Do You Have the Hunger?

Thank you very much, ladies. And thank you all for your offering. I'm reminded of Brother Impressim, but I'm saying thank you, but it's not coming to me, of course. But I know God will direct those in His work to put it to good use. I have a confession. Actually, it's a confession I've made here before, but it's one I like to remind people. Every now and then, it's suitable. And that's that I like to watch commercials. Now, Sue thinks that's ridiculous. I still think they're a bit of an art form. They can be incredibly funny. Well, they can be incredibly stupid at times. But they can be effective at entertaining us, sometimes getting our attention.

And they can be very good at depicting the product that they're trying to sell, especially if you've got a high-definition TV these days. I've seen certain beer commercials where they pour that frothy, golden liquid into the glass and then up close those little sparkly bubbles rising up and forming ahead and pouring over. It just really makes you understand that product. Now, we're not all beer drinkers, and it doesn't work the same with colas and things. But I know Kroger's had commercials for the meat they're selling. They'll show the steak on the grill just sizzling perfectly.

Or ice cream, your favorite color. I said a digital high-def TV gleaming. Now, don't you hate it when men do that when you're fasting? It's funny, you might be fasting on a Sabbath another time, but not everybody knows. On a tome it's the one time we do know. And I say, don't you also kind of love it, though? It's fun to think of those things. But I didn't just describe these foods in a way that sort of reminds us of our hunger just to be mean.

But for a reason. Because we tend to think and learn through analogies, and God gives us powerful analogies. Food is one of them. And we can make some, draw some important lessons to learn between needing physical food and needing spiritual sustenance. Or as we often say, spiritual food. Our bodies need food to survive and grow physically. We need spiritual food to survive and grow spiritually. And the Bible analogies appear, or the analogies in the Bible appear often. Paul discussed the meat and the milk of the word. Christ said it was His food or His meat to do the will of Him who sent Him. That is the Father. He also spoke of providing meat in due season. Now we relate to that because we need food.

And God commands us to go without for certain periods of time to help us learn a lesson, but He knows those have to be limited. If this day of atonement lasted two weeks instead of 24 hours, how many of us would see the end of it? Now most of us, and I don't know if any of us in this room, have known what it's like to go truly hungry.

I've read accounts of men and women, some during the Great Depression, which was surprisingly not that many years ago, or in wartime in other countries, of men and women getting so desperate they see hallucinations. And they're willing to eat almost anything because they're literally starving to death. They feel very, very hungry. There's a different type of hunger I want to focus on. So I don't have to ask the question today, are you hungry? Obviously all of us are to some degree, but spiritually, are you hungry?

Do you have the hunger? Mr. Call, if you're looking for a title, or any of you call it, do you have the hunger? Do I have the hunger for the things of God? If you will, join me in Matthew 5, Matthew 5 and verse 6. Early on in what we call the sermon on the Mount, in the list of the Beatitudes, the Blessings, we see one of a certain category where we believe we should fall, and I think most of us do most of the time.

Matthew 5 and verse 6, Jesus says, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Hunger and thirst for righteousness. The Greek word there for hunger is pianel, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but it means to be famished, to be starving. Now all of us here are very hungry physically. Hopefully we are also hungering for the things of God. We're hungering to be at one with God. We want to be reconciled and have the things between us and our Father removed.

That's one of the great lessons of the Day of Atonement. While we're physically hungering and thirsting for physical sustenance, we should be spiritually hungering and thirsting as well. And with a hunger that most of the world doesn't yet have, they don't understand fasting on this day, and because Satan has deceived most of the world and taken them aside, they might feel an empty need, but they don't know what it is.

But we're looking forward to a time when, of course, Satan will be put away, and all can have that hunger, and all can be filled. Now I should note, our hunger doesn't come from being deprived of any of God's righteousness. Obviously, many of us have been living this way for quite a while, and God has been building us and changing us. But we're still aware that we're deficient. We haven't attained all of His righteousness. So we should be hungering, looking to achieve the full potential. Christ wants us to have an irresistible urge for His way of life.

Hungry and thirsting for righteousness means having a wholehearted desire for His righteousness, not a sort of maybe kind of, I wish I had some desire. And as I said in this verse, Jesus said that if we're really hungry and thirst for His way of life, He will fill us. He'll fill us not only with His righteousness and will experience all the blessings that come from that.

This analogy of hungering and thirsting portrays a Christian as having an acute awareness of a need to be filled in his life. And because it's not yet filled completely, He yearns for it powerfully. So we can ask ourselves again, am I still hungering and thirsting for God's righteousness? Do I have that hunger? That sometime all of us felt that, pretty much, unless some of the very young among us might not have felt that. But when we were first called into the church, or if you grew up in the church when you first started realizing that need and that desire to be baptized, when God starts removing the deception that Satan has cast over all people, then people at that time tend to develop a strong appetite for learning more about God's way and experiencing it. They get booklets, they get study guides, and they just devour them right away. I'm guessing many of you have had that experience. I remember, I refer back to my grandmother, she had a pile of booklets and such that she would send from the church and go through them right away. And let me share an email that was sent into the home office. This was some years ago, but it summed this up pretty well and made the same analogy. It says, thank God for the survival of His church. Soon I want to find a place to worship with others who believe as I do. I have felt so alone I cannot get enough of your literature. How thirsty I have been! Remember that feeling? I can't get enough. I've just got to get more. Are we who have been around longer still thirsty for the milk of the word and hungry for the meat of the word? Now, keeping in mind that we learn from analogy, let's consider our desire to attend the Feast of Tabernacles coming up in a few days. Right now we're fasting, but soon we'll be feasting.

