My task, here at the end of this conference, is to convince you, or remind you, or deepen your conviction, that despite what the world tells us, and what our people themselves might say, our people desperately need God. They hunger for him.

Every time we preach, our hearers, whoever they are — men and women, teens and children, middle-aged and elderly — they are God-hungry people. Some of them, perhaps many, are starving for him. It’s been so long since they’ve really eaten, or their moments of satisfaction are so thin and so few, or the core emptiness of their soul is yet to find satisfaction in him.

Many don’t know how hungry they are, and what they’re really hungry for. The lead article this month in The Atlantic, titled “The Anti-Social Generation,” includes this little line that every Christian preacher would be wise to keep in mind: “A consistent finding of modern psychology is that people often don’t know what they want, or what will make them happy” (35).

• They may think and say that they need life hacks and mainly practical advice.
• They may say they would enjoy movie clips and images on the screen while you’re preaching.
• They may say they would like shorter sermons, and more stories.
• They may say they need the preaching to meet them where they are.

And they may be half-right in some of these evaluations and expressions of their needs and desires. But in them all, and beneath them all, whether they realize it or not, they are hungry for God.

And many, perhaps most, are out of touch with their own hunger. They are hungry for the bread of life. They are thirsty for living waters. Brothers, our people are hungry for God, and I pray it will do our own souls well, and our preaching well, to linger this morning over “the God-hungry people” — which of course includes their God-hungry pastors.

God Supreme in Preaching

Twenty years ago, I was a student in John Piper’s preaching class and read the book The Supremacy of God in Preaching. I read it again this fall and found it even better than I remembered — even more up to date than I expected. Do you know why? Hunger for God is timeless. It cuts right across cultures and across generations. Anywhere you go, do you know what the people need? They need God.

Some of you know that the first paragraph of the introduction reads like this:

People are starving for the greatness of God. But most of them would not give this diagnosis of their troubled lives. The majesty of God is an unknown cure. There are far more popular prescriptions on the market, but the benefit of any other remedy is brief and shallow. Preaching that does not have the aroma of God’s greatness may entertain for a season, but it will not touch the hidden cry of the soul: “Show me thy glory!” (17)

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The greatness and the glory of God are relevant. It does not matter if surveys turn up a list of perceived needs that does not include the supreme greatness of the sovereign God of grace. That is the deepest need. Our people are starving for God. . . .

It is not the job of the Christian preacher to give people moral or psychological pep talks about how to get along in the world. When that is needed, someone else can do it. But most of our people have no one, no one in the world, to tell them, week in and week out, about the supreme beauty and majesty of God. (18–19)

Brothers, it was true in the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s. I’m tempted to say it’s even truer today — but I do believe that this is simply timeless, in every decade, in every generation, in every place in the world: People are starving for the greatness of God.

And so, the urgent task for preachers in every generation, in every culture, in every church is to expound God’s word and manifestly enjoy Christ’s majesty so that his people can join the preacher (as he feeds on Jesus and drinks of the Spirit) and glorify God through depending on and delighting in him.

Brothers, in one sense, all I want to do in this message is linger over this truth we can be so quick to forget: that our people are hungry for God. No matter what they verbalize, their hearts ache to eat — through your words (God’s word through your words). No matter how much they say they want stories and pro tips on life, no matter how much they have dulled their appetites with endless nibbling at the table of the world, they still ache, deep down, to be fed real food. There is a hunger there, a hunger for God, which he means to feed with himself,

• through his infallible word (the Scriptures),
• in his Word (the Son),
• through his word (the gospel),
• by his Breath (the Spirit),
• and, amazingly, through you (the preacher) and your fallible but faithful Spirit-empowered preaching.

Four Convictions for Feeding

So, this morning is a commission. This is a send-off. I want to send you off to your churches to preach the big God of the Scriptures and do so in such a way as to feed the souls of your God-hungry people.

Now, the Bible gives us much we might rehearse as big-God preachers about our people’s hunger and thirst (oh the Psalms!), but let’s limit the field to just two voices: the Prophet of Hunger and the Apostle of Thirst.

Who is the Prophet of Hunger? His name is Isaiah. And we’re going to start with Isaiah 55. And who is the Apostle of Thirst? It’s not Paul but John. Along the way, we’ll gather some bread and living water from John 4, John 6, John 7, and finally the book of Revelation. So, limiting ourselves to just these two voices, let me send you home with four convictions for feeding hungry souls with big-God preaching.

