Hunger can drive us to make all kinds of bad decisions. Hunger is one of the worst feelings a human can experience. Here’s a real-life parable about hunger, and the God we crave:
I once read the story of a man named Kevin, who had an interesting encounter with the meal delivery service Grubhub. When an order showed up at his doorstep that he didn’t order, he got excited and thought, “This is amazing! Someone accidentally ordered their food and had it sent here.” But several orders later, Kevin began to get nervous.
That’s when he remembered that his six-year-old son, Mason, had been wandering around the house with his phone. Whoops.
Apparently, Mason had gotten onto the Grubhub app and started ordering whatever looked good to him. Kevin found him a few minutes later, hiding under the bed, and asked, “Son, what have you done?” Mason replied with six-year-old candor: “I was hungry.”
All told, Mason had ordered $1,500 worth of food.
Hunger can drive us to make all kinds of bad decisions. Hunger is one of the worst feelings a human can experience. When we’re hungry, one of the first things that happens is our mood changes. (Anyone else get hangry?) After a few days without food, we lose our ability to concentrate. Eventually, we have trouble sleeping, and then our muscles start breaking down and our immune system becomes compromised. At a certain point, our bodies just stop working.
There’s no more primal feeling of need than hunger, and no more universal satisfaction for hunger than bread. The same thing is true, though few of us think about it, when it comes to our spiritual lives. Without spiritual nourishment, our souls wither and die. The question is, where does that spiritual bread come from?
Answer: a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Truly, the God we crave
The God We Crave
John’s gospel records Jesus’ seven “I AM” statements in his Gospel, each of them with a different application to our areas of brokenness and need. In John 6, Jesus claims to be the “bread of life.” Seems straightforward enough: Jesus feeds hungry souls. But to understand Jesus’ full meaning, we have to go back to Moses’ encounter with the burning bush in Exodus 3.
It was then that God told Moses that he was to lead Israel out of captivity, and Moses responded, “And who should I tell Israel is coming to deliver them? What is your name?” In that day, names carried tremendous weight. They revealed where someone came from and what kind of resources they had available to them. So when Moses asks God’s name, he’s not just being polite. He’s making sure that God is the one who can come through.
God says in verse 14, “I AM who I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you’” (NIV). Normally, after saying “I am” to someone, you expect some kind of adjective to follow. But God leaves it at “I AM,” reminding Moses that he has neither beginning nor end and is self-sufficient. Whatever Moses needs or lacks, “I AM.”
