A Hungerin’

I think a lot of times we as the body of Christ, (just as Christians individually) we come to a place of complacency. We live in this world and serve this God but we come to a turning point or a stopping point where we switch it. We begin to serve our life and ourselves rather than the Lord.

The Word of God always works, it has never been proven to fail. So we can find ourselves being out of the will of God and still recieve the promises that His word declares, and judge our life according to that. So you find yourself in a place where the blessing of God is evident in your life, but you lack the peace and joy promised by Him. Then you convince yourself ‘well i don’t really have joy or peace but i have all this other stuff going for me. I’m ok i guess’

Leonard Ravenhill used to say that if you weren’t moving forward you were backsliding. That is the truth for sure, maybe you aren’t ‘backsliding’ right away but but you will if you don’t keep moving forward.

Not that I have now attained [this ideal], or have already been made perfect, but I press on to lay hold of (grasp) and make my own, that for which Christ Jesus (the Messiah) has laid hold of me and made me His own. I do not consider, brethren, that I have captured and made it my own [yet]; but one thing I do [it is my one aspiration]: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the [supreme and heavenly] prize to which God in Christ Jesus is calling us upward. – Phil 3:12-14

Three times in three verses Paul mentions how he presses forward toward what God has called Him to do. Even if we don’t know what to press towards, What God’s plan is we still need to go after Him. Before Jesus ever had any ministry for the disciples he called them to be with Him, so we always have Him to press toward and go after.

The point is that you have to be hungry for the things of God at all times. In the book of John Jesus speaks to the woman at the well about water that would satisfy to a point where she would never thirst again. There is a place of satisfied desperation. When we go after the things of God, and place our focus on Him our life is full of joy and peace. When we come to a place of being satisfied with our current state or relationship level with the Lord, that’s when you’re in trouble. When you stay hungry and keep after the things of God you don’t allow the junk into your life to grow any further.

By keeping yourself in a place of hunger and growth you allow the light of God to shine on all the dark areas of your life. God will keep showing you things that need to change and things that need to be taken away. If our focus is always more of Him and a deeper revelation of His love we’re golden.

[For my determined purpose is] that I may know Him [that I may progressively become more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him, perceiving and recognizing and understanding the wonders of His Person more strongly and more clearly], and that I may in that same way come to know the power outflowing from His resurrection [which it exerts over believers], and that I may so share His sufferings as to be continually transformed [in spirit into His likeness even] to His death, [in the hope] – Phil 3:9