Conviction 1: All your hearers hunger for God, and need to eat.

We will never have a hearer of any sermon we preach who does not hunger for God. God made our souls to hunger for him. And their souls. Every hearer hungers for him, even if they don’t know it. And in Isaiah 55, he offers soul-satisfying food and drink to every soul, indiscriminately.

No matter how much the luxuries and decadences of modern life have conditioned the souls of our people for two-bit, low-yield, momentary pleasures and creature comforts, our people, and all people, are hungry for God. Not only “has [God] put eternity into man’s heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11), but also hunger for the Eternal One-in-Three.

We often talk about Christian preachers being heralds, and so we are. But Isaiah 55 gives us another image, perhaps a more humbling one: the street vendor. But before you think too lowly of the image, remember that this is the voice of God. How amazing that God would stoop as he does in Isaiah 55 to play the street vendor.

Brothers, do you stoop like this? Often hearers come awake to their hunger by our talking about their hunger for God and talking about God in hunger-satisfying ways. When we preach, we are not only the herald proclaiming good news; we are street vendors making an appeal to hungry, thirsty souls. Do you ever sound like this when you preach?

Come, everyone who thirsts,
     come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
     come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
     without money and without price.

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
     and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,
      and delight yourselves in rich food.

Incline your ear, and come to me;
     hear, that your soul may live;
and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
     my steadfast, sure love for David. (Isaiah 55:1–3)

God’s appeal here, through Isaiah, is to all, to everyone — not just Jews but Gentiles. And even pastors. All thirst for him. All hunger for him. The question is not whether all hunger and thirst, but whether they might awake to it and heed it and come to the only one who can satisfy.

Someone might ask, “What is it here that satisfies souls?” The great Street Vendor is very clear about this:

• Verse 3: “Come to me.”
• Verses 6–7: “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him. . . . Return to the Lord . . . to our God.”

And when you come to him, he doesn’t say, “Here’s a voucher to go get your meal over there.” He is the rich food. He is the drink that gives life to our souls. As Jonathan Edwards says,

The enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. . . . Fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of earthly friends, are but shadows; but God is the substance. These are but scattered beams, but God is the sun. These are but streams. But God is the ocean. (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2:244)

Blaise Pascal wrote memorably about the infinite abyss of the human soul, which can only be filled by an infinite Object: the infinite God.

This is why this focus on “the God-hungry people” fits so well under the banner of “big-God preaching.” Our people have a God-sized hunger that will not be fed with a domesticated deity or anything else. And so, we preach his Book.

Our human brains and our most creative and imaginative notions are too small. We cannot preach a bigger God or a better God than the God who is and reveals himself in this Book. The God who is, and who speaks in this Book, is himself “the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.” Stray from the Book, or minimize the Book, and you stray from the very greatness our souls were made for, and the only greatness that can satisfy them.

This is the preacher’s privilege, like the starving lepers of 2 Kings 7 who stumbled upon the deserted Syrian camp, filled with all their provisions: “I found food! Hungry souls, come eat. Thirsty souls, come drink!”

We are street vendors calling out, “Come, eat and drink rich fare, cost covered, free of charge!” It’s free of charge not because this food and drink are cheap; this is rich fare. It’s free of charge to you because someone else has paid the price. The feast is costly. The Servant of Isaiah 53 paid the price so that the offer of Isaiah 55 can go out to all the hungry, all the thirsty.

And we, brothers, get to be his instruments. We get to play a part! It’s like the disciples in Matthew 14. There’s a great crowd, five thousand strong. Evening comes. The people are hungry. The disciples suggest, “This is a desolate place, and the day is now over; send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” (That sounds like what Isaiah 55 says not to do!) What does Jesus say, to his disciples, and his preacher? “They need not go away; you give them something to eat” (Matthew 14:15–16).

So, that’s the first conviction: all your hearers hunger for God, and need to eat. And we want to do our level best not to send them away hungry.

Conviction 2: I myself hunger for God, and need to keep eating.

