05.05. Hungry-Thirsty-Filled

V HUNGRY--THIRSTY--FILLED

Matthew 5:6 "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled."-- Matthew 5:6. THIS characteristic of hunger and thirst arises naturally out of the foregoing ones. Up to this we have considered the passive side of Christian character--the poverty of spirit that lies low before God, and dares not think of itself more than a redeemed sinner may--the sorrow that mourns in secret over the evil of the world and of the heart--the meekness which has learned to take rebuff, rebuke, and injury calmly and quietly. But now the active element begins to assert itself. The man whose face has been buried in the dust, or stained with tears, or covered with marks of contumely and reproach, now lifts it toward God, crying, with David, "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God." You misjudged him. You thought that he was altogether deficient in force, and unable to exert himself; now you discover that the whole strength of his nature passes through channels which elude the common view of men, and shows itself in vehement passion toward the Unseen and Eternal. The desire of the regenerate soul is not simply toward God, but for righteousness. To be right, to do right, to conform in all things to the outlines and spirit of God’s ideal, to have a conscience void of offence, to be uncondemned by the heart--this is the desire of the soul. It is not enough to be conscious of weakness and ignorance, or to mourn for sin, the true penitent desires to learn the secret of walking before God in holiness and righteousness all his days. Our one regret should be that our desires after God and His righteousness are so fickle and faint. There is pain in hunger; nothing is more terrible than to suffer thirst bred by the heat and sand of the desert. But how rarely do we meet with biographies and experiences that come within measurable comparison with these natural cravings for food and drink! Why is it? May we not ask how to increase and augment this hunger for God, so that we shall not need to exert so strong an outward pressure on ourselves to observe times of prayer and worship, but shall leap out in desire toward God and the remembrance of His name, desiring these as the hungry man counts the moments to his meal? Let us take it to heart that we know so little of those passionate yearnings for God which have dwelt in all holy hearts, and the lack of which is one of the most serious signs of declension in the inner life. May God create in us hunger and thirst like that which Jesus knew, even though it should introduce a new and constant pain into our lives, that we may be led by it to know the blessedness that the knowledge and love of God can bring.

I. THE SPIRITUAL APPETITE.

It results from the constitution of our nature. --We cannot go deeper than nature. We cannot go behind or beyond it, for nature is what has been born (Lat. natura), born out of God’s thought by God’s power. When we speak of nature we must pass in thought from her to her parent God, and find a sufficient answer to all questions and difficulties by saying, " God has so willed it, therefore it is as it is."

All the strong basal instincts of human nature must be traced back to the make of our moral being as it was planned by Almighty wisdom, and wrought by infinite power. Do you ask why a belief in the immortality of the soul, and the hereafter, is found in every nation under heaven? Why lying, theft, and murder are accompanied with the blush of shame, and the desire of concealment; why, in the oldest settlements of man, there are traces of the altar and temple: and why human hearts are irresistibly drawn toward each other, finding indissoluble and indestructible affinities? It is only possible to answer by saying, "These things are as they are from the very nature with which God has endowed us." They are necessary, constitutional, essential, as much so as the features of the face, and the general principles of mathematics and arithmetic.

We hunger and thirst, because our physical nature has been so created that it must needs go out of itself for its supplies of nutriment. No one of us is self-contained, or independent of the great world of which we form a part. The difficulties and questions of how it came to be so do not alter the fact. Similarly, God made our souls for Himself. Deep within us, He has put necessities and desires, that crave for satisfaction from the Unseen, Eternal, and Divine.

We have a vision of the land of righteousness and blessedness from which we have come. Trailing clouds of glory, our race has descended into this murky atmosphere, but it can never forget the note of perfect music which it once heard, the vision of perfect beauty which it once beheld. Man is haunted by the thought of God, his original home; and however low he is plunged in sin and wickedness, he does not utterly forget; and there will be a time in his life when the gagged, imprisoned, drugged soul, will arise and come forth and begin to cry with exceeding bitterness, "I have perverted that which was right, and it profited me not;" " Thy Spirit is good; lead me into the land of uprightness;" "I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek Thy servant."

