Transcription
There is a secret that God reveals to almost no one. Not because he hides it from the many, but because he gives it only to the hungry, and the hungry are so few. God has a way of showing himself, of making his presence and his depths real to a soul, that the casual and the comfortable never taste. And the one condition, the single key that unlocks it, is a hunger for him that most people simply do not have.
The scripture says it plainly. He fills the hungry with good things and the rich he sends empty away. And here is what should stop you tonight. The reason God feels distant to you. The reason your faith is more duty than delight. The reason the depths you read about in others seem close to you. It is not that God is withholding himself. It is that the hunger is not yet there.
Let me ask you a hard question and do not soften the answer. When did you last truly hunger for God? Not for his blessings, not for his help, but for him. For most of us, the honest answer is uncomfortable. We have been content, well-fed on everything but God. And the comfortable are never the ones to whom the secret is revealed.
Tonight, I want to show you the secret God reveals only to the hungry. What that secret is, why hunger is the one condition, and how a hunger for God can be awakened in you before this night is over. Based on the teachings of Awtoer, a man whose whole life burned with a holy hunger for God, who refused to be content with anything less than the living God himself. We made this video and we believe it can be an instrument God uses to speak to you tonight. Because the secret is not reserved for a special few by accident of birth. It is reserved for the hungry and the hunger can begin tonight in you.
Now before we go one step deeper, I want us to find each other. The hungry ones scattered across the earth but one in this longing. So wherever you are watching from tonight, the city, the country, the room you are sitting in right now, type it in the comments below and with it, tell us honestly, are you hungry for God tonight? Say it plainly so that this scattered company of the hungry can see it is not alone. And as you do, leave a like on this video. It tells the algorithm that this generation still hungers for the depths of God. Type where you are, pause for 10 seconds, and ask the Lord one thing. God, make me hungry for you.
And now, a direct and honest word from us, the ones who make these messages. Because here is where the hunger meets its path. God reveals his secret to the hungry. But the hungry soul still has to seek him in the secret place day after day. And that is exactly where most give up. Here is the honest truth almost no one will tell you. The reason your seeking never lasts is not that you lack the hunger. It is that you were never given a way to sustain it. The hunger stirs. You resolve to seek him. And then the mind wanders. The noise floods back. The days blur and within a week the fire has gone cold and nothing has changed. That is not a failure of your heart. It is the lack of a path. So we built one. It is called the War Room Manual. 30 days that take the hunger God has stirred in you and give it a path to walk. Silencing the noise, steadying the wandering mind, and leading you into the secret place day after day until God reveals himself to the hungry soul you have become.
And now, the War Room Manual comes with some exclusive gifts. Something that has already helped many people go deeper with God and that we believe will help you, too. The manual will never replace your Bible. The Word is the foundation, the final authority always. But it is the path that carries your hunger all the way to the secret God reveals to those who seek him. If the hunger is stirring in you tonight, do not let it fade by morning. It is linked in the description and pinned to the top of the comments.
Now, let the noise fall silent and let us turn to a message on the secret God reveals only to the hungry. Let us think tonight about spiritual hunger. For I am convinced that it is the one thing that separates the soul that truly knows God from the soul that only knows about him. And that its near total absence is the hidden reason our religion has become so shallow and so cold. God reveals himself to the hungry and we are not hungry. And there is the whole tragedy in a sentence.
Let me begin with the great principle that runs through the whole of scripture. For once you see it, you will see it everywhere. God gives himself to those who seek him, and he is found in the measure that he has wanted. Blessed are they, the Lord said, which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Ye shall seek me and find me, he said, when ye shall search for me with all your heart. He satisfieth the longing soul and filleth the hungry soul with goodness. The pattern never varies. It is the hungry who are filled, the thirsty who are satisfied, the seeking who find, the ones who want him with the whole heart to whom he gives himself. And the reverse is just as true and far more terrible. The rich he sends empty away. The full and comfortable and self-satisfied go without, not because God refuses them, but because they never truly wanted what he offers.
