Daily Lesson for January 7, 2016

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Deuteronomy chapter 8 verse 3:

3 And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

I once heard an old, no-nonsense preacher tell his congregation that while he had heard many times many folks say they weren't being fed in church what he wondered was, "Is it really that they're not being fed, or is it that they just ain't eating?"

I liked the insight -- and the wit.

But here's something even better: sometimes we are left spiritually hungry, not out of any lack on either the preacher or the hearer, but rather because God wants us to be hungry.

Sometimes God wants us to hunger and thirst and be dissatisfied.  And God does this, we are told in today's lesson, to humble us and make us to remember just how dependent we are upon God and God alone.

Jesus fed the 5,000 one day.  The next they all came again -- this time demanding to be fed; but Jesus refused. They had missed something when full; they would only learn it when empty. And the something was humility.

I think now on my own early attempts to feed the flock with the sermons I preached when I first started out. And I think of all those old saints, now departed, who sat and listened to me while at 29 or 30 I told them about God -- and thought I knew what I was saying. Here I was a little lightning bug describing the rays of the sun.  I could only speak out of my experience and my experience was so thin.  I mean, it's so embarrassing! I once preached a sermon about how to boil an egg; talk about not being fed!

But then I think of those saints, and how they did what the saints always do: they endured.  They endured my little jokes and anecdotes and after the benediction they left church having not been fed anything at all but some cream puff religion.  But they did endure; and they came to know that it wasn't all about their being fully satisfied.

And in the end maybe that was the real word from the LORD -- their willingness to hunger, and God's astonishing ability to sustain the flock even with only the crumby bread I had to offer.