God Hunger
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. (Matthew 5:6 NIV)
These words are addressed to those of God's children who have been pierced with the arrow of infinite desire, who yearn for God with a yearning that has overcome them, who long with a longing that has become pain.
"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled" (Matthew 5:6). Hunger is a pain. It is God's merciful provision, a divinely sent stimulus to propel us in the direction of food. If food-hunger is a pain, thirst, which is water-hunger, is a hundredfold worse, and the more critical the need becomes within the living organism the more acute the pain. It is nature's last drastic effort to rouse the imperiled life to seek to renew itself. A dead body feels no hunger and the dead soul knows not the pangs of holy desire. "If you want God," said the old saint, "you have already found Him." Our desire for fuller life is proof that some life must be there already. Our very dissatisfactions should encourage us, our yet unfulfilled aspirations should give us hope. "What I aspired to be, and was not, comforts me," wrote Browning with true spiritual insight. The dead heart cannot aspire.
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Prayer
As the deer pants for for streams of water so may my soul pants for you, O God. Only You can satisfy.
Thought
Few of us seem to suffer from intensity of hunger and thirst for God. We regularly endure long "spiritual fasts." We won't be filled if we do not hunger and thirst. Rather we will become victims of spiritual malnutrion without hardly being aware of it.
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