It reminds me, I've been to, well, like many of you, you attend the Feast of, I almost said, Feast of Atonement. That's appropriate for the sermon I'm giving today, but we get to this point and at the end of services, the next big thing for most of us is we're going to the feast. We're waiting for sundown to break our fast and we're just, as I mentioned in the email I sent out last night for those of you who got it, you know, Atonement sort of seems like an obstacle, but what it represents is, you know, it does have that, but when it's passed, it's, we're a straight shot, where they were going right to the kingdom. And physically, when Atonement is passed, we're so excited about going to the feast. And we've prepared for the feast and we're excited. We're excited about seeing our family and our friends, about traveling to different places, and we get excited about all the terrific food and drink we'll enjoy. These are all important parts of the feast, but of course we want to make sure that we also anticipate the spiritual feasting, the partaking of spiritual food. You know, feast implies banquet in the English, or food in the English language. I was going to say banquet a bit later. So we're going to partake of a spiritual banquet, in a sense. I was thinking, Sue has shared the story a number of times when she was teaching in the public schools. She would tell her junior high school students that she would be gone and she was going to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. They might ask what that is. And when she would come back, they would almost always ask, well, did you eat a whole lot?

Well, because you said it was a feast, so it must involve eating a lot. And it typically does, but we're going to be going to eight days of services. Hopefully we'll be feasting spiritually. And the Home Office has been reminding the ministry that we need to put our best effort into our sermons for the feast. So hopefully we're looking forward to going and hearing some of the best messages all year. Now, every now and then one of us gets lucky and we do a really good one another time, but we put a special effort into this time. And hopefully, if you're like me, you're thinking, yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing the best from the men who are there.

We should look forward to that, the Bible studies, and also our personal Bible study is important at the feast. Now, I've had times when I was younger where I thought, well, I'm going to church every day and I'm busy spending time with my friends. I'm staying up too late. And, you know, personal Bible study sort of gets left a little by the wayside. But it shouldn't be that way. Really, when you're in that setting and your mind is already focused on the world tomorrow, personal Bible study can take on even greater meaning. It should be a very important part of that spiritual feast. While we're there, we're going to be focusing on learning about God's plan of salvation for mankind, about the way of life He revealed in His Word. Of course, we don't have to wait until the Feast of Tabernacles to learn about that. Here today is an important step in God's plan of salvation. Atonement pictures this huge part of the change. I'll refer back to my sermon on trumpets, where of course Satan led Adam and Eve to choose the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And ever since that time, up till now, most of mankind has been going down that way, alienated from God, choosing, deciding for themselves what's right and wrong. But atonement pictures the time when we can start over or turn back again. People can partake of the tree of life. That's wonderful. We don't want to forget that, even though we'll still be excited about the physical things of the Feast. And I don't at all want to say, oh, don't get excited about that. But we just want to keep it in perspective. And I have to look back. As I said, when I was younger, there were times when I got excited enough. I was looking forward to the fun things and the people I'd see and the friends. And the spiritual aspects started dropping down on my list of priorities. And as I said, I don't think that's a big problem. I'm not here to try to give a corrective on that. And I think we do want to maintain excitement for those physical things. I just want to use that as an analogy, though, and this greater analogy of food and the spiritual lessons remind us that physical appetites can be strong and they can be distracting.

Our physical drives can pull us away from the spiritual things that are important.

Now fasting, as we're doing today, helps us to focus on what really is the most important overall and helps us to realize, understand the distraction.

And we can all relate to that. You know, I was just writing my notes. I wrote about 20 hours into a fast. We're coming up on that now. About 20 hours into a fast, if you happen to smell that steak on the grill I mentioned earlier, it has an impact. It gets your attention. It's hard to think straight. But you know, there's a smell that even has a more powerful impact on me, and that's bread, especially when it's baking. Now have you ever walked past one of those Subway sandwich shops when they're baking? Because they brag about how they have their own ovens and, wow, you smell that and your body just, I want bread, you know, and your brain's not working well anymore. But we've got to be able to overcome the physical desires as our saviors set an example. If you're still turned to your Bible is open to Matthew 5, across the page in mind is Matthew 4. This is when Jesus was led into the wilderness, as it says, led up by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. When he had fasted 40 days and 40 nights afterwards, no surprise, he was hungry.

This is often listed as an understatement, but I suspect maybe it should be said, he was hungry!

