“To Stay Hungry You Must Keep Eating”

Wait, read that heading again. “To Stay Hungry You Must Keep Eating.”  That has to be a misprint. 

No, it’s not a misprint.  That’s right.  At least in the spiritual realm, but not in the physical. In the physical, the more we eat the less hungry we are.  And it is our hunger that drives us to eat.

But in the spiritual, I have discovered it is the direct opposite.  The longer someone stays away from prayer, the Word of God and the regular gathering of the people of God in corporate worship, their spiritual appetite begins to be atrophied and might never recover.  We see this especially with the elder who no longer have an appetite.

Health sources tell us a body can go 21 days without food, but not without water.  Even after 24 hours of no food the body begins to react by consuming stored proteins.

Without the proper nutrition, the body cannot survive long.  Yet, persons will go weeks and weeks without spiritual nutrition and think all is fine.

Matthew 5: 6 Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.”

The thought here is not those “who have hungered and thirsted,” but those who are now and has been continuing to hunger and thirst.

It is a present and ongoing state. 

But how is that true spiritually?  Are we not “filled.”  Yes, but there is a double meaning here.  We have been filled but we are continuously being filled.  When God fills us with His goodness and grace, it just creates in us a desire for more of it and to be continually filled.

This was the cry of Paul in Philippians 3: 8-14.  Although he knew God, he wanted to know Him more always “pressing on toward the goal of the prize of the God in Christ Jesus.”  What is the goal….Christ Jesus.

For only in Heaven are we promised we “shall never hunger anymore nor thirst anymore…” (Revelation 7:16).  But until then….the words of the hymn is my prayer…“More about Jesus would I know,…More about Jesus, in His Word, holding communion with my Lord….More, more about Jesus…”  Make it your prayer today.