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THE POWER OF HUNGER

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There is a constant need for men to be hungry in every generation. Since the days of the Apostles of the Lamb whose level of hunger cannot be compared to what we have ever seen in our days, there have always been men with dangerous and contagious levels of hunger for God scattered all over territories which can be called remnants even during times when the world seems to be overwhelmed by evil and sin. Therefore, the Spirit of God is actively in search for men that will be among these few men of hunger that will preserve the divine ordinances of God in this our generation and hand over these eternal legacies to the coming generations. Why do you need to be hungry for God? firstly, without hunger, you cannot fully deliver all that God has deposited into your life for your generation from the foundations of the earth. Hunger will fire you up, refine you for your divine assignment and keep you in the place God has placed you for the rest of your days. Many would have fulfilled destiny in their lifetime, but the lack of hunger for God in their lives limited all they could do and achieve with God. Hunger is a like a catalyst, it speeds up your walk and work rate with the Holy Spirit. It makes communion with the Holy Spirit a necessity for you. Hunger for God will make you pass through all the necessary classes in the school of the Spirit that is required for your God assigned dominion on earth. In reality, you have not started moving deeply with God if you have never been hungry for God! hunger leads you to many strange moves and quickening of the Spirit than you can ever imagine. Stages which would have required total obedience of many months can be flawlessly fast tracked when a hungry man steps in simply because hunger for God will make you obedient to God and His precepts.

The Spirit of God is actively in search for men that will be among these few men of hunger that will preserve the divine ordinances of God in this our generation and hand over these eternal legacies to the coming generations.

There is a need to define what I mean by hunger at this point. Hunger here refers to the overall outburst of passion and zeal towards God and all that pertains to Him.  It is a supernatural force inspired from heaven which starts from within a man and then burst out after many dealings and workings within the person. A man that is hungry for God will seek God until he finds Him. It is so easy to recognize hungry men! The way they pray, sing, talk, act and do other activities in their lives depicts a special concentration, an uncommon target, a distinct goal and a totally different desire they demand from God. Their whole live is controlled by a special force. All they want in their live is an audience with the Almighty! Their life desire is to please God, to live for Him and satisfy His pleasure all the days of their lives. They long for His presence all day. They are men and women after the likeness of David, Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Paul, Peter and other saints whose track records no one has broken in ages! This Psalm of David is their constant heart cry: As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. when can I go and meet with God? [Psalm 42:1-2 NIV]. There is good news for you here, you can join this band of God addicts right at this point. Get ready for the extra ordinary!

How can this mystery of hunger help you in prayer? Owing to the dynamics of the force behind the concept of hunger, it stands that whenever it is used in the place of seeking God or finding solution in God, it always brings out the desired result elegantly! When you pray with hunger, it is the kind of prayer that is limitless, timeless and without constraints! Imagine your mother is on sick bed about to die at that moment and the only thing left that can be done is prayer, how would you pray? I may not be sure of the length of the kind of prayer you would pray at that point but I can predict some features of that kind of prayer. It is the kind of prayer that you immediately forget where you are and what is happening around you, all you do is to focus on GOD and what He has to offer at that specific time. Yes! That is what hunger and urgency can wrath in a man. I once heard the testimony of how a boy was miraculously brought back to life after falling-off from a moving lorry. At the point when it was evident that the boy was gone, everyone there started praying passionately and loudly. Their voices were so loud that neighbours around could presume some desperate believers are crying to their God for help at that moment and to the glory of God, the young boy was brought back to life. Halleluyah!

This piece was tagged the power of hunger for some important reasons. Let us check out if there is truly any power in the concept of hunger. What can hunger birth for a man? Is there any benefit of being hungry for God and all that pertains to Him? All of these questions will be answered in this part of the piece. In the school of God chasers, one of the core courses to be learnt by all students is the concept of Hunger. Hunger is the gateway to access deep things of God. hunger will power your praying strength and stretch you beyond your usual capacity. Prophet Jeremiah speaking by the inspiration of the Almighty said “Then you will seek Me, inquire for, and require Me [as a vital necessity] and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart – Jer.29:13 AMP. What will make you search for God with all your heart? It is hunger! When a man is hungry for something, then he is ready to do all it takes to get that thing. It takes hunger to get some results from God. Only desperate and hungry men will access some depths in the Spirit through their persistent efforts. Nothing seems impossible when hunger is involved. Hunger will break every limitation and blockage standing between the person that is hungry and the solution he desires. Hunger makes you think of any possible way to reach the desired spot. It makes the impossible possible. It so much overwhelms your thinking faculty so much that you start to reason faster and better so as to get the desired outcome. Therefore, hunger is a powerful tool for seeking and finding God. Are you a God seeker? Do you seek to know more about your Maker and what He entail? Then this concept will simply make your journey sweeter and faster. No seeker of God that found Him did so without being practically hungry and passionate for God. At a time, it becomes an issue of life and death, it becomes so intense inside you that you can go hungry for days all because you want to meet God. Yes! At that exact point, you are ready to truly encounter who He is.

What will make you search for God with all your heart? It is hunger!

There was a man in the bible with similar experience, Moses the law giver. Here is his testament depicting his level of hunger and cry out to know more about the person of God. “now therefore, I pray You, if I have found favour in Your sight, show me now Your way, that I may know You [progressively become more deeply and intimately acquainted with You, perceiving and recognizing and understanding more strongly and clearly] and that I may find favour in Your sight. And [Lord, do] consider that this nation is Your people. And Moses said, I beseech You, show me Your glory” [Exodus 33:13;18 AMP]. This is the case of a man who was truly hungry for God! during the period he had this conversation with God, he was on his second series of 40 days retreat with God. Do you know what it means to be in a retreat for 40 days and nights without food and water? Apart from being supernatural and strictly prohibited for a mortal man unless specially instructed by God, it is an advance level of sacrifice a man can give to God! all because he needed the attention of the Almighty at that particular time. So, what do you do when you need the Presence of God desperately in your life? do you just go straight to meet your Pastor or just linger around it for days? Or you go mad with that desire and start to chase after God with spiritual direction just like Moses did in the passage above? A very important benefit of hunger can be derived from here. When you are hungry for God, you simply give it all it takes to meet God and you end up finding Him at the end of it all.