He was hungry. Now the tempter came to him and said, if you're the Son of God, command these stones to be made bread. Jesus probably had a good act of imagination in mind, maybe just at that moment in his mind he could smell the bread, but he didn't let it distract him. He answered and said, it's written that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Don't be distracted by those physical things.

Satan might have tempted Jesus where he was physically the most vulnerable, but Jesus deflected it by his focus on the spiritual food of God's word. And there are a number of other places in the Bible where food is used to represent divergent ways, one that's right and the other that's wrong. And the physical hungers that get involved are revealing. As we reviewed, I mentioned in the sermon I gave on trumpets, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the fruit of the two trees represent two different things. The fruit of the tree of life represents God's way. Fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents man going his own way, deceived by Satan. And I was making this point. 1 Corinthians 15, I won't turn there, but Paul refers to Christ as the second Adam. The first Adam chose to go his own way and make his own decisions and was deceived by Satan. The second Adam, as we just read, deflected those temptations. It's interesting, the first Adam and his wife were tested with food.

And if you take away the spiritual meaning, which we know is there, you could say, boy, they gave up all the blessings of God for a piece of fruit. But, of course, it represented more than that. But as we said, Jesus Christ, he was tempted with bread, but he didn't get distracted.

Let's look at another case where some people were distracted by their desire for food in Exodus chapter 16. The children of Israel experienced something similar. Now, they weren't making decisions for all of mankind, but we'll see that they allowed a physical hunger to distract them from what was spiritually important. Exodus 16. It's interesting, you learn things about yourself. This morning, I was listening to the pages flip, and boy, this has taken a long time. This is normal to occupy myself by getting a drink of water. Mrs. Blackburn didn't leave me one here today. She's looking out for me. She knows it was here. I'd have already been drinking out of it.

Exodus 16 in verse 1 says, "...they journeyed from Elam, and all the congregation of the children of Israel came to the wilderness of sin, which is between Elam and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month, after they departed from the land of Egypt. And the whole congregation of the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. And the children of Israel said to them, Oh, that we had died by the hand of the eternal in the land of Egypt! I wish we'd just died back there when we sat by the pots of meat, and when we ate bread to the full. You've brought us out into this wilderness to kill the whole assembly with hunger." Now, what were the spiritual things that were important? They'd just been delivered by great miracles. The plagues that came on Egypt, the locusts and the frogs and the darkness and the plagues, and then they went out in the wilderness and God parted the Red Sea right in front of them. They walked and driled in with the wall like a water on both sides of them. But physical appetites are powerful, and it made them start forgetting about that and saying, Oh, we might as well have died with the Egyptians.

There's lessons in that for us. Let's turn back to the New Testament. 1 Corinthians 10.

The Apostle Paul reminds us that we want to learn from these lessons, not that we're going to be tested by being taken to the wilderness and being hungry, unless that Petra thing turns out.

We've got the lesson there to know where the bread will come from. 1 Corinthians 10, verse 1.

Moreover, brethren, I do not want you to be unaware that all our fathers were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized into Moses, in the cloud and in the sea. All ate the same spiritual food, and all ate the same spiritual drink. For they drank of the spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ. But with most of them, God was not well pleased, for their bodies were scattered in the wilderness. He wasn't well pleased because they let their physical desires distract them from the spiritual. These things became our examples to the intent that we should not lust after evil things as they lusted. We'll see that repeated in verse 11, or a similar thought. Verse 11 says, Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages have come.

So this is telling us that we can learn these valuable lessons from the journey and trials of the children of Israel. They are leaving Egypt and traveling through the wilderness to the Promised Land is a type of us leaving a life of sin and journeying towards salvation and being in God's kingdom. And one lesson for us to understand is how, though they'd been taken miraculously out of that wretched situation and given a vision of a wonderful life ahead, they allowed their physical appetites to distract them from what God had in mind. Now think, do we have a vision of what lies ahead? We do. And of course annually, by keeping the seven holy days, that vision is renewed. God leads us through and He shows us His plan that there was a sacrifice for sin that makes it possible to put sin out of our lives. He gives out His Spirit, which He's given to us now and will be given to all mankind as they repent. And then Christ is going to return. He's going to take charge of this world. He's going to put Satan away and establish His rule for a thousand years. And eventually all who have ever lived will be raised and have a chance to accept God's way of life.

And that's just a real quick thumbnail sketch, but we want to have that vision firmly in our mind and not be distracted. Let's go back to the Old Testament to Numbers 11 to see how those appetites did affect them and we don't want to affect us. Numbers 11 and verse 4.

