A Spiritual Appetite

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.” Matthew 5:6

Someone has said: “Man is merely the sum total or his appetites.” I admit that this is a very superficial definition of man, but it does emphasize a very great truth, namely that, “Man is being of many appetites, and these appetitesbecome basic drives that motivate his whole life. In fact, man’s appetite, his inward longing for something he does not now possess, this I say is one of the great blessings of his life. For in the longings of man lies the fertile seed of progress. He who longs for nothing, never does much. It is the man who dreams up a new idea, a new invention, a new experience, a new accomplish­ment, and then longs to accomplish that dream is the forward mover, the inventive genius, the prophetic seer, the one who moves forward in life, and carries others along with the momentum.

In our day, we have had man’s freedom classically rephrased in the words of President Franklin Roosevelt. Central in these four freedoms is the expression: “Freedom from want.” Now, from the standpoint of our common life, there is a real frame of reference where this phrase is applicable, we certainly are saddened when we hear of the destitution and starvation that is abroad in our world today. We want to be freed from such destitution and want. However, to make the unqualified statement of our longing: “Freedom from want,” is a paradoxical expression. If we were complete­ly free from “want”, we could not even “want” “Freedom from want.” For such freedom would be the death knell of aspiration. Life would be sheer boredom.It would be moral and intellectual suicide.

The other day I heard a story over too radio. Two proud and very wealthy parents welcomed a little daughter into their home. That little girl became their idol.       The parents showered her with everything they had. They bought a whole island of the coast of New York state, near Long island, and they built a virtual paradise for their little girl. She lacked nothing. She had a doll house as big as the house of many poor folks. Servants waited on her hand and foot. She had a thousand dolls, a dozen ponies, all the cats and dogs and pets you could possibly imagine. They even imported pets from Asia, Africa and other parts of the world, until she had a veritable zoo. She got whatever she asked for and a thousand times more. But the little girl was not happy. She got tired of her toys and her pets and in fact she even got tired of her own parents. She became listless. She could not sleep. She became pale and wan, until her parents despaired of her life. They called in a score of specialists to examine her out they found nothing wrong with her. They thought perhaps she needed friends, so they brought all the school children from a large New fork School to the island to play with her. She was still not helped. These children wanted to ride the ponies, play with the dolls, take the dogs on a walk. She had been doing these things so long it bored her. The experiment was a failure. Our little lady grew more listless and unhappy.

Now for a long time the winds and rain and the hurricanes had been jealous they had not been able to budge the great castle, in which this little girl lived with her parents on this island. So, one night the rain, the wind, the tidal waves, the thunder and lightning and all the forces of nature got together and planned a united effort to assault the castle. They were to strike at midnight. At the stroke of twelve the wind rose in its fury. The rain came down in torrents, the thunder roared in answer to the flash of the lightening. A great tidal wave came up with its great assault waves. This was too much. The castle shook and shivered and reeled and finally the foundation was swept away, and the castle was driven to shore and battered on the rocks. Fortunately, the little girl and her parents escaped with their lives, but they were ruined. They were wet and cold and finally found refuge in a cave. That night they had to scour the countryside for food and dry clothes. When darkness come, they had to sleep in a deep cold crevice in the rocks.

That night, for the first time, our little friend slept as peacefully as a babe. In the morning she was up with the dawn, with a new rosebud on her cheek ready to go find wood for a fire and food to eat. At last she had something to life for. The blessing of want that had inspired her life was no longer boredom. Oh yes, her parents still had their fortune, but they had learned their lesson. They built a little house on a moderate avenue and helped their little girl to live with the nature, longing and the wants that make every child’s life interesting.

The biographies of great men are generally about men, who had strong appetites, longings and wants. In our day, we read of the barefoot and ragged paper boy who became England’s first Labor Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. We read about Franklin Roosevelt, who had the terrible disease of infantile paralysis, and fought himself back to health to the great aspiration to be President of the United States. We read of a man born in slavery, inspired with the want to make his people free. He become the great scientist and humanitarian George Washington Carver.

Freedom from want, in its real sense, would already a tragedy. Our culture would become stagnant and our civilization decadent. We would become rotten psychologically speaking, and in this frame of reference, the words of Jesus come with a new freshness and fullness of meaning.

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.”

Some of us have become appalled at the moral destitution and spiritual depravity that exists in our generation. But we need not look far for the cause. We have it right here in this terse statement of feet of Jesus:

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.”

The great trouble in our world is that we are fast losing our spiritual appetites. To find a reason for this, we must analyze man as he is. For man is indeed a wonderful but strange creature. Perhaps we should reverse the old saying and put it man is “wonderfully but fearfully made.”

The present emphasis in Human Science today is on Dynamic Psychology. This branch of Psychology works on the basic premise that man has a series of drives or appetites that motivate his life and cause him to grow. Incidentally, this Idea is as old as the New Testament. Modern psychology is just finding this out. Modem psychology has also discovered the Biblical Idea that man today has a flare for madness. That one or the other of these basic drives is always getting out of control, and man’s whole personality is warped in the direction of that over-accentuated drive.

Now, in our generation, the emphasis has been on the material world. The central drives, or should I say over-accentuated drives, have become lustful cravings. These cravings are materialistic drives. We have a hunger and thirst for material things. Some want luxury. Others want financial security. Still others want pleasure. Some are ambitious to make a name themselves. Regardless of the materialistic drives that motivate our lives, these cravings have their end in the brief span between the cradle and the grave. The man who neglects spiritual things to work in his garden or go joyriding in his car; the women who cannot go to church because she must prepare the big Sunday dinner; the Joy lover who kids himself into believing he can worship on a golf course; these people are satisfying material wants. We live in that kind of a civilization. Our hunger and our thirst are for earthly things. We are earthly, or perhaps to put it in good Biblical language, we are carnal and of the flesh, fleshly.

