Our body’s health directly affects our disposition. You know how you feel when you are sick – more irritable, less social, more self-focused. Adversely, when you can get your body into its optimal performance, it stands to reason that it will positively affect your countenance, attitude and disposition. I am not giving an excuse to act in the flesh (when you don’t feel well) nor am I implying that true fruit is not of the Holy Spirit, but the loving attitude toward others that our Lord desires flows much easier when we are not laboring to get through life. We can easier get our minds off ourselves and on to the needs of others as Philippians 2:3-4 teaches. Isaiah 35:3 says, “Encourage the exhausted, and strengthen the feeble.” Wouldn’t you rather be on the encouraging and strengthening side than the exhausted and feeble side? Acts 20:35, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
Randy Smith

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Have You Ever Been Hungry?

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#1 · November 10, 2003, 2:07 pm

Posted by: Asn <Asn@...>

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. Psalm 63:1

"Have you ever been hungry? Really, really hungry?" So reads the billboard for a local food pantry. This nagging question has for me evolved into a prayer: Lord, make me hungry - really, really hungry - for You.

In modern-day America, it is easier to be complacent than hungry. After all, since the scriptures have been freely published here for a century; we automatically assume they'll be here tomorrow, when we find time to read them. Will they? What about prayer? Is it prevalent and pervasive in our homes and our personal lives? Have we forsaken the assembling of ourselves together in corporate worship, in favor of "communing with God" at a football game or on a beach? In essence, do we really, desperately need God in our lives, or are we content just to say we do? America is now a post-Christian culture. Although spirituality and belief in God have skyrocketed, the foundational conviction that the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ on the cross is the only way to eternal life is waning. There is even a movement to remove the cross from Christianity because of its offense to established religions!

Yet there is a rumbling in the Body of Christ today. As rumblings usually do, it began in our music a couple of years ago with songs that declared desperation for God and dissatisfaction with simply "doing church." No longer content with our self-sufficiency and no longer satisfied with yesterday's manna, we need God - not for what He can do but for who He is. And we need Him more today than ever before.

Please, Father, make me hungry - really, really hungry - for You.

© Andrea Neumann
October, 2003

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