It produces pain.--There are many sources of pain; but perhaps primarily God has instituted it to compel us to take measures for our health and safety. The intense suffering produced by the decaying tooth is intended to force us to conserve an implement so necessary to mastication. The pain of hunger and thirst is designed to force us to take food, without which the body would become exhausted and die. How tenderly the love of God deals with His children when He forces them by pain to take measures for their own preservation! So in the moral sphere, we should be thankful, when we are discontented with ourselves, when in self-abhorrence we cry out for God’s unsullied righteousness, when we turn from the tortuous policy with loathing, when we go about smitten with infinite unrest. Treasure such an experience, for thus the grace of God leads back to Himself. The " vanity of vanities" of Ecclesiastes, so often wrung from Solomon’s soul, was the one symptom of returning health.

It is universal.--As we have never met man or woman incapable of hunger or thirst, so there is no human soul which is not capable of possessing God, and does not need Him for a complete life. Often the spiritual appetite is dormant, as that of a man debauched with drink. The child, whose stomach is cloyed with sweets; the invalid, who has long suffered under the pressure of a wasting illness, may have no appetite, but at any moment it may awake. Thus with the hunger of the soul for God. It awoke in the woman that was a sinner, in the thief on the cross, and Zacchaeus the publican. Take it bitterly to heart if it has not gnawed at your complacency, and destroyed your peace. Be very anxious if you know no yearnings for a better life, no desires after righteousness, no dissatisfaction with the present, no tireless search for God. These are grave symptoms.

Reduce all the activities of man to their ultimate reason, and it will be discovered to be as Jesus said--What shall we eat? What shall we drink? Wherewithal shall we be clothed? Perhaps in these northern climes we might add, How shall we be housed? These elemental necessities are the motor forces of the world. Similarly, all the feverish quest of men in music, art, the love of beauty, the pursuit of the chief good, to say nothing of religion, may be traced back to the desire of the soul for something which it has not attained. It cannot be satisfied in itself. It does not always know what it needs, any more than the babe does who feels the pains of hunger, and cries passionately or bitterly. During the great famines in China and India, the natives have fed on a kind of edible earth, making it into loaves. It has stayed their cravings, but they have grown gradually weaker till they have lain down to die. The nardoo plant of Australia closely resembles flour, but lacks the nutritive property, and those who feed on it, though insensible of hunger, after a few weeks die of starvation. Thus men who seek for that which is not bread, who refuse the fair loaf of God’s gift, which is Christ, and feed on ashes, may succeed in stilling the cravings for the unseen and eternal, and yet perish of that fatal lack of God.

II. THE NURTURE OF SPIRITUAL APPETITE.

We know too little of it. We cannot always say with the Psalmist, "I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord;" nor yet " My soul breaketh for the longing that it hath unto Thy judgments at all times;" nor with Job, " I have esteemed the words of His mouth more than my necessary food."

Here are a few simple directions for the stimulating of our desire for God.

Beware of the other food you take.--When children are unable to take the meal their mother has provided, she suspects them of having visited the confectioner’s shop on their way home from school, so that their appetite has become cloyed and sickly. May it not be that before we can have an eager taste for God’s Word, we shall have to put away some of the reading in which we now indulge, and which is little better than garbage? Sensational novels, frivolous talk, indulgence in appetite and sense, quickly incapacitate us for enjoying God.

Take exercise.--The more we do, the more food we require, and the more we enjoy it. Manly sports; long, vigorous walks; muscular exertion of any kind, will supply the source of hunger which will make the roughest food palatable; and it is they whose hand is seldom off the plough, who sow beside all waters, and are instant in season and out of season, that are most glad when the bells call to rest and food.

