If you were weak and hungry, it would be ridiculous to think that a teaspoonful of soup would suffice to give you physical energy to live for a day. But if you were sick with the kind of hepatitis I had once (delicious food tasted like sawdust, I had no appetite), you would appreciate a bite of something that tasted so good that it aroused hunger to eat more. That's the purpose of "Dial Daily Bread" e-mails: not to sustain anyone with spiritual energy (two or three minutes couldn't do that!), but it comes with a prayer that it might make someone "hungry."
Jesus was right when He said, "Except you eat, ... you have no life in you," and He was talking about "the bread of life" (John 6:48-53). But multitudes have no "appetite" for the Bible; it's boring, like eating sawdust, and God knows it may not be their fault. The teaching they have heard may often represent the Bible as Bad News, a dose of legalism, a program of works they must do they don't feel they have the strength to do; thus reading the Bible tastes like sawdust. They can't wait until it's over and they can flip to something "interesting" (I know I'm a part of mankind!).
Our heavenly Father is well aware of this problem. He has no end of people in His "hospital" ward who are being kept barely alive by a spiritual intravenous "drip," and He longs to give them a taste of some spiritual food so delicious that they will learn to "hunger and thirst after righteousness" (Matt. 5:6). Then it will become their passion to "eat" and "drink" Christ in the sense that they will yearn for more of His Word. "I am the bread of life," says Jesus. "This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man [or woman] may eat thereof, and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man shall eat of this bread, he shall live forever" (John 6:50, 51).
This e-mail "Dial Daily Bread" has a fundamentally radical idea that every page of the Bible has Good News locked in it, if only we can "see" that One who also said that He is the water of life. "If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink." The person who believes on Him becomes a drinking fountain, "as the Scripture has said, Out of his inmost soul will flow rivers of living water" to refresh some other thirsty soul (7:37, 38). If you have "tasted," you're bound to want more; and thus everlasting life begins with blessed eternal hunger and thirst.
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: March 9, 2001.
Copyright © 2010 by Robert J. Wieland.
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