fulfillment. After you make your list, go down each item and consider how each of these areas fall short of the fulfillment that we are looking for. Then, give each of these areas over to Jesus Christ.

Carve out a portion of your day today for a special prayer session, being honest to God about your faith journey and your search for joy.

Take Hebrews 11 and spend several days studying the “Hall of Faith” chapter. Each day, focus on a person mentioned in the passage, looking at his or her life, expression of faith, and the degree to which they realized their life’s goals.

Diving Deeper
Phil 3:7-16, Hebrews 11.