Because while we're keeping that eye on the vision, we need to remember that God does provide whatever we need. Not always what we want, though. It says in verse 4, Now the mixed multitude who were among them yielded to intense craving. So the children of Israel also wept again and said, Oh, give us meat to eat. We remember the fish which we ate freely in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions and garlic. Now our whole being is dried up and there's nothing at all except this manna before our eyes. Makes it sound like it's pretty bad stuff. I think the next couple verses Moses probably inserted as a sort of a parenthetical phrase into the narrative to point out for readers what manna was really like. He said, Now the manna was like coriander seed, color like the color of bedellum. People went out and gathered it and ground it on millstones or beat it in mortar and cooked it in pans, made cakes of it, and its taste was like the taste of pastry prepared with oil. That doesn't sound bad. And of course, when the dew fell, it came on the ground. They had this food. It provided what they needed nutritionally. And I don't know, we can't get it and put it in a spectrograph right now, but I'm sure it had all the essential vitamins and nutrients. It probably tasted pretty good. It was easy to get. Just go out and gather it up six days a week. But people were focusing on more. Their appetites got them distracted. I'm not going to turn there. Numbers 21, they referred to the manna as worthless bread. Whereas if you want to make a note, Psalm 78, it's called the bread of heaven. It's called angels' food. We don't want to be like them. We could possibly discount the value of the spiritual food that God provides for us, but we shouldn't. Now, in the model prayer, is the phrase, give us this day our daily bread. Now, I don't know how many of us say those exact words, but it's common to say, God, give me whatever our daily needs are. But we should also not neglect our daily spiritual food and ask God to renew his spirit in us. We should spend time studying our Bibles daily. As Christ said, it's more important to live by the word of God than have physical bread. Hopefully, we don't forget the miracle that God performed in calling us out of the world and giving us his spirit the way the ancient Israelites seemed to have forgotten all those miracles that God worked to bring them out of Egypt. When you think about it, as I said, they weren't going hungry, but they had appetites in their mind. They wanted different things. Manna provided for their nutritional needs, and he was willing to go beyond it. I'm not reading the rest of chapter 11 in Numbers, but he sent the quail. And we understand he might. I believe he sent it from then on. Every morning there's bread for Manna. Every evening the quail come in, and you're doing pretty good. The people were punished because they had an excessive lust. Their appetites led them to lose track.

They forgot those harsh conditions they'd left behind. We don't want to do that. When we reached the point of repentance, we were ready to give up all that. And we would have gladly lived on bread and water to be part of God's family. We don't want to lose track of what we left behind by different appetites distracting us. The children of Israel were willing to give up the Promised Land to have a few mouthfuls of meat. Sort of like the story of Esau. He came in from hunting, saying, ah, the birthright's not doing me any good. I need food. So he sold his whole birthright away for a bowl of soup. There is the lesson for all of us. We want to remember the feeling we had with what we call the first love. When you first realized you wanted to be baptized in the body of Christ, when you began learning God's way of life and you just couldn't get enough, like that email I read, I can't get enough. Now, before that time, we were searching for other things. As I said, all human beings feel a need to fill a void sometimes. We might have been hungering and thirsting for things that we were trying to satisfy our appetites, and they didn't really bring real satisfaction. Now, God knew that. He wasn't unaware, but he called us anyways. He said, I'm going to show you something better. And he began to give us an appetite for spiritual food. And that's important to remember. He's the one that gives it to us. But when he did, he doesn't necessarily automatically remove all of our old appetites, just like our ancestors in the wilderness hadn't forgotten the fish and the leeks and the cucumbers in Egypt. Those long-established appetites sometimes can cause us trouble. Over the years, people have fallen away from God's true church because they could not or would not control their worldly hungers. Now, we all know that's happened, but we don't want that to be us. And it doesn't have to be us. God hasn't left us powerless. He gives us His Holy Spirit. That's an important thing. That Holy Spirit helps us. It stirs up a different hunger. That hunger and thirst that Jesus said we should have for righteousness.

That hunger can motivate us to overcome and to grow spiritually.

We want to think about what happens. What happens when you miss a meal?

Or by now, when you miss two or three meals, you know, your blood sugar drops, you start to feel weak, you're a little out of sorts. I find for me, it's not as much physical. I feel fine that my brain doesn't work, and the mouth doesn't work very well, either. The same thing can happen to us spiritually. When we start losing our contact with God, and you've experienced that on a small scale, I'm sure, you know, say an especially busy morning and you didn't have time to pray, and later in the day you start feeling like something's not right. You start feeling maybe a little spiritually weak. You feel like I'm empty inside because you're running on empty. I shouldn't be saying you. I should be saying we. I'm not preaching down to you. I'm as prone to this. I try not to let it happen. It's funny, when it's your job, you remember these things more.

But there's another parallel with what happens when we don't eat physically. And many of you, I noticed that this morning. I thought, hmm, yeah, I feel like I'd really like some coffee, but of course I didn't. But I didn't feel real hungry. You know how it is when you miss a meal or two and your stomach shrinks up? And I think especially when sundown's kind of late like it is this time of year. You know, you start your fast and for long you go to bed. And so that initial getting hungry period happens while you're asleep. So you wake up and it's like, ah, stomach shrunk up. I'm not missing the food so much. People that go a long time without food even have trouble when it's time to introduce food. Their bodies don't want it. Can that happen to us spiritually?