God reveals his secret to the hungry and to the hungry alone. Now hear me, for this is the heart of it. This is why the deep knowledge of God is so rare. Not because God is stingy with himself. Not because he plays favorites. Not because the secret is hidden from all but a chosen few. It is because hunger is rare. The secret is offered to whoever will hunger for it and almost no one will. We live in the most comfortable, most well-fed, most entertained generation in the history of the world. And our very comfort has killed our hunger. A soul stuffed full of a thousand lesser things has no appetite left for God. We snack all day on entertainment, on noise, on the endless scroll, on every trivial pleasure within reach. And we come to God, if we come at all, with an appetite already ruined, and we wonder why he does not satisfy us. He cannot fill a soul that is not hungry. The secret is not withheld from us. We have eaten ourselves out of the hunger that would have received it.
And so I must press upon you the question this whole message exists to ask. Are you hungry for God? Not for his gifts, not for his blessings, not for what he can do for you, but for him, for God himself, for the living God as your exceeding great reward. Be honest, for a soul may deceive itself here more than anywhere. Is there in you a real hunger, a longing that aches, a thirst that the world cannot satisfy? Or have you been content, comfortable in your religion, well-fed on everything but God, satisfied with knowing about him, and never once desperate to know him. For the secret is revealed to the hungry. And if the hunger is not there, no amount of religious activity will unlock it. The first question is not whether you are seeking, but whether you are hungry, for hunger is the thing that drives the seeking and without it the seeking never lasts.
Let me tell you where this hunger comes from. It is vital and it will keep you from despair. The hunger for God is itself the gift of God. No soul hungers for him whom he has not first stirred to hunger. The very ache you may feel tonight, the very longing that these words are awakening in you is his hand already upon you, drawing you to himself. This is grace at the very beginning of the thing. And this means that if you do not have the hunger, you are not shut out forever. For the hunger itself can be sought, asked for, received. You can pray even now the most important prayer a half-hearted soul can pray. God, I am not hungry for you and I know it and I am grieved by it. Make me hungry. Give me the holy appetite I lack. And he answers that prayer, for it is the one prayer that asks for nothing but more of him, and he delights to answer it. The hunger is the gift, and the God who gives the secret to the hungry will give the hunger to the soul that asks.
Now let me name the great enemy of this hunger in your generation. For it is the very thing keeping you from the secret. It is the endless feeding on everything but God. Your generation has been given a device that offers infinite snacking for the soul. An endless stream of stimulation, entertainment, outrage, novelty, noise, always another thing to consume so that the soul is never empty long enough to feel its hunger for God. Hunger is felt in emptiness, in stillness, in the quiet where the soul discovers that all its snacking has left it starving for the one thing it was made for. And your generation has abolished emptiness. It fills every silent moment, every gap, every pause with the screen. And so it never feels the hunger, never reaches the emptiness where the longing for God is found. You are not less hungry for God than other generations by nature. You are more anesthetized to the hunger, more skilled at drowning it in noise. And part of recovering the hunger in this generation is the deliberate laying down of the endless feeding, the fasting from the noise, the entering of the emptiness, the willingness to be still and unfed long enough to feel how starved for God you really are.
And here is a hard mercy you must understand. God will often let a soul grow empty before he fills it. For he fills the hungry. And sometimes the only way to make a comfortable soul hungry is to let it taste its own emptiness. Those dry seasons you have known when the world lost its savor and nothing satisfied and even your religion felt hollow. Those were not God abandoning you. They were, it may be, God emptying you, hollowing out the space where hunger could be felt, teaching your soul that all its snacking had left it starving. Do not run from that emptiness back to the noise. Do not fill it again with the endless feeding. That emptiness is holy ground. It is the very place where hunger for God is born. The soul that will sit in its emptiness and feel it and let it become a hunger, and bring that hunger to God. That soul is on the very threshold of the secret.
I want to take you to a well in Samaria. For there the Lord himself spoke of this. A woman came to draw water, a woman who had tried to satisfy the thirst of her soul with one relationship after another, and was still empty, still coming to the well. And the Lord said to her, "Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again, but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst. It shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." There is the whole matter. She had been drinking from the wells of the world, pleasure, romance, the approval of men, and thirsting again every time, as the world's wells always leave you thirsting again. And the Lord offered her the one water that satisfies the soul forever, the living water of God himself. And your generation, drinking endlessly from the world's wells and thirsting again every hour, scrolling and consuming and craving and never satisfied, is that woman at the well. And the same Lord offers you the same living water if you will thirst for it and come to him to drink.