There were truly men who were hungry in the bible just like Moses in the previous paragraph. We shall consider some of them before concluding this piece on the power of hunger. There was a man of hunger and unusual level of confidence in the times of the Israelites of old. His name was Caleb, son of Jephunneh. He was the only partner of Joshua who together stood against the words of the other ten spies sent into the land of Canaan to spy the land. While the other ten wailed and made the people hopeless by their discouraging report about the promised land. Only Joshua and Caleb declared to Moses that the children of Israel are truly capable to possess the land of Canaan and take what the Lord called their possession. Owing to this, Moses the servant of God swore that the land Caleb threaded shall be his inheritance because of His unwavering dedication to God. Caleb was forty years of age when Moses gave him this promise from God. The children of Israel did not possess their promised Land until Caleb was Eighty-five years of age. He was a man who received favour being that it was only Joshua the servant of God and him [Caleb] that left Egypt together with the Israelites and eventually entered the promised land owing to his dedication to God and bravery displayed even when it was evident there were giants in the land they were to possess. So, when they finally possessed Canaan, Caleb went to meet with Joshua who had become the leader of the Israelites at that time to remind him of the inheritance God promised him through Moses the servant of God forty-five years ago. Joshua 14:6-14 recorded the rest of this fantastic story. What made Caleb remained as strong as before when he went to claim his inheritance? That was hunger in action! Passion at its peak! Caleb told Joshua that for the forty-five years he spent waiting for the fulfillment of the promise of God, he was as strong as he was in the days of his youth and war; wow! That is kind of wonder only hunger commands! Get hungry in all you do and watch the results that will follow!

The world of believers of Christ has been characterized with effectual prayer over the centuries. This is not a surprise or big deal as it is well known to all Christians that Prayer is a MUST DO! Prayer is a command of Jesus Himself while on earth, Prayer was His lifestyle so it is glaring why believers will always have to pray at all times. Hunger goes well with Prayer when prayer gets to the level of fervency and aggression. The lives and times of the numerous men of Faith that lived before us is characterized by an unimaginable concentration and dedication to the art of fervent prayer. It seems they knew things we do not know about the concept of prayer which made them ever committed to this ancient craft of communication with the Almighty in such an effectual manner. However, it is quite unfortunate that our generation has lost touch with this infallible legacy of our Fathers. One of the reason for this decay and redundancy in the level of right attitude towards prayer and fervency is the lack of hunger and passion to pray. When you fail to see reasons to pray, when you fail to see why you need to seek the face of God, then it will be logical to see you live a “prayer-less” life!

Paul the Apostle of Christ can also be said to be a hungry man in the school of hunger for God! after his thrilling and memorable encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ on his way to Damascus, he did not only learn about His new found Lord from the other Apostles and believers of those days, his hunger for God drove made him mad for God! His hunger for God pushed him to the desert of Arabia where he truly encountered God and was trained by God Himself for the cause of Christ he had to fulfill on earth. He truly fulfilled purpose, his writings alone constituted a reasonable part of the New Testament of the Bible we use today as a testament of his legacy of being truly for God. Apostle Paul on many occasions had to suffer a lot for the sake of Christ in his days of ministry being a Missionary sent to the Gentiles. In his letter to the Philippians he declared his unwavering passion to know more about God after practically doing a whole lot of great things for God, his hunger for God was still intact! He never ran out of it for once! This passage captured his statement of hunger at that particular time: “[For my determined purpose is] that I may know Him [that I may progressively become more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him, perceiving and recognizing and understanding the wonders of His Person more strongly and more clearly], and that I may in that same way come to know the power outflowing from His resurrection [ which it exerts over believers], and that I may so share His sufferings as to be continually transformed [in spirit into His likeness even] to His death, [in the hope].” Phill.3:10 AMP. I believe the version of the bible above made my point very clear to all. The passage above is the hearty cry of those that are hungry for God at every point of their lives. There is a lesson here from the life of Apostle Paul. He kept his hunger intact all through his days of ministry and times on earth. What will make you not run out of hunger is to keep pressing more for God all through your life just like Paul did! Many were hungry at the beginning of their dealing with God but lost it before the end of their sojourn on earth, nothing is as disastrous as not finishing strong. The end of a thing is better than the beginning thereof, so I beseech you to stay glued with God through continuous hunger for Him all through your days on earth.

Conclusively, we have been able to journey through the concept of the power embedded in Hunger for God in this piece. Ranging from the true need of hungry men by God to stand as remnants of divine ordinances for this generation to the benefits of being hungry for God and finally discussing about the lives of two men that were truly hungry in their pursuits of God while on earth. I truly believe at this point that an urgency to be hungry for God has being birthed forth in your life as you have read through the lines of this piece. Here is my plea to you, return back to the place of prayer, ask God for the level of hunger for Him that will keep you glued to Him all through the days of your life. He will surely give it to you. He is still in the business of baptizing men with love and hunger for Him. It is the needed fuel you need to keep burning in Him all through your stay in this earth realm. Always remember, whenever your level of hunger is low, return back to Him and just as you refill your cooking gas when it is out, He will truly refill you and keep you refreshed in His hunger all through your sojourn on this planet. I wish you a hunger-filled and passion-driven stay with God in this world. Shalom!

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