Can we get to where we're cut off from God, we're not studying His Word, we're not praying very often and we don't feel that hunger so much. But we are still being malnourished spiritually. That's a danger, you know, we want to watch for. Now physically, as I said, other symptoms affect us. Like I said, you get up here and the words don't want to come out.

You can't think straight. In the same way a person could die a physical malnutrition, a Christian could die spiritually from losing a connection to God. And it's also important to remember, as I said, you know, your stomach can shrink up and you don't feel the hunger as much, but you could be physically filling your belly with stuff that's not really providing nourishment and you don't feel the hunger, but you're in trouble.

It's interesting, when I was thinking about that, I remembered an incident, well, I'm not sure, an incident, something we did every now and then when I worked at Wendy's back when I was a teenager. And some of you are familiar, you know, and I loved frosties. You know, matter of fact, I'd say I was addicted to frosties. You know, I would go in on my day off. I couldn't go a day without a frosty. And of course, I was working on my feet 10-12 hours a day. I didn't gain any weight from it. But if you ever looked at those machines, it's standard for any soft-serve machine, you know.

It has a refrigerated cylinder with blades in it that makes the liquid up together while it's freezing and there's what's called a carburetor that feeds air in. So you get a certain mixture of air with liquid that's frozen so that when you raise the knob, you know, that creamy stuff comes out. Okay, and then at the end of the night when you want to clean the thing out, you turn it off, let the refrigeration go, and you you prop something in there and drain that fluid out.

Now what's interesting is the top of the machine where you keep all that fluid, because of the mixing of air, some foam will start to develop. And if it's running all day and you've made a lot of frosties, there could be a fair bit of that foam. It's the frosty mix mixed with air but not refrigerated. Well, you might wonder, why in the world is he telling me about making frosties? Well, what we discovered when we were staying at night after closed down is we drained the liquid, that foam would run into the freeze chamber. You could turn it back on, the blade beats up, and you freeze that foam mixed with even more air.

And once it's frozen, then you can lift the lever and something comes out that looks a lot like the frosty. Similar consistency, I was dumb enough to taste it. It tastes sort of like the frosty. It didn't taste that bad, but it was like 80 to 90 percent air. You know, it just looks like the real thing, has some taste and everything. My manager said, I'll bet you you could starve to death eating these things, because it's just air.

You'd be filling your belly with something that has a certain look, a certain taste, but it doesn't provide any nourishment. That's the danger we need to avoid spiritually. Could we do that? As I said, all humans feel this emptiness need. Usually it's an emotional feeling, but spiritually, God made us to want to connect spiritually. That's why people started worshipping rocks and stones and the sun and everything around in ancient times when they were cut off from God. So people today, they try to fill that spiritual, emotional hunger with other things. They use alcohol or drugs, sometimes food, usually not the best food, sex, entertainment, partying with lots of friends, acquiring stuff, any kind of stuff.

You know, when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. They didn't laugh at that this morning. And I had to explain that I think I learned that from Fred Flintstone.

But other things, exercising, being devoted to your job. You can do all kinds of things to fill the void, and most of them are not necessarily bad. Some of them are very bad, but you know, some things when you're using them to an inordinate degree to try to fill an appetite that they can't really take care of, then they cause you trouble.

When a person relies on them to try to fill that spiritual need, it's like eating that frozen frosty foam. Now, things that aren't really spiritual food can temporarily fill a spiritual void or make the hunger seem to alleviate, but they don't provide what the person needs for spiritual growth. And this will bring us to the conclusion, like we say physically, you are what you eat. Spiritually, we are what we eat. Now, I couldn't find that in the Bible, but if you'll turn to Galatians 6, you'll see the exact same principle. Galatians 6 and verse 7. Don't be deceived. God is not mocked. Whatever a man sows, he will also reap. For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption. That is, and you could say, whoever tries to fill his appetite with things that aren't spiritual will reap corruption. He who sows to the spirit will of the spirit reap everlasting life. For this, we could say if a person feeds their physical appetites only, they'll end up with physical death. But if a person develops a spiritual hunger and feeds it properly, they'll gain eternal life. Let's turn to one of Christ's best-known parables in Luke chapter 15. It's interesting. This is the parable of the prodigal son. We look at it fairly often, but I tend to forget how much it refers to food. We want to make the analogy here. It doesn't refer to spiritual food, but remember the prodigal son is like any of us who are sinners, and the father in the parable is like God the father, who is willing to forgive us. Luke 15 and verse 11, Jesus says, A certain man had two sons, the younger of them said to his father, Give me the portion of the goods that falls to me. So he divided them his livelihood. And not many days after, the younger son gathered altogether, journeyed to a far country, and he wasted his possessions with prodigal living. Or is it prodigal living?

When he had spent all, there arose a severe famine in the land, and he began to be in want. So when he went and joined himself to a citizen of the country, that citizen sent him to the fields to feed his swine. And he would have gladly filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate. No one gave anything to him, so he's starving to death, feeding these pigs. And when he came to himself, he said, How many of my father's hired servants have bread enough and despair? I'm perishing with hunger. I'll arise and go to my father. How can you be fed with what you need? Go to the father.

