DO YOU REMEMBER SEEING ON TV THE ABJECT HUNGER AND STARVATION OF THE ETHIOPIAN PEOPLE in 1984 and 2017? It was heart wrenching! Adults and children were lying on the streets slowly dying, nothing more than bones sheathed with parched skin.
God placed in our body the desire for food. If you lose your normal, natural hunger and thirst, illness and possibly death may take place. God also put in the soul of his crowning creation a hunger and thirst for a deep, settled peace. If you lose your desire for inner peace, a seared conscience takes place. When you have no desire to act on the hunger that Jesus gives, you may “eat and still be hungry,” as it says in The Book of Hosea 4:10.
Many will try to assuage their grief, fear, anger, and guilt with escapism into alcohol, drugs, money, power or multiple relationships. Others who recognize their spiritual hunger will ignore it by gravitating to a form of Godliness while denying the power thereof.
Physical hunger tells your body that you need food while spiritual hunger is as Isaiah says: “My soul yearns for you in the night; in the morning my spirit longs for you.”
Isaiah 26:9 (niv).
The Psalmist prayed (42:1-4):
“As the deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God. I thirst for God, the living God. When can I go and stand before him? ….” The Psalmist continues, “My heart is breaking as I remember how it used to be: ….”
Thank God, there is an answer. “BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO HUNGER AND THIRST FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS, FOR THEY SHALL BE FILLED.”
Matthew 5:6 (nkjv)
“Longing, longing for Jesus.
I have a longing in my heart for him.
Just to be near him,
To feel his presence,
I have have a longing in my heart for him.”
Write It On My Heart 