Sermon quotes on spiritual hunger
Augustine of Hippo
You have made us for Yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.
Confessions
Jonathan Edwards
Persons need not and ought not to set any bounds to their spiritual and gracious appetites, [instead they ought] to be endeavoring by all possible ways to inflame their desires and to obtain more spiritual pleasures… Our hungerings and thirstings after God and Jesus Christ and after holiness can’t be too great for the value of these things, for they are things of infinite value… [Therefore] endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement… There is no such thing as excess in our taking of this spiritual food. There is no such virtue as temperance in spiritual feasting.
Sermon: “The Spiritual Blessings of the Gospel Represented by a Feast.”
Michael Card
A hunger for beauty is at its heart a hunger for God.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss
Do you want to increase your hunger for the Lord? Try weaning yourself from the world’s diet- be prepared for some withdrawal symptoms when you turn off the radio and the TV and eliminate unnecessary activities. Then begin feeding on the Word of God. At first, it may seem bland and boring; but in time, you will discover that it satisfies in a far deeper, richer way than those things you once thought were so filling.
A Place of Quiet Rest, Moody, 2000, p. 130.
Mark Batterson
If you aren’t hungry for God, you are full of yourself. That’s why God cannot fill you with His Spirit. But if you will empty yourself, if you will die to self, you’ll be a different person by the time you reach the last page of this book.
All In: You Are One Decision Away From a Totally Different Life
Kent Hughes
It works like this: we hunger spiritually and are then filled and become supremely satisfied. The satisfaction then makes way for a deeper spiritual hunger, a further filling and blessed satisfaction. And so it goes on in sublime paradox: hunger – filling – satisfaction, hunger – filling – satisfaction. We become more and more full of Christ.
Luke Volume 1, copyright 1998, Crossway Books, a division of Good News Publishers, Wheaton Illinois 60187, www.crosswaybooks.org. Page 62.
Christopher Lasch
People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.
The Culture of Narcissism, p.17.
James Merritt
There is a spiritual hunger in the human heart and an eternal hunger in the human soul that can never be satisfied with anything other than Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life.
52 Weeks with Jesus, Harvest House Publishers.
Mother Teresa
The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty — it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.
A Simple Path-Open Market, 1995.
Mother Teresa
People are hungry for something more beautiful, for something greater than people round about can give. There is a great hunger for God in the world today. Everywhere there is much suffering, but there is also great hunger for God and love for each other.
Eugene H. Peterson
Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God; it whets our appetite.
A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, 2012, p.56, InterVarsity Press.
John Piper
The cost of food in the kingdom is hunger for the Bread of Life.
Desiring God
John Piper
The key to Christian living is a thirst and hunger for God. And one of the main reasons people do not understand or experience the sovereignty of grace and the way it works through the awakening of sovereign joy is that their hunger and thirst for God is so small.
John Piper
The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we drink in every night.
A Hunger for God, SPCK, 2013, p.17.
Tony Reinke
TV is imago populi—all of society’s trendy appetites incarnated into visible form and broadcasted.
Taken from Competing Spectacles by Tony Reinke, © 2019, p.133. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.
Fred Smith
It’s important, as we go along in life, to create thirsts that death will satisfy.
Leadership, Vol. 3, no. 1
Bruce Springsteen
Everybody’s got a hungry heart.
Joni Eareckson Tada
To hunger is to be human, but to hunger for God is to feed on Him. Hunger and thirst after His righteousness and feed on Him in your heart. Taste and see that the Lord is good; it is He who will fill you to satisfaction.”
Diamonds in the Dust: 366 Sparkling Devotions
Aiden Wilson Tozer
The only Christian you want to listen to is the one who gives you more of a hunger for God.
Thomas Watson
God will fill the hungry because He Himself has stirred up the hunger. As in the case of prayer, when God prepares the heart to pray, He prepares His ear to hear (Ps. 10:17). So in the case of spiritual hunger, when God prepares the heart to hunger, He will prepare His hand to fill.
William Williams
Bread of Heaven, Bread of Heaven Feed me till I want no more.
“Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah” (no. 127), in The United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville, TN: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989).
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