I want you to understand that what you believe about God shapes whether you will ever hunger for him. For what comes into your mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you. The soul that thinks of God as a distant, dull, undemanding deity will never hunger for him. For who hungers for the dull and the distant? But the soul that has caught a true vision of God, the living God, the fountain of all beauty and joy and satisfaction, the exceeding great reward, the one in whose presence is fullness of joy, and at whose right hand are pleasures forevermore. That soul will hunger, must hunger, cannot help but hunger, for it has glimpsed the only thing that can truly satisfy. Our lack of hunger is bound up with our low thoughts of God. We do not hunger for him because we have made him small and dull in our minds, and no one starves for a small and dull thing. Recover a true and glorious vision of who God is and the hunger will rise in you of itself. For the soul was made for him, and to see him truly is to hunger for him.
And let me tell you a paradox that lies at the very center of this secret. For it will guard you from a great error. You might think that when God fills the hungry soul, the hunger ends. That the satisfied soul hungers no more. But it is the opposite. The soul that tastes God does not lose its hunger. Its hunger deepens. For it has tasted the only thing worth hungering for. To have found God is to have found the one thing that both satisfies and increases the appetite at once. The saints who knew God most were the hungriest of all. Not the most satisfied in the sense of being finished, but the most alive with a holy, happy, ever-deepening desire for more of him. This is why Toer could say that to have found God and still to pursue him is the soul's paradox of love. That the more we have of God, the more we want. And the wanting is itself a kind of having. And the having only deepens the wanting. Do not imagine then that you are seeking a destination where the hunger stops. You are entering a pursuit that grows sweeter and deeper forever. A hunger that is itself joy. A thirst that drinks and thirsts again, not in frustration, but in delight. The comfortable who never hunger will never know this joy. It is reserved for the hungry who find, and in finding hunger more, and in hungering more are filled more, world without end. Recover then the holy hunger and you recover everything.
I must confront the cheap religion of our day directly, for it is a great killer of hunger. It has offered men a Christianity that asks nothing and stirs nothing. A comfortable, undemanding religion that lets a soul feel saved while remaining perfectly satisfied with the world, that quiets the conscience without ever awakening the hunger. It tells men they have everything the moment they believe. And so they never press on, never hunger for more, never seek the deep things of God, having been assured that the shallow is enough. And this false contentment is one of the deadliest enemies of the hunger. For the soul that believes itself already full will never hunger to be filled. The saints of old were marked by a holy dissatisfaction, a divine discontent, an aching for more of God that no measure of him ever quenched. And we have replaced it with a cheap satisfaction that has never truly tasted him at all. If we would recover the secret, we must let the cheap religion be shattered and let ourselves feel again the hunger it has smothered.
I want to take you to the saints who hungered, for they are the great proof of this secret. David in the wilderness cried, "My soul thirsteth for thee. My flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land." And God revealed himself to David as to almost no other. Moses, who already knew God face to face, still cried, "I beseech thee, show me thy glory." Hungry for more of the God he knew better than any man alive. And God passed his glory before him. Paul, who had been caught up into the third heaven, still counted all things but loss, still pressed on, still cried, "that I may know him." Hungry to the end for the Christ he had followed for decades. The pattern is unmistakable. The ones to whom God revealed himself most were not the satisfied but the hungriest. Not those content with what they had of God, but those who ached for more. They were not of another order than you. They had your flesh, your distractions, your temptations to comfort, but they hungered for God with a holy desperation. And to the hungry, the secret was revealed. The God who filled them has not changed. He still fills the hungry. And the only question is whether you will be one of them.
Consider two souls that you may see what hangs on this hunger. There is the one who is comfortable, who has his religion, his church attendance, his correct beliefs, and no hunger at all. Who is satisfied with knowing about God, well-fed on the world and on a shallow faith. And who feels no ache, no longing, no divine discontent, and therefore never presses in, never seeks, never receives, who lives and dies, having been religiously comfortable, and having never once tasted the God he professed. And there is the one who hungered, who felt the emptiness and did not run from it, who ached for God and would not be satisfied with anything less, who turned from the snacking of the world and sought the living God with the whole heart. And to whom, being hungry, God revealed himself so that he came to know God as a friend, to taste the living water, to be filled with a satisfaction the comfortable never dreamed of. The difference between them is not that one was granted the secret and the other refused it. It was offered to both. The difference is that one was hungry and the other was full. Full of the world, full of self, full of a cheap and shallow satisfaction that left no room for God. Which will you be? The comfortable soul that felt no hunger and went empty away, or one of the hungry who ached for God and was filled?