I'll go to him and say, Father, I've sinned against heaven before you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me one of your hired servants.

So this is similar. Remember, this day is about reconciliation, about those barriers being taken away. This is a reconciliation between a father and son. Now, it doesn't make reference to Satan being bound, but no analogy is perfect. He rose and came to his father, and when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion. Fell on his neck and kissed him.

And his son said, Father, I've sinned against heaven and in your sight. This is repentance. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. And it's funny, he's probably about to get to the part of saying, well, let me be one of your servants. But the father cut him off and said to the other servants, bring out the best robe and put on him. Put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. And bring the fatted calf and kill it. Let us eat and be merry. For this, my son, was dead and is alive again. That's the great thing about if we've been eating spiritual food that's not nourishing, we can change. We can be forgiven. We can start over with God's forgiveness.

He was lost and is found. They began to make merry. I'm going to leave off. The lesson that the older brother had to learn is an important lesson, but it doesn't apply to what we're discussing here. But the lesson for us is hungering and thirsting for the things of the world, which the prodigal son did at first. He went off and the older brother later said, he spent all your money on harlots and fast living. Hungering and thirsting for those things leads to death.

Hungering to be close to God leads to fullness because he will fill us and it'll lead to feasting. In the end, he got the fatted calf. Now, there's something else, though, that I find interesting.

There is one other thing that people can use to fill their emptiness or they can feast on that would could lead to a you could say a case of spiritual malnutrition, and that's actually religion or improper focus within their religion. A man could busy himself with technical points of the Bible or hearsay or argumentative stuff and neglect the meat of the word. And you know, there are websites out there that pick apart every word of every prophecy, especially end-time prophecy, but even other ones, or that develop complex conspiracy theories. And a person could focus on them so much that they lose sight of the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, and faith.

Now, mind you, I'm not saying that we shouldn't study prophecy. Prophecy is important, and understanding all these things and putting them in place are what we need to do, but we need a balanced diet of spiritual food. If we were to eat only dessert physically, we wouldn't be in very good health. If we were to study only end-time prophecy, if I could relate that, not that it's necessarily equated to dessert, but if we were to study only one particular thing and not other things, we would also suffer from poor health spiritually. I've heard stories from older ministers of men who literally quit their jobs to study nothing but end-time prophecy, and they lost focus on Christian living and overcoming. They were too busy feeding on things like speculating of who and when were the seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3, and trying to figure out who would be the end-time beast and false prophet. Now, I'd like to know the answers to those questions, believe me, but we have to have a balanced diet. People who do that require a taste for things of limited nourishment. I said, if we ate only junk food physically, although I said right now that sounds good, but if we ate only junk food, we wouldn't be in very good health, and we'd put on extra weight, and our arteries would get clogged, and we'd have a bad time. We crave the junk food because it tastes good, and in moderation it's fine. I like a ho-ho as much as anybody, and Sue could attest that I don't always resist. So we crave those things. How often do we crave broccoli and spinach and carrots? Even now, you're probably not that excited about broccoli and spinach, but those kinds of foods build our bodies and protect our health.

If I can make the analogy, we might not get so excited about doing an in-depth study of the Ten Commandments, or the Sermon on the Mount, or the Fruits of the Spirit. Now, hopefully we do, and hopefully we also eat our carrots. Those things are the basics that build good spiritual health. We don't want to let ourselves grow tired of them like the children of Israel grew tired of manna and start focusing on other cravings. As unhealthy spiritual cravings, they'll diminish if we don't entertain them all the time. Like I said, if you eat a good balanced diet, that starts to be what you want. And if we have a good balanced spiritual diet, we'll want that.

Let's turn to Ephesians 4. Remind ourselves that God has called us to a higher level of thinking. This is what he wants from us. Ephesians 4, verse 22. Put off concerning your former conduct the old man which grows corrupt according to deceitfulness, be renewed in the spirit of your mind. Put on the new man which was created according to God in true righteousness and holiness. When we come up from baptism, we're a new creation in Jesus Christ. And we need to be ready to be shaped by God and fed by Him spiritually.

We can consider the foods that God wanted for Adam and Eve and for the children of Israel.

We want to feast on those things, what they represent during the Day of Atonement. As I said, we're not eating physically, but we can have a spiritual feast.

We know that eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil resulted in death. And for the children of Israel, craving those delicacies of Egypt resulted in death. But what about the good foods that God wanted for them? What would they result in? I think we know that. On Trumpets, I read Genesis 3, where God said, you know, now that they've taken to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, basically said, before they take of the tree of life and live forever, let's put them out of the garden. Eating of the tree of life would have brought eternal life. And as I said, Atonement pictures the day when Satan is put away and mankind can take of the tree of life. It's not a coincidence that the tree of life appears near the end of the book of Revelation and that it's freely available.

