I’m preaching through Acts on Sunday morning and yesterday we came to Acts 13. Originally I was going to preach on the worship, prayer, and fasting of the church in one sermon, but as I studied I felt led to spend one week on each discipline. As I prepared to preach on the three actions of the church before they sent Barnabas and Saul for their first missionary journey I found myself reading through John Piper’s book A Hunger for God.
In the Introduction he said,
In the Introduction he said,
“The more deeply you walk with Christ, the hungrier you get for Christ…the more homesick you get for Heaven…the more you want ‘all the fullness of God’…the more you want to be done with sin…the more you want the Bridegroom to come again…the more you want the Church revived and purified with the beauty of Jesus…the more you want great awakening to God’s reality in the cities…the more you want to see the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ penetrate the darkness of all the unreached peoples of the world…the more you want to see the false worldviews yield to the force of Truth…the more you want to see pain relieved and tears wiped away and death destroyed…the more you long for every wrong to be made right and the justice and grace of God to fill the earth like the waters cover the sea.
If you don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great. God did not create you for this. There is an appetite for God. And it can be awakened. I invite you to turn from the dulling effects of food and the dangers of idolatry, and to say with some simple fast: ‘This much, O God, I want you.’” (page 23)
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