Brothers, all preachers hunger for God. You included. You need the bread of life. You are thirsty. You need living water. In fact, we preachers should be the biggest and most mindful eaters in our congregations — or, at least among them. And yes, I’m talking about spiritual food, which you can’t eat too much of, as Jonathan Edwards said — no moderation for spiritual appetites:

Persons need not and ought not to set any bounds to their spiritual and gracious appetites. . . . [Rather they ought to] be endeavoring by all possible ways to inflame their desires and to obtain more spiritual pleasures. . . . Endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement. (Works, 14:286)

Brothers, do you lay yourself in the way of allurement? Or better, do you do it enough?

Our own hunger, and feeding, is vital for feeding our people for two reasons: (1) We have to feed to stay alive spiritually to feed the people, and (2) we won’t know what’s good food, what’s refreshing water, unless we’re enjoying it ourselves.

I suspect one of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, that a pastor’s sermons don’t feed his people is that he’s losing his sense of taste. He himself is not really eating. Apart from sermon prep, he’s not getting alone with the word just to enjoy the word and drink the Spirit.

Frankly, I wonder whether in gatherings like this we might be prone to undersell the importance of the preacher’s own private feeding — in seminaries or in pastors fellowships and conferences like this. We may mention a pastor’s secret communion with God, but how long do we linger on it? I’m not sure I’ve heard it overdone yet. You can’t help others breathe for long if you’re not breathing. You won’t feed others very well if you’re not feeding.

“We will never have a hearer of any sermon we preach who does not hunger for God.”

As I’ve traveled around to talk about “habits of grace,” I’ve heard from many pastors who want help. Ministry demands are relentless. They have not ruthlessly made the time and the space, and guarded it, to see that their own souls are sufficiently fed. This is not the same as study. Plenty of pastors study; I’m talking about communion with God. I’m talking about devotional reading and meditation, private prayer, enjoying God as an end — not as a means to ministry preparations.

This brings to mind George Mueller. God bless George Mueller. I hope you’ve read his 1500-word journal entry from 1841. If you haven’t, read it. If you have, read it again. I get more from it just about every time, and I’ve read it now many times. Here’s what I’ve found so helpful in it over the years.

Prioritize the Word

First, he prioritizes the word first. It’s his first thing each day, before breakfast. He first went to the Bible, then prayer. God speaks first in his word; then we respond in prayer. And this, he says, is our first job each day: “The first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day [is] to have my soul happy in the Lord.” What a business. What a task. Just about any other daily task would feel burdensome, but “get your soul happy in God”? What a job! Brothers, you have that job.

Obtain Food

Second, Mueller uses the eating/feeding metaphor. He says, “The first thing the child of God has to do morning by morning is to obtain food for his inner man.” He comes to God, he says, “for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul,” and as he lingers in God’s presence, he aims to “continually keep before me that food for my own soul is the object of my meditation.” Do you do that?

Mueller uses the word nourish over and over:

• “The first thing to be concerned [each day] about [is] not how much I might serve the Lord, how I might glorify the Lord; but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished.”
• He has learned, he says, to approach this daily spiritual feeding in such a way that “my inner man almost invariably is even sensibly nourished and strengthened, and that by breakfast time, with rare exceptions, I am in a peaceful if not happy state of heart.”
• How does this relate to prayer? He says that in “my heart being nourished by the truth, being brought into experimental fellowship with God, I speak to my Father and to my Friend . . . about the things that he has brought before me in his precious word.”
• Prayer, he says, “can be most effectually performed . . . after the inner man has been nourished by meditation on the word of God, where we find our Father speaking to us, to encourage us, to comfort us, to instruct us, to humble us, to reprove us.” (Those are forms of spiritual food: spoken to, encouraged, comforted, instructed, humbled, reproved.)

Meditate

Third, Mueller emphasizes meditation. He mentions it fourteen times. I won’t read them all. Brothers, other than the importance of your own private feeding, this might be the most important thing he has to say to us as preachers. I don’t know how many of us heard much about meditation in seminary. And even fewer of us learned to do it amidst all the readings and papers and other demands outside seminary. But this is where spiritual feeding happens. It’s not in quick reading and box-checking. It’s not merely in sermon prep and study. Real feeding, deep feeding, I’ve found, comes in slowly reading, rereading, and chewing on, unhurriedly following the text and steeping in it. Follow where the Spirit leads in the word, without a hurry.

Meditation, Mueller says, means “searching as it were into every verse, to get blessing out of it . . . for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul.”

