Key Verse: "For he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness."
- Psalm 107:9 KJV
We find the living family of God sometimes set forth
under the character of the 'hungry'. Let us see what they are hungering
after. Is it pleasure, honor, promotion, respectability? O no; these toys
and baubles cannot satisfy the spiritual hunger of a living soul. They
cannot hunger after that on which they cannot feed. They hunger then after
righteousness, as the Lord said--"Blessed are you who hunger and thirst
after righteousness." They hunger after God himself in his blessed
manifestations; they hunger after the bread of life which came down from
heaven, that a man should eat thereof and not die.
Christ in the mere letter of the word cannot satisfy
their keen appetite. They must feed upon him internally, or their famine
still continues. To these hungry, famishing souls, to have Christ in the
letter is like a starving beggar standing outside a shop where there is
plenty of provisions, and not having a farthing to buy them with. What is
Christ in the letter? Will a sight of Christ in the word of God remove the
burden of guilt, bring peace into the soul, purge the conscience or subdue
the power of sin? Will the mere doctrine of Christ draw up the affections to
him, cast out the world, dethrone self, or purify the heart? "Alas!" we say
by painful experience, "not one jot, not one jot." But the 'presence of
Christ in the soul' can at once do all these things. Thus a hungry,
famishing soul can only be pacified by Christ coming into his heart as the
hope of glory.
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