My two year old comes to me on a regular basis and says, “ungry.” Tobi is still working on his H’s. So we head to the kitchen, open the cupboard, and get out a snack for him. But that is not enough, I also help him into his chair at the table.
When my nine year old comes to me and says, “Dad, I am hungry.” I might give him a few boundaries (like no ice cream, or a limit to the amount of fruit roll ups), and he goes happily on his way to the kitchen.
When my sons are twenty-one years old, I can’t imagine them coming to me and saying, “Dad, I’m hungry.” (although they might at some time!).
As a pastor, people would regularly come to me and say, “We need fed.” The scenario always reminded me of my two-year old standing in front of me with his mouth open wide. “Ungry. Ungry. Ungry.”
But instead of my two-year old son, it is people who have been following Jesus for years.
Although I patiently listened and nodded in agreement, I also tried to wake them up to the real problem. They were no longer babies who needed me to prepare food, open food, and show them what hole to stick it in. These were no longer baby Christians, but people who have spent most of their lives within the church. In our faith journey, there comes a time when you are responsible to feed yourself.
I Peter 2:2 says, “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.” Hunger is a natural reaction of being alive. You know that God is good, and the follower of Christ will naturally desire to grow.
The hunger is good, but sometimes people expect the senior pastor, youth pastor to be their personal spiritual caterer. We are to prepare a meal for them that will fill their hunger (The preferred meal being a diet of new information misconstrued as “depth.”) They come each week to church crying, “Ungry, ungry, ungry.”
However, look at what they should be chasing. 1 Peter 2:3, “As you come to him, the living Stone.”
Peter doesn’t tell them to come to the church. Peter doesn’t tell them to come to crying to him (They couldn’t in that society). Peter tells them to go to God – the one who can meet their needs.
Our current obsession with Big Churches and Big Preachers is built upon this concept that church is the place we are fed- the great spiritual feeding trough.
While, I am not opposed to people being fed at church, we need to examine what should be the source of “food” for those who follow Christ.
We have lost our focus on the proper source of nutrition, and how to get it.
Grow up and feed yourself.