Just as the tree of life was free before Adam and Eve sinned and manna was free, children of Israel could go out and scoop it off the ground. So God's truth is freely available to us, those who he's called. Now, the church prescribes to the motto of freely you have been given, freely give. And of course, that's one of the reasons we make offerings since it's been freely given to us. We want to give so others can enjoy. If we compare the two types of food, let's go over to Galatians chapter 5. Galatians 5 and beginning in verse 19, let's make the comparison between the works of the flesh and the fruits of the spirit. Galatians 5, 19, now the works of the flesh are evident. They're adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, and sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like, which I tell you beforehand, just as I told you in times past, those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. So those things we don't want to have a craving or an appetite for. Verse 22, but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Again, such there is no law. Obviously, we want to hunger and thirst for the fruit of the spirit and not for the works of the flesh. Let's turn back to Deuteronomy. I wanted to make this connection. I probably should have brought this in earlier. Deuteronomy 8 in verse 3. And I said, we've considered manna as a physical bread that God gave the children of Israel. It was good for them. He wanted them to desire it, but he knew all along that physical bread only counted for just so much. God wanted them to develop a taste for spiritual food.

Deuteronomy 8 in verse 3. Now, this is after the children were about to enter the Promised Land, and Moses was recapping the law for them, saying his last testimony before he was going to die and let Joshua lead them in. So Moses is saying this, and he says, So he humbled you, he allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna, which you didn't know, nor your fathers know, that he might make you to know, man shall not live by bread alone. Man lives by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. God made Israel dependent on them every day for their physical sustenance. He wants us to depend on him every day for our spiritual sustenance.

And of course, Jesus Christ knew this. That's why he deflected Satan's temptation by quoting this scripture. Let's turn to John chapter 6. I am coming into the home stretch here, but I want to focus on this chapter and what it tells us. John chapter 6 makes many references to food, because in the end, Jesus Christ is making pretty much the same analogy that I've been making through this sermon. Maybe I should back that up and say, in my sermon, I've been copying the analogy that Jesus Christ made, because obviously he gets first credit. The chapter starts out with him feeding thousands of people with a few loaves of bread and a few fish. That alone is a good reminder, even at a time when we're feeling hunger, to know that hunger is nothing to God. He can fix it just like that. He can provide all the food we'll ever need. But of course, the people there listening to Jesus Christ had trouble equating that. They got focused on the physical food, as we'll see if we start in verse 27. John 6 and verse 27.

Jesus told them, Don't labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life. What's the Son of Man will give you? Because God the Father has set his seal on him. But they said to him, What shall we do that we may do the works of God? Jesus answered, This is the work of God that you believe on him whom he sent. And they said to him, Well, what sign are you going to perform? That we may see it and believe you. What work will you do? Our fathers ate man in the desert, and he gave them bread from heaven to eat. So they're saying, Work a miracle! Give us food! What are you going to do? Jesus is probably getting a little frustrated. He said, No, most assuredly I say to you, Moses didn't give you the bread from heaven. In other words, you're not getting manna every day. They wanted a free meal ticket. He said, You're not getting that, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. Something so much better. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. Now that sounded exciting to them, except they were still thinking physical bread. So they said, Lord, give us this bread always. So Jesus had to spell it out for him. I'm the bread of life, He said. He who comes to me shall never hunger. He who believes in me shall never thirst.

Remember what we read in Matthew. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. They'll be filled. If we're believing in Christ, if we're connected to Him, we won't be going hungry for that hunger that we have. But I said to you, you've seen me and yet you don't believe.

Now I want to skip down to verse 47. Most assuredly I say to you, He who believes in me has everlasting life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the man in the wilderness and they're dead. So eating that physical bread is good for keeping your life physically for as long as that lasts, but that's not all that long. But this is the bread that comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die.

I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he'll live forever. The bread that I'll give is my flesh, which I'll give for the life of the world.

The Jews therefore quarreled among themselves saying, how can this man give us his flesh to eat? And Jesus said, most assuredly I say to you, unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink of his blood, you have no life in you. But whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. I'll raise him up at the last day. He didn't mean they would never die physically, but he was looking ahead then to the resurrection and most of them couldn't understand that yet.

Remember, on that last Passover, he told his disciples, what I'm telling you now, you won't understand, but later you'll get it. You would have the Holy Spirit. He says, my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him. And as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not as your Father's eight man and are dead. He who eats this bread will live forever. And this is pretty heavy stuff. If you remember in the narrative, a lot of disciples said, we're out of here. We're not doing this anymore. You know, he was down to just the twelve. We said, are you guys going to go? But Peter understood enough. He said, no, you have the words of eternal life.

We know Christ was speaking in metaphor and symbolism. And when we keep the Passover, during which ceremony we usually read these scriptures, we take of that unleavened bread and we drink that little bit of wine that pictures Christ's body and blood. We want to think of his body as that metaphor. And also, Jesus said, I'm the bread of life. God's Word is also called a type of bread. The Word is equated with bread. Jesus Christ is equated with the Word and he's equated with bread. Man is served also as a type of God's Holy Spirit in the sense that when he gave it to Israel, it had to be renewed daily. It wasn't a one-time supply. Like for us, the Holy Spirit has to be renewed. The Holy Spirit is God's very essence, the life of Christ.