Such thinking on the part of many individuals has fit into a picture of the masses. We are fast becoming secularized. We are becoming a culture very attentive to the material drives of life, and one that wholly disregards the spiritual drives.

The world today is in a terrible mess. There is no getting around it. What is the reason behind it? It is very simple. We are like the educated fool of who it was said: “He was educated beyond his intelligence.” Our material drives, interests and advancements have been so over-emphasized that the spiritual side of our life has been outstripped. The spiritual side of our lives has grown weak and feeble by lack of use. Our spiritual muscles have become soft and flabby. If you do not believe me, try to teach a Sunday school class today.

From 75% to 85% of the children in Sunday school come from homes devoid of religious training. Youngsters come to Sunday school because they enjoy the company, or because they are driven to it by their parents who are not interested themselves. As a result, it is as hard to interest and enthuse the average Sunday school child with the things of God, as it is to make a stone soak up water. We have lost the “blessed and the hunger” that Jesus forcefully spoke of.

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.”

We have neglected our spiritual appetite to such an extent that we have reached the blissful stage of “freedom from want,” the freedom from the want to desire after God.

You may well ask why is there this spiritual destitution in the world? Let me answer by a very simple illustration. This month in the Readers Digest, there is a very interesting article on the greatest killer of all tines, the Black Death. The Black Death killed a greater proportion of all the people in the large cities Europe and Asia than the atomic noob did at Hiroshima. The reason that the Black Death spread was that the people of the middle ages lived in squalor and filth. They never bathed. They seldom washed their clothes. They threw their garbage into the city streets. Rats and mice roamed the garbage piles unmolested. No one batted an eye or furrowed a brow or raised the least protest. They had been raised in squalor and they did not know anything else. It was something that had gradually grown upon them over time and they didn’t know any different. It took the Black Death and other epidemics for great men like Pasteur and Lister to go to work and find the cause. Now every large city has a board or health, a sanitation department and e garbage collecting department to clean up the mess that caused disease.

We in our generation have been slowly lulled into a spiritual sleep of self-sufficiency. We have been great producers and inventers. We use high-sounding phrases about the dignity of man and the divinity that is in a man. We have finally weaned ourselves from our spiritual appetites. We no longer nurse ourselves from the breast of God and the sincere milk of the word.

We have changed to the strong meat of self-sufficiency. We have lost our hunger and thirst after righteousness. We have become spiritually empty and destitute.

And now we are beset by fears on every hand. The potency of the atomic bomb as a killer has frightened us. The price of a barrel of oil need only drop ten cents and the whole financial world is in a turmoil, and we have a gigantic bear market on Wall street. In our generation, we have seen one nation after another fall from freedom. We have seen two mad holocausts of world-wide war. We have seen starvation in the world and many other things that recall the fast depleting of our natural resources.

As we cut through a cross section of human nature and see man as he is: drunken, selfish, greedy, eager to enslave his fellow man, and prejudiced of men of different colors. What a depraved creature man is. Look at man today. Where is the exalted dignity? Where is the lordship of the universe? Truly, with one our own great philosophers, we must say: “Man’s story is not a success story but a tragedy.

Man has dignity only when he finds his place in the will of God. He is only of infinite worth, as he fulfills the purpose for which he was created. Man must be reborn and reoriented to the will of God. He must be redeemed from his destitution. Within his heart, he must be once more renewed with that hunger and thirst after righteousness, that hunger for fellowship with God, that love for the will of God. Man must be restored not only to speaking terms with God, but to terms of friendship, kinship, and worshipful reverence with the eternal God.

In Christ, God came down in human flesh to give us an example of how man as he should be. Only in Christ do we see truly the dignity of one who hungers and thirsts after righteousness. He shows us how to hunger and thirst to be Christ-like. The world has produced many men who can became goals. It has produced its Beau Brummells with their love for show. It produced Lord Byrons with goals of love for pleasure. It produced Hitlers and Stalins with their love for power. It has produced corporate CEOs with only their love for money. These men have been multiple people. Only once in this world has there been a man who walked across the pages you and I ought to be. That man was Jesus Christ the son of God. And, we can never be free until we are like him. We can never fulfill our purpose in life until we are Christ-like. We can never find happiness, peace end satisfaction, until we have Christ-like submission to the whole will of God regardless of the consequences. Christ is the only goal in life that is worthwhile.  Being Christ-like is the only “want” and “only appetite” that brings satisfaction.

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.”

However, you say what can I do about this myself? The answer is plain. “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.” God is calling you and me to a new dedication to the life of reaching out towards righteousness. If you must choose between physical food and spiritual food, give up a meal a day in order to have time to read the Bible. If you must choose between church and your garden, let your garden go to weeds. If you must choose between God and mammon, choose God and let mammon be forgotten. If you must choose between your duty to the church the kingdom of God and your own ease, your comfort, your own physical welfare, choose to satisfy your spiritual hunger, for there is no substitute.

Have you ever thought how many excuses we can dig up to shirk the spiri­tual responsibilities that have been placed upon our shoulders? How many things are there that keep us away from our spiritual responsibility, and that do not keep us away from work or from pleasure?

God calls us to a new dedication to the life of the spirit. We have ne­glected our spiritual appetite long enough. So, with a fresh forcefulness, he says to you and to me this morning this one important word:

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.”