THOUGHTS ON BEING COMPLETELY SATISFIED YET INSATIABLY HUNGRY

“In the path of your judgments,O LORD, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul.My soul yearns for you in the night;my spirit within me earnestly seeks you.For when your judgments are in the earth,the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness.” Isaiah 26:8-9

"Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied.”
Luke 6:21

“Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.”
Psalm 90:14

"My soul longs and even yearns for the courts of the LORD; My heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God."
Psalm 84:2

I remember as a little kid being invited to a friend’s house to eat. My friend’s mother made a banquet type meal complete with Chicken Parmesan, spaghetti, salad, garlic bread, and spumoni ice cream. (At least it is my idea of a banquet!) But before I went I didn’t know what I was going to be having for supper. I was afraid that it might be a meal like my mother’s favorite meal. I called this “the meal from hell”. It consisted of a combination of pork chops, liver, or spam, along with broccoli, hominy (which I called agony), and Swanson’s T.V. Corn Bread (whose constitution was much like eating sawdust!) So dreading the possibilities I loaded up beforehand upon good old peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (also known as PB and J). As a result, when I got to my friend’s house, to my surprise my dream feast was being served, but to my disappointment I had absolutely no appetite and therefore ended up passing on the meal. I missed out on the feast because I settled for a sandwich.

I am afraid that many of us are in danger of becoming peanut butter and jelly Christians stuffed with other food that has robbed us of an appetite for God. Every day of your life a war goes on in regards to our appetites. Every one of us have been born with appetites and desires. They dictate what directs us and what satisfies us; whether it is the cravings of our physical hunger, the desire for the things that this world offers, or the deep longings of our souls for God.

Augustine said, “Oh Lord thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts can find no rest except we find it in Thee.” The heart of man is full of restlessness and longing. We are both afflicted and blessed with a chronic restlessness, an insatiable soul-thirst for this reason: that we might keep looking until we find Christ, and that having found him we might be turned back to Him again and again when we leave His spring to taste of other springs and find them lacking.

Is it no wonder that Jesus said in John 6:35: "I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst. Or in John 4:14, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life."

Salvation is the awakening of our appetites for God. It is an appetite from God that gives the palette of our souls for Him. “Oh taste and see that the Lord is good”, says the Psalmist (Psalm 34:8). Once you have tasted the Lord, nothing less will ever satisfy your longings. It is no wonder, for when we taste of God’s ultimate goodness, anything else would be like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches compared to Filet Mignon!

When we are converted God awakens in us we a new appetite for Him and a new delight in God. Saint Augustine describes this in his description of his own conversion when he writes:
“How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys that I once feared to lose was now a joy to part with.You drove them from me, you who are the true sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure, though not to flesh and blood, you who outshine all light, yet are hidden deeper than any secret in our hearts, you who surpass all honor, though not in the eyes of men who see honor in themselves…Oh Lord my God, my light, my wealth, and my salvation!”

One might think that those who are satisfied most with God are the least hungry. When we eat a full meal of steak and our favorite pie until we are full, we say that we want no more because our physical appetite has been satisfied. But not so with the hungry, thirsty, feasting Christians. They turn often from the innocent pleasures of the world to linger more directly in the presence of God through the reading of the revelation of His Word. And there they eat the Bread of Heaven and drink the Living Water by prayer, meditation, and faith. But, paradoxically, it is not so that they are the least hungry saints. The opposite is the case. The strongest, most mature Christians I have ever met are the hungriest for God. They feast upon Him and are satisfied, yet the taste for God continues and ever increases. Their cry to God is an insatiable "More, More, More!" The desire creates the delight and the delight creates a deeper desire which leads to deeper delight and so on and on throughout this earthly journey until glory. Why? Because God is an inexhaustible fountain, an infinite feast, and a glorious Lord.

When you begin to drink at the River of Life and eat the Bread of Heaven, and know that you have found the end of all your longings, you only get hungrier for God. The very satisfaction creates an even greater longing. “We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread, And long to feast upon Thee still; We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead And thirst our souls from Thee to fill,” said Bernard of Clairveux.

The more satisfaction you experience from God, while still in this world, the greater your desire for the next. C.S. Lewis describes this wonderfully supernatural, peculiar appetite: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world…It was when I was happiest that I longed the most…The sweetest thing in all of my life has been the longing…to find the place where beauty came from.” How wonderful it is for God to awaken in the soul of a person the longing for God above all of His gifts. For, as C. S. Lewis said, "Our best havings are our wantings." In the truest sense, the greatest gift from God is the gift He gives us of stirring an appetite for Him above His gifts!

John Piper gives a great description of a person who feasts upon the Lord Jesus.
“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 a 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 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.”

Oh reader, beloved one of God, if you don't feel strong desires for God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are not satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world that your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great thing. God did not create you for this. He has created you to have an appetite for God and it can be awakened.

My prayer for us all is that God might awaken us to a new hunger for Himself. That He might remove the callouses from the taste buds of our heart, and cause us to drink deeply, and savor the magnificence of Jesus and we will become so satisfied with Him that we will glorify Him like David saying from our hearts and our preferences:

O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water…as the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God… Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever." (Psalm 63:1; 42:1; 73:25)

Satisfied yet insatiably hungry,
Pastor Bill