Babies have a ferocious appetite. They must, after all, in the first few years of life they grow from little babies to roaming engines of curiosity. Then, in the teen years, the next hyper-growth years, they get very hungry again. But not only babies and teenagers get hungry; everybody gets hungry. It’s God’s built-in way to supply us with the fuel we need for life.
There is another kind of hunger we all experience, a spiritual hunger. We may call it something else, or we may call it nothing at all, but we all experience a hunger for happiness, love, and meaning in life. It is unavoidable and insatiable. The question is, how do we fill our spiritual appetite?
The Bible speaks of this in 1 Peter 2:2. “As newborn babies, desire the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow in respect to salvation.” God compares us to newborns who have a great desire to eat, and the only thing that will satisfy their hunger is pure milk. For the follower of Jesus Christ that pure milk is a relationship with God himself ( salvation). God made human hearts for himself. He made us to gravitate towards joy. And in God’s creative genius, desire is the mechanism that drives a person towards that Joy. Our problem is that we don’t know what the true joy is, but we are still driven by desire. So, we often pursue flawed and distorted things and experiences to satiate our burning spiritual hunger. One person pursues one flawed thing, and another person something entirely different, and both criticize each other for not being on the same path to nowhere that fulfills nothing.
There are good desires and bad desires, but sometimes (maybe even often), we have good desires in a bad way. Like a man who desires to succeed in his job, he’s hungry for success. This is a good desire, but maybe he desires success because his older brother always did everything better than he did, and his father seemed to favor his brother. His motivation for success is to one-up his brother and attempt to fill up some relational need. His hunger is misdirected and is working against him rather than for him.
What’s your story? What are you filling your hunger with that may leave you empty or only temporarily satisfied? How do we fill our hunger with good things, God things? The pure spiritual milk we need is an ongoing love relationship with God that is real. We enter a relationship with God by faith in Jesus Christ, and we live day to day in that relationship by faith. The Apostle Paul says something truly amazing in Colossians 2:6-7. “Therefore, just as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk (carry on a way of life) in him: having been rooted, and now being built up in him and being stabilized by being strengthened in the faith, just as you were taught, so you are overflowing with gratitude.” This is an expanded translation; read through it several times. Let God speak to you.
We discover true joy by filling our deepest hunger with a trusting love towards Jesus Christ rather than the world’s junk food. Only Christ can fill us and satisfy our hunger for happiness, love, and meaning in life. All the great saints of the Church have found it to be so.
Aurelius Augustine, the great bishop of Hippo in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, was a man of immense spiritual hunger. In the early years of his adulthood, he attempted to satisfy his hunger with sensual and intellectual pursuits. Augustine ultimately found all these pursuits to be impotent in filling his real craving. It was when he encountered Jesus Christ in repentance and faith that his deepest thirst began to be quenched. In his famous book, Confessions, he wrote, “You made us for Yourself O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”
CS Lewis was also a man who struggled for many years to fill a longing he experienced deep in his heart. He wrote of this longing in his autobiographical account of his coming to the Christian faith, Surprised by Joy. In his book, he describes several times how he unexpectedly experienced this stab of longing. He describes it as, “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”Lewis also tried to satisfy his great longings with many things but found all his attempts fruitless. It was only when, like Augustine, he experienced conversion to the Christian faith that he understood his longing and found joy in it. In his well-known and highly popular book, Mere Christianity, he describes it this way, “If I find in myself a desire no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
We were all made for another world, but we can experience the satisfaction of our spiritual hunger in this world by faith in Jesus Christ. Isaiah said it this way, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy without money and without price, wine and milk… Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest feast.” He was talking about Jesus, who said, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never hunger, and he who believes in me will never ever thirst.”
Come, the table is set; it is waiting for you. You can fulfill your greatest spiritual hunger in Jesus.