Praying for God to Fill up My EmptinessIsampula

Cravings

The Israelites were grumbling about food. It’s not that they had nothing to eat, but they wanted something to eat other than the manna God rained down in front of their tents every day. God was leading them to a land flowing with milk and honey and feeding them day by day with bread from heaven. (And how do you think bread that is made in heaven tastes? Heavenly, of course!) But their mouths were watering for the leeks and melons back in Egypt.

Many of us have cravings that blind us, so we can’t see all that God has done for us and all he has given to us. Yes, we appreciate salvation and all that, but what we crave is to be thin, to have a nicer house in a better neighborhood, to be elevated to a position with more authority and opportunity, to have a child, or to be able to change the child we’ve got.

For the Israelites, everything was about food. What is everything about for you? Are you allowing that craving to be the knothole through which you view all of life, causing you to lose sight of God’s goodness?

Later, as the next generation prepared to cross the Jordan River into the Promised Land, God told them why he had allowed their parents to experience hunger in the wilderness. It was so they would know something. So they would know that “people do not live by bread alone; rather, we live by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deuteronomy 8:3).

They had the words from God that Moses had delivered to them, but we have the whole of the Bible. So then, what does it mean for you and me to “live by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord”? We are meant to consume what God has provided for us in his Word by reading it and hearing it preached. We have to chew on it, work its nourishment into our system, and think through what it will look like for us to begin living in light of its truth. And as the Word of God begins to change how we think, we discover that it is also changing how we feel and what we want.

Question to consider: What do you find yourself craving that can sometimes seem to color everything about your life? What do you think it would take for that craving to have less of a hold on you?

Prayer: Lord, I ask you to work in the emptiness of my life and the cravings that threaten to control me. Help me to trust in your provision and promise of a home. Help me to see this time in the wilderness as an opportunity to live out genuine faith rather than spend my whole life living an untested, inactivated faith. Retrain my appetites away from what the world offers, and away from the things I crave that will kill me, toward the food that will satisfy and sustain me.