Take a tonic.--There is no tonic for spiritual appetite to compare to the biography of a holy life. It is well to have such an one constantly at hand. Frequently the story of the exercises of a man’s soul before God has started others on a more passionate quest for the Holy Grail.

Get up into the mountains.--The best appetite invigorator is the keen, bracing air, which breathes around those natural altars of the world which God has reared, where the pines grow, and the glacier moves slowly down, and the sounds of the valley seem far away. There is nothing so healthy as to go up with Christ into the high mountain apart when He prays. The tides of blood are aerated by the purer atmosphere; the eye sparkles with clearer vision; the appetite of the soul becomes keener.

Let us never rest with low levels, attenuated aspirations, or the mean standards which content our fellows. The only hope of the young artist is that he should not be content with the standard that prevails in the provincial town of his birth, but aim after that presented in the highest masterpieces. The only hope of the cygnet, born in the farmyard, is that it should not be content to paddle in the pond which suffices for the ducks. The hope of the soul is to refuse comparison with those beneath, and to keep the eye fixed on the righteousness of God as it is revealed in the life and words of Jesus. " Not as though I had already attained, but I press on." Let us see to it that we apply the highest standards of right to ourselves, to our relations with our fellow-men, and to our attitude before God, so that we could be content to live alone with God, as the one all-satisfying food of the soul. Hudson Taylor said the other day, "I have been forty years in China, it is forty years since I first landed on her shores, I have done but little there, I have learnt much, and this of all things--to live alone with God, to know God Himself, to know that His heart is love, and that His heart actuates His hand to help." Here is an ideal after which we may well aspire.

III. THE CERTAIN GRATIFICATION OF THIS APPETITE.

God never sends mouths, the old proverb says, but He sends with them the food to fill them. Young lions never seek that which His hand does not open to give. The fish, and the fly at which it snatches; the bird, and the berries on the hawthorn bush; the babe, and the milk stored in its mother’s breast, are perfectly adapted to each other. The instinct for immortality, and the mansions which Christ has gone to prepare; the desire for the city, and the city which hath foundations; the lively hope to which we are begotten by the resurrection of Christ, and its fruition, are in perfect harmony. Whatever you and I have longed for in our best and holiest moments, may have its consummation and bliss, because God has prepared for our perfect satisfaction. No hunger without food to match it; no wing without air to match it; no fire without water to match it; no babe’s cry without the mother’s love to match it; and no soul hungering and thirsting after the righteousness of God without God to meet and match it. Do you ask what is the bread of God, which can satisfy the insatiable craving of man’s heart? Jesus says, "I am that Bread of Life, he that cometh to Me shall never hunger; he that believeth in Me shall never thirst. I am the Bread of Life which came down from heaven, of which a man may eat and not die. The bread that I shall give is my Flesh that I shall give for the life of the world. He that drinketh of the water that I shall give shall never thirst."

Christ is made unto us righteousness. In other words, the man who has Christ, and gets right with Him, who is brought into adjusted relationship with Christ, almost unconsciously gets right with himself, with men, with the great system of law, and with God. Do not fret about the infinite demands that surround you. Do one thing. Let Christ be Alpha and Omega. With Him as foundation-stone, your building shall stand four-square to God and man. Are you filled? Do you know what it is to be satisfied? Have you ever been filled? Has it ever occurred to you to ask what the apostle meant by saying that the disciples were complete in Him? If not, and you truly desire these experiences, God will supply all your need out of His riches in glory. To ask, is to have. To seek, is to receive. To hunger and thirst, is to be satisfied. Lift up your heart unto the Lord, and say, "Fill me." Cry for Him with an exceeding great cry. For bread He will not give a stone or a serpent for fish. Believe that you receive simultaneously with your request, and you will know the blessedness of the pain which has brought you to God, the blessedness of being satisfied from God, the blessedness of desiring more of God; and yours shall be the song of the Virgin Mother--" He hath filled the hungry with good things." " My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise Thee with joyful lips."