Thoughts on Hunger and Passion

Hunger

"Come on, let's stir up our hunger for God..."

I've heard many iterations of this over many years of my Christian life, and I just heard it again today. It started me thinking today... and I think many churches have a fundamental misunderstanding of how spiritual hunger works.

I'm not sure what "stirring yourself up" is supposed to mean exactly (it's not a biblical term I'm sure), but to me, the closest equivalent I can think of is to meditate on God and His goodness when you're down. Perhaps even, as my US pastor Glen used to say, preach the gospel (the good news! not that you need to be a better Christian) to yourself. Focus on God, declare that He is good to you, and keep focusing on the aspects of God that He reveals to you until your internal environment (how you feel) conforms to the truth of how He is. This is not about avoiding your feelings; this is about influencing them with your mind until your feelings actually reflect what your mind knows is the truth.

Many times, though, I've heard "stirring yourself up" to mean the equivalent of "make yourself feel ___". No one will ever say it like that, but from the way people use it, it sure sounds like that's what they mean. Stir up the hunger, stir up the passion etc etc often sounds like "Make yourself feel hungry," or "come on, be passionate!" to me.

So here's my thoughts on two truths about hunger that seem extremely pertinent to me right now:

1) You can't make yourself feel something.

You can't will an emotion. You either feel it or you don't; you either want it or you don't. You can't make yourself want something. Yes, there are many times when our emotions are dulled or we're just fearful of feeling or desiring things because of bad past experiences, so in that case, there is a process of letting how you feel or what you desire reveal itself. But that takes time, patience, love and acceptance. It is not an instantaneous thing, and telling people repeatedly to stir up that feeling is probably more counter productive to letting that feeling come out. The same goes with hunger. You're either hungry, or you're not. God can change that in an instant of course, but you're not God. You can't make yourself hungry.

What you CAN do is put yourself in situations or environments that would influence you to feel a certain way. E.g. if I'm feeling lonely, I can stay home and sulk, or I can pray and focus my mind on the fellowship of the Holy Spirit until my heart gets it and I stop feeling that way, or I could almost force myself to say yes to an invitation I know is open to me to hang out with good friends, even though I feel like sulking, because hanging out with them will make me feel less lonely. Similarly, I can't make myself fall more in love with someone, but I can create conditions where I would develop feelings for them (which is one of the points of dating - to regularly and frequently create situations where feelings for the other person can develop and grow). So when it comes to spiritual hunger, I could hang around spiritually hungry people; I can go to a place where people are experiencing more of God than what I normally do etc. But I cannot make myself be hungry if it happens that all these things don't stir up anything in me.

Emotions and desires are like plants - at best, you can cultivate and nurture them. But you can't force them to grow.


2) The only way to get hungry when you're not, is to begin to want the things you don't yet have.

How many times have you not felt like eating AT ALL, only to see someone walk by with a delicious morsel that just whets your appetite and makes you crave it? We sometimes think we're just being weird, but let's be honest - it's the way God made us. At any one point, we have a certain amount of hunger. Let's say we have none now. We're full, we're satisfied, we've eaten what we've eaten and there's nothing we can do to change that. When someone walks by with something that looks delicious, suddenly we're made aware that there is something more that we haven't had, something that's desirable... and then we want it.

If we always eat everything we want (in the natural) then gluttony may result. But in the spirit, hunger is a good thing - our spirits get strengthened by spiritual food. (Although I will add that sometimes when we receive a lot spiritually, the best thing to do isn't just to receive more but to give it away by ministering to others). So, the only way to build spiritual hunger is to get a revelation of God that is even better than what you already expect, and what you expect is often based on what you've experienced. It's faith - the substance of things hoped for, proof of things unseen. It's the conviction, the realisation and revelation, that God has already been good but He really does have more for you, and even if you don't quite see what it is, you realise that you don't already have it all, that there is more (that's the faith part!). And then you want it. Ta daa! Hunger.

So, as a leader, the best way to stir up hunger in a people is to focus their eyes on God's goodness. There is always more of Him to see, and He always has a next step for us that takes us closer to Him. Declare His promises. Preach His goodness. Let people connect with the fact that God really loves them as they are (i.e. taste that He is good now) and has more for them (and who can resist that when they've already tasted He is good?).

