Hungry

Hello, Brother.

Today I want to talk to you a little bit about how life is harder when you’re hungry.

For a long time, this was one of the hardest things for me to accept. I think part of it is that I held on to the idea that I was always in control of myself. You could say I was trusting in my own will power and never paying attention to the things that would make that will power fluctuate.

One of my pet peeves when I was in my teens was that I would be greatly upset about something, but when I tried to tell my parents about it their first reaction was to ask how long it had been since I had eaten. That used to make me so mad that I could spit. Why weren’t they listening to me? Why did they think that my problems weren’t big problems? Didn’t they understand that I was talking about important things!?

Now, I am not a particularly smart person, so it only took me another fifteen years to look back on my life and notice a pattern. My folks would outrage me by suggesting the first thing I needed to do to solve some incredible problem that threatened to overwhelm my world was get a bite to eat and something to drink and then come back to it. Now, as an adult, I can see the times when I was very upset, and times when the same problems didn’t seem like such a big deal. Sure enough, if you guessed that I could handle the same stress factors a lot better.

Mom and Dad, if you are reading this, you were right.

When I look back on my life, I think I had bought into a popular idea in modern culture. I was a big Star Wars nerd, along with every other kind of nerd, as a kid. There is a great quote by the Muppet Jedi Master Yoda in the original trilogy. In effect, Yoda said that Luke and the other people were luminous beings and not crude matter.

That is a new way of saying a very old idea, that we are spirits stuck in bodies. Some Greek philosophers and the early church heresy called Gnosticism thought this as well.

The truth from God’s word says that we have bodies, minds, and spirits. You can tell because both Jesus and the Old Testament say that we need to love the Lord with them all. This is pretty freeing. If I am my body and spirit together, instead of some super-being trapped inside a body, then it makes sense that how my body is doing will affect the rest of me. Maybe it would be better to say that I would not be lowering myself from some super-spiritual plane to take care of my body, too.

The simple fact is that our brains burn calories just like our muscles. Without fuel, we don’t think as well. Once again, I want to point out that our sinful nature isn’t going to go away in fear of a healthy breakfast, but why take up the daily battle against sin and pick another fight with your belly, too?

You would never try to run a marathon or try to win a competitive sports game with no fuel for your muscles. It is not helpful to try to make good decisions without brain fuel.

So far, we have mostly been looking at human wisdom. Let us take a look at some times in God’s word when people had a hard time while they were hungry.

In Genesis 25 we get the story of Esau and Isaac. Esau was coming back from hunting and he hadn’t caught anything. He was really hungry and Isaac had food. When Isaac offered him food in exchange for the blessing of that Birthright, Esau handed it over. He would spend the rest of his life paying for that decision he made when he was hungry.

Being ruled by your belly instead of your fear of God is such a big deal that Esau is held up in the New Testament as a specific example of godlessness.

Hebrews 12:15-17 See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled; that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal. For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears.

When the people of Israel were wandering in the desert after their slavery in Egypt, their bellies got them into trouble twice. First, instead of trusting God to provide for them, their hunger drove them to complain that it would have been better to stay slaves in Egypt then for God to bring them out to die in the desert of hunger. You’ll remember that because God arranged to give them manna from heaven, which he did for forty years (Exodus 16).

The second time, even though they were eating literally miraculous food every day, the people of Israel complained that they weren’t getting enough meat. So, once again they were focused on their stomachs instead of trusting God and God punished them by giving them exactly what they asked for. He stuffed them full of quail until they couldn’t stand anymore (Numbers 11).

My third example of life being harder, and temptations being stronger when you are hungry comes from the New Testament. In the Gospel of Matthew, we know that after his baptism, the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness for he fasted for forty days. I don’t know about you, but I have never fasted for longer than seven days, and I was starving.

It is at the end of this forty-day fast that we have Satan’s three best attacks on Jesus. What is the very first thing that Matthew records Satan tempting Jesus about? He offers him food.

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written,
“‘Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Matthew 4:1-4

Jesus is absolutely right that God’s word is far more important than earthly bread. This is also a great example of knowing God’s word to defend yourself from Satan. Go figure, Jesus is a great example, period. As hungry as it is possible to be, he didn’t fall into sin the way that Esau and the children of Israel did.

God also knows that food is important and necessary for us, and in his love, he provides for us. He teaches us to ask for our daily bread in the Lord’s prayer. He fed the crowds with fish and bread rather than let them go hungry for one evening.

God makes it a point that he will faithfully give us food to eat, but he doesn’t leave us there. He also teaches us that God’s word is a much more valuable food for our souls than food and drink will ever be for our bodies. So, little brother, let us learn from the failures of the past and the success of Jesus. Unless we are fasting for some reason, we shouldn’t neglect to feed ourselves or our neighbors. Then we should know that God’s word is the food we truly need, which God faithfully gives us and will never perish.