Help for the Hungry SoulНамуна

Nowhere Else to Go

I once entered a trying season of what I would call spiritual depression. Our family had been sick on and off for close to a year, so we kept to ourselves; we stayed away from church and other people for a long time. The lingering Midwest winter was also wearing me down. And on top of it all, my husband and I lost a second baby to miscarriage.

The loneliness and grief of living in this fallen world felt suffocating.

As the dual clouds of sadness and longing settled upon my soul, I started to ask questions and face doubts about the Lord, an unwelcome battleground every believer enters at some point. I asked my small group to pray for the heaviness to break. I needed the light of Jesus to stream into my weary heart again.

I knew I needed his word more than anything else.

Yet, engaging with it was a struggle. I would approach the Lord in Scripture only to feel as if no one answered the door. The words on the page seemed to bounce off my heart rather than penetrate it. But I knew I had no other choice. I needed to be in the word.

So I committed to simply continue. No matter my detached feelings and how bleak circumstances seemed, I would come. I would plead and ask, and ask again. I remember praying along the lines of Jacob’s prayer in Genesis 32:26: “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” People were praying for me, and I knew the very words of life were mine to feed on, and where else could I go? “You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

Eventually, on a normal day, through the normal means of his gracious words and prayerful people, the Lord met me. In his supernatural way and in his own timing, he shined his light upon my heart again, and the clouds of heaviness began to disperse.

Longing for His Promise

I do not tell you this story because there is some magic formula for dealing with hardship (there isn’t), or because I’m so great at committing to God’s word (I’m not), but because God is so great at committing himself to us, and we cannot know the trustworthiness of his commitment to us apart from his word. His word is his commitment, his promise, and his covenant faithfulness that never ends (Ps. 119:76). To trust him is to trust what he has said, and our faith in him is strengthened as we hold fast to his word. And, oh, how we long for something trustworthy to cling to when everything else is changing, including us! The psalmist’s plea was my own: “My eyes long for your promise; / I ask, ‘When will you comfort me?’” (Ps. 119:82).

We too hunger for his promise, even without realizing it. Despite our many attempts to cover it up, we know we are needy at our core. In our hunger, combined with this passing-away world and its many troubles and tears, God graciously gives us something more sure for our faith-weary eyes to rest upon: his words. His unchanging, true, and powerful words.

We are visual creatures. We were made to see God (Gen. 3:8). The whole story of redemption is about God’s people learning to walk with him by faith, not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7) until we see him, in the flesh, with our physical eyes (Col. 3:4). And though we cannot see him now, he sees us and knows us and sustains our faith with something we can see. His words.

He is so kind and good.

And yet, what his word produces within us is unseen. This is the hard part, I think, for needy, hungry souls like us who want something visible to hold onto day after day. So we need encouragement. The work of God through his word is supernatural, ongoing, and seemingly slow at times, but it is always trustworthy and good. In my cloud-laden season, God was not absent, nor was he idle. He was working in more ways that I can pinpoint even now. He was using it, “weaving” it into the “fabric of illumination,” as John Piper beautifully puts it.

God was using his word to shine his light so I could see again.

Coming to Truly See

When we come to the Bible, we come to truly see. We desperately need spiritual sight (faith)! Much of what we can physically see around us is hard, grievous, and hope-quenching. What our weary souls need more than anything in this world is to see reality God’s way.

This is what the light of the word of Christ does. It illuminates. It shows us his glory. It shows us our need for his glory to be our greatest good, no matter what is happening around us or within us.

Friends, when we come to our Bibles (either privately or with our church family), we come to be reminded of a reality that is more real and powerful than the one visibly surrounding us, of a coming creation that makes the one outside our window pale in comparison, of a kingdom that cannot be shaken by rulers, wars, pandemics, or the stormy doubts inside our hearts. Through God’s word of truth, we come to know and believe and hunger for the God who has made us for himself. Though he is a God we cannot see, he has given us eyes of faith and hearts of hope that are instilled by his words: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).

Where do we gain knowledge about who God is, in all his glory? In his Son, his Word. And how do we “see” the face of Jesus Christ? Through his word, the Bible.

But how do we do this? How do we come to trust God’s nourishing work, a work we can’t always see, when the world around us and the emotions inside us tend to feel more real? How do we seek the light of Christ when the darkness seems to envelop us, even our very desire?

We obey, and we cling.

We Come to God’s Word

First, we obey. Sometimes the word obedience makes us cringe. (Did you cringe?) It causes us to think legalistic thoughts and, if we aren’t careful, we will slip into trying to earn God’s love and approval by our actions. Yet, obedience is good, commanded by God, and commended in his word: “Strive . . . for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14).

“Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed . . . work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12).

Obedience is evidence of true faith in Jesus.

It demonstrates that we trust him enough to do what he says.

It demonstrates that we love him and actually want to know him.

It demonstrates that we acknowledge that, without him, we would be lost.

And so we come to his word. No matter how we feel or how things appear, we come. We choose to believe that the way of obedience is the way of life, which is how parents instruct their children, that it may go well with them (Eph. 6:1–3). We choose to believe that God works through our obedience, using it to nourish us with his words and fill us with himself.

The unexpected blessing is that obedience both proves our faith and produces more faith, helping us cling all the more tightly to God’s promises as we obey him, just as it did for Abraham.

We Cling to God’s Word

Abraham was in an impossible situation, or so it seemed. He and his wife were old—really old—and well beyond childbearing years. And yet, God told them they would have a son, from whom God’s entire family line would come. Even though God’s promise seemed impossible, Abraham “[trusted] God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6; Rom. 4:3).

Abraham obeyed, giving God glory, and “he grew strong in his faith” (Rom. 4:20) as a result. We too desire stronger faith. Deep in our hearts, we need to be convinced, as Abraham was, that God’s words are not just hot air—empty, lifeless, and cheap. No, God’s words are purposeful, nourishing, and invaluable. They are worth trusting, for God’s words come from God’s heart. We cling to them because God is the only trustworthy, unchanging rock upon which we can stand. And so we keep coming to God’s word, and we keep clinging to the promises we find there. As Abraham did.

When we cling to his promises about his word, God gets the glory and praise, since in our waiting upon him we are proclaiming him to be trustworthy and worth the wait, not the things of this world. In clinging, we remind ourselves, other people, and even the spiritual realm that the unseen, ongoing, seemingly slow work of God is always good, that there is more happening than we can now see and observe with our eyes, and that God is nourishing us even when we can’t feel it.

Nourishing Our Souls

Just as I couldn’t see the difference that each day of regimented eating was making to my weak health, so it is often hard to assess the work of God in our weary souls as we obediently and desperately consume his word. But the right eating lifestyle was changing me. Little by little, the doctor’s plan was unfolding its good purpose.

And little by little, one day at a time, God is working his good purpose within us.

Even when we can’t see it.

He is working through his word, satisfying our hunger and nourishing our souls with his words of life, the food we need the very most.