The reason why this is so important is that if leaders try to get their people to stir up hunger without setting their eyes on something greater, then I think the people only have one other option, which is to tell themselves, I don't have enough. But what if they really do feel like they do have enough? Then they begin to doubt themselves. "I don't have enough but I feel like I'm full. How arrogant can I be? My feelings must not be of God and I must fight them." And then condemnation comes in and becomes a tool to make themselves feel a need for God. Because it's actually true; if we accept condemnation (which we shouldn't! See Romans 8) then we feel lousy and we feel the need for God to rescue us. Of course then the problem is, when God rescues them from the guit, how do they maintain the hunger? So then they go into condemnation again, and essentially end up almost intentionally using condemnation to stay distant from God so that they will always feel like they need Him, so that the prayers that their pastor is asking them to pray to tell God that they are 'desperate' for Him will actually be sincere.


I can say this because I've been through it, and I've had to recover from it. This is my inside scoop. And maybe I'm wrong; maybe this was just my own issue and no one else got this message from what the church I've left (but still have much fondness for!) did on a regular basis. It's possible. But I highly doubt I'm alone. My leaders meant well and God gives them grace, so I'm not judging them or any other leader. I'm just saying, telling your people to 'stir up hunger' (or passion, or desire) all the time is NOT a healthy thing for the flock.


A focus on passion

The other thought I have is this focus on being passionate for God. It's a frequent cry, and a good one often times, to be more passionate for Him. However, I do think that it can be overstated as a spiritual goal. The kingdom of God is full of contradictions (Jesus is a lion and a lamb; we are to be innocent as doves and sly as foxes; we are to love our neighbours and love our enemies, but hate Satan and hate sin) and it is in the tension of those contradictions that His precious and awesome truth is found. It's the same here. Passion alone is insufficient; it must be completed by patience.

Notice I didn't say that it must be balanced by patience. "Balance" is a good word, but it often connotates a sense of compromise; that too much of one thing is bad, and sometimes we need to have less of one and more of the other. In the kingdom, contradictory truths don't balance each other out. They fulfill each other. A wife does not balance out her husband; she completes him. Without her, he cannot be all that God made him to be, and without him, she cannot grow to the fullness of her identity as a God-made woman. It's the same with kingdom principles. We aim to love our neighbours and enemies a lot and hate sin a lot. We don't aim to have a limited amount of passion and a limited amount of patience; we aim to have tons of both.

Have you ever met a person who is completely quiet and agreeable all the time, and then one day gets really angry over one thing (something good, like injustice)? Doesn't the fact that they were so meek before serve to bring out the severity of the rage? It's the same with passion. The more passion you have, the more your patience means, and the more the patience to wait for God to do what you desire Him to do builds character and draws you closer to Him. Similarly, the more patience you have, the more your passion means, because you're crying out to God out of a desire so big that it has to come out in spite of your patience to wait. That's why patience and passion fulfill each other.

In contrast, a focus purely on passion, I think, promotes impatience. "God we want you! Come! Come now!" The intent is good, and there's nothing wrong with expecting God to do good things in the present. But if this is the predominant cry of our regular prayer meetings, then our relationship with God becomes focused on the now, the presence of God in the meeting you're in, the success of this particular event. But our relationship with God is eternal, and even within this lifetime is a long process of Him transforming us into His image. As Christians, our aim shouldn't be to be better now (more passionate, more hungry or whatever it is); we are already made perfect by the blood of Christ and we can consider ourselves accepted by God today as though we were as perfect as Jesus is. Instead, our aim should be to walk with God in the present and for the long term, listening, yielding, obeying, loving, and allowing Him to develop the fruits of the Spirit in us.

I think a Christian with the fruits of the Spirit but not the gifts will inherit the kingdom of God, but a Christian with the gifts but without the fruits may not. At the end of the day, the key question when we get to Heaven is whether we know Christ and Christ knows us (Jesus rejected many in the parable who cast out demons in His name because, in His words, "I never knew you"), and that relationship in the long run is made manifest most acutely by the presence of the fruits of the spirit.

Of course the gifts are pretty darn fun too. :)