And we need to have it renewed in us daily just as we need to have food come into us daily. Bread is often called the staff of life because it's eaten around the world. It's the fundamental part of people's diets. When we eat bread, or any other food, but stick with bread, our body digests it, breaks down its compounds, and it's absorbed. It becomes part of our body, part of us. That's why we're starting to feel like there's not much of us now, right? Because we haven't put anything in.

In the same way, Jesus Christ, the bread of life, the bread of heaven, the spiritual manna, he becomes a part of us through the Holy Spirit. His thoughts become our thoughts. His ways become our ways. That's something that doesn't exist before that. You know, when Isaiah says, my thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways are not your ways. Now, for us, his thoughts become our thoughts and his ways are ways. We have to change. And that can happen. Remember, the day of atonement represents the obstacle being moved out of the way. Satan is put away. We're reconciled to God. But we want to be growing and building in that relationship. Daily, we take in God's word, and daily we ask Him to renew His Spirit in us. And by doing that, we become one with God. We're reconciled to Him. That's important. We don't want to wait until the literal day of atonement is fulfilled. We want to become reconciled now so that we're ready for what's going to happen when Christ returns. And this analogy reminds us, if we wholeheartedly seek God and we seek to enter His kingdom, He'll provide for our spiritual needs. Remember that one of the most commonly memorized scriptures in the Bible, Matthew 6, 33, says, seek you first the kingdom of heaven, and all these things, or you could say all those other things, will be added to you.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. They will be filled.

When we're really hunger and thirst for the things of God, we'll be motivated to pray. It'll motivate us to study our Bible, motivate us to meditate. It'll even motivate us to fast.

And, well, I was going to say, sometimes it still surprises me, because I'm still young compared to some of you here, that I'll get that feeling, like, man, I need to fast. And I look and say, what? I don't like to fast. But, you know, God puts us, we grow closer to Him, there's times when you start thinking you have that need. You're motivated because you're drawing closer to God. And even though you don't like it or don't enjoy it, but we like what it does for us.

So here we are on the day of atonement, and we're fasting. It's a fast day between two feast days. We just had trumpets. We're looking forward to tabernacles. And the perspective of God's plan, we're at the point shortly after Christ's Second Coming, but before the millennium has quite begun.

Two events are pictured as happening. Now, one of them we know falls squarely on the day of atonement. That's Satan being bound and put away for a thousand years. The other one is the marriage of the lamb.

Now, there's been discussion. Does that happen? Should it be considered as part of trumpets? Is it in those few days between trumpets? I'm not going to worry about that. We know that it happens. Let's go to Revelation 19, because whenever and wherever it happens, we want to be part of it.

Revelation 19 and verse 7. As I said, this is falling at that time after Christ is returned.

Well, this is announcing what's going to happen, because if you read further down, it shows Christ returning. But it says, Revelation 19 and verse 7, Let us be glad and rejoice, give him glory, for the marriage of the lamb has come, and his wife has made herself ready. To her it was granted to be arrayed in fine linen, clean and bright, for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints.

That's to be our state when the fulfillment of this day atonement comes. We'll be reconciled to God, and we'll be ready to be at one with Christ, just as a man and wife are joined in their marriage. The church, the bride of Christ, will have made itself ready, no longer having impurities or blemishes. And then what will happen will be similar to what that father did for the prodigal son when he returned. He said, bring out the fatted calf, let's celebrate. So too, our heavenly father is going to have a great feast, a marriage supper, with the best food and the best wine and anything else we could ever imagine. The best Pepsi-Cola, if that's what you like. Our wedding cake in verse 9. He said to me, write, blessed are those who are called to the marriage supper of the lamb. He said, these are the true sayings of God. I thought that's what it said.

Now, right now, we're not having the best food and drink. We aren't having any.

And that's okay. Fasting is a sobering experience. It brings us face to face with the reality that if we don't eat, physically we'll die. And that's good. It can help us remember, if we don't eat spiritually, we'll die the spiritual second death. But we're not planning on that happening.

Right now, we need to eat physically pretty much every day. We can get away with a day or two without, but it catches up with us. Spiritually, we need to feed every day. We need to feed on the things of God. And we'll do that because we're hungering and thirsting for His righteousness.

So, come sunset tonight in a little over three hours, and it's amazing. I have that clock in my head that keeps track. When that sun goes down, we're going to have a pretty strong focus on providing physical nutrition. You know, we'll be putting something in our mouths, and won't it be good? It's okay. You know, the conversation after the service usually food comes up and the feast of tabernacles. But we want to keep a strong focus spiritually. Be ready to feed a hunger and a thirst for righteousness. Because when we feed that hunger, it'll lead us to eternal life.

And that is going to be so much better than whatever we eat tonight. So, I want to say, brethren, I might not see a lot of you again, but I hope you have a wonderful journey in a feast of tabernacles, and we're all here again in a couple weeks.