I would not stir this hunger in you without showing you the glory it leads to. For the secret God reveals to the hungry is worth infinitely more than everything the comfortable cling to. What the hungry soul receives is God himself. Not merely his gifts, but his presence, his friendship, the knowledge of him that satisfies as nothing in this world ever could. Ask any soul that ever hungered and was filled whether it was worth the ache. And you will hear the same answer every time, a thousand times. Yes, the hunger is painful. The emptying is hard. The divine discontent is not comfortable. But what it leads to is the living God. And there is nothing in heaven or earth to compare with him. There has never been a soul that hungered for God and was filled and counted the hunger too costly. The comfortable who would not hunger keep their ease and their snacking and their shallow satisfaction, and they never taste the secret. The hungry ache and press in and are filled with the God who satisfies forever, and there is no comparison between the two. Better to hunger and be filled with God than to be comfortable and go empty away.
And do not look at your own cold heart and despair, as though the hunger was something you could never work up. For it is not a thing you manufacture, but a thing you receive. You cannot squeeze hunger for God out of a comfortable heart by sheer willpower. But you can come to God with the little longing you have, even if it is only a longing to long for him, and ask him to deepen it. Turn from the endless feeding that has ruined your appetite. Enter the stillness where the hunger can be felt. Feed on his Word, which awakens hunger even as it satisfies it, and ask him again and again to make you hungry. The hunger will grow. It always grows in the soul that turns toward God and asks. For he is more willing to make you hungry for him than you are to be made hungry. You have only to begin to turn, to ask, and to trust the God who stirs the hunger to bring it to fullness.
So I bring you to the question, and much may hang upon your answer. Will you become one of the hungry? Will you turn from the snacking that has ruined your soul's appetite, enter the emptiness where the hunger is felt, and seek God until he reveals to you the secret he reveals only to the hungry? Because the secret is open to you this very night. On the same terms it has always been open. Not to the comfortable, not to the satisfied, not to the well-fed and the casual, but to the hungry, to whoever will ache for God and seek him with the whole heart. The same God who filled David and Moses and Paul waits to fill you if you will hunger for him. The condition is real, and it is the very reason so few know the secret. But the hunger can be yours, for the asking. And to the hungry soul, God reveals himself.
Let me be practical before I close, for I would not stir this hunger and leave you without a path. Tonight, before you sleep, get alone with God, even if only for 15 minutes. Get to a quiet place, on your knees if your body allows, with your Bible open, and be honest with him. Tell him you have been comfortable, well-fed on everything but him, and that your hunger has grown cold, and that you long to long for him again. Ask him plainly to make you hungry. Then be still, and let the emptiness be felt, and do not rush to fill it. Feed on a portion of his Word, and let it awaken the appetite that the noise had smothered. Then tomorrow, before the phone, before the noise, before the endless feeding of the day begins, come to him first, hungry, and seek his face, and build that seeking into the daily rhythm of your life, turning from the snacking, entering the stillness, feeding on him, asking for more of him, until the hunger that was cold becomes a fire. And the God who reveals himself to the hungry reveals himself to you. Begin small if you must, but begin tonight. For the God who stirs the hunger meets the soul that begins to seek him.
Do not let this be one more message that stirs you and changes nothing. For that is the very way the hunger is lost. You can feel a longing rise as these words are spoken and then return unchanged to the same endless feeding, the same comfortable religion, and by morning the hunger will have faded and nothing will have changed. The stirring you feel now is not yet hunger. It is the beginning of hunger, and it will die if you do not act on it. Do not mistake the feeling for the thing. Let it drive you tonight into the stillness to ask God for the hunger that unlocks the secret. So go, go and become one of the hungry. Turn from the snacking that has ruined your appetite for God. Lay down the noise, enter the emptiness, and let yourself feel how starved for him you really are. Ask him to make you hungry and keep asking. Feed on his Word. Seek his face in the secret place and do not stop until the hunger that was dead is alive. And the God who reveals himself only to the hungry has revealed himself to you. The comfortable will never know the secret. Be one of the hungry and you will be filled with the living God, which is worth infinitely more than all the comfort you leave behind. In Jesus' name, hunger for him and do not stop until you are filled.