And by meditation, he says that he means “not the simple reading of the word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts.” I think that’s the closest he gets to what meditation is: considering what you read, pondering over it, and applying it to your own heart.

Do you know what Hudson Taylor’s “spiritual secret” was? Union with Christ was the doctrine; communion with Christ was the daily, soul-feeding practice:

Communion with Christ requires our coming to Him. Meditating upon His person and His work requires the diligent use of the means of grace, and specially the prayerful reading of His Word. Many fail to abide because they habitually fast instead of feed. (Hudson Taylor’s Choice Sayings, 2)

Hungry pastors, habitually fasting, will not feed their people well — not for long.

Eat for Your Own Sake

Fourth, Mueller says his daily unhurried seasons of communing with Christ through meditating on his word is “not for the sake of public ministry.” Brothers, take note. Mueller is forceful about this. Daily communion with God, he says, is “not for the sake of the public ministry of the word, not for the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon, but for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul.”

He says, “The Lord is pleased to communicate unto me that which, either very soon after or at a later time, I have found to become food for other believers, though it was not for the sake of the public ministry of the word that I gave myself to meditation, but for the profit of my own inner man.”

So, brothers, let’s eat like George Mueller. Let’s get our souls happy in God, by feeding on him in his word, through meditating on it, not for the sake of public ministry. Daily communion with God in his word is not sermon prep. Not yet. This is communion with the risen Christ through his word, by his Spirit, as end in itself. It’s to enjoy him and to feed our own souls on him.

Conviction 3: My people need to eat, and keep eating.

There is in the Christian life a punctiliar moment of “Ah, now my soul is satisfied” and then, “Oh, how I want to keep feeding.” Which relates very much to preaching. Hopefully, we’re aiming to feed both hungers with our preaching each week. “God, make this sermon the converting meal for someone in this room. Feed their core emptiness in Jesus that, in one sense, they may never hunger again.” This is how Jesus talks in John 4:13–14:

Everyone who drinks of this [well] water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

So, there is a core emptiness to be fed, a core thirst to be quenched. John 6:35:

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.”

So, how do we square “not hunger” and “never thirst” with this ongoing hunger and thirst in each of us? Here’s D.A. Carson on John 6:35:

The hungry and thirsty person who comes to Jesus finds his hunger satisfied and his thirst quenched. This does not mean there is no need for continued dependence upon him, for continued feeding upon him; it does mean there is no longer that core emptiness that the initial encounter with Jesus had met. (John, 288)

So, we aim and pray to feed both hungers with our preaching. “God, make this sermon the converting meal for someone in this room. And God, make this sermon a feeding, soul-satisfying meal for hungry saints in this room.”

Brothers, we preach to quench both, to feed both. Feed the one-time core emptiness, and keep feeding the satisfied and still-hungering people week after week.

That leads to John 7:37–39:

On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out [note the street-vendor mode here], “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink [Isaiah 55!]. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

This is a huge piece. Jesus is the bread of life. And Jesus gives the water of life. He “pours out” (a fitting image for water) his Holy Spirit on his people that he might be in his people and become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life — or rivers of living water flowing out of the heart.

Oh, how good to know that the food with which we feed our people is the word of God, in Scripture, and in his Son, and that his Son gives us his Spirit, who is living water in us. Our people have the Spirit welling up within them, giving them an appetite for the word, making them hunger for the word, inclining them to feed on the word, even in and through our imperfect preaching.

Our people hunger for Jesus and thirst for his Spirit. They are made not only for God but for the God-man. “Come to me,” Jesus says — not just through me but to me. He is true bread, true drink, true food; his Spirit is living water, welling up in them, preacher, ready to hear and receive and feed on your preached word. And the Spirit in you is critical if your fountain is to overflow to serve your thirsty people.

So, all your hearers hunger for God. You yourself hunger for God. And your people need to keep feeding on God, in his Son, by his Spirit.

Conviction 4: Full satisfaction is coming.

I loved President Tabb’s quote from Edwards on “pre-libations.” The best of feasts here are but pre-libations — a little tip of the cup compared to the feast that is coming.

So, we finish with the Apostle of Thirst in the last book of the Bible and our consummating satiation.

Revelation 7:14–16 is about “the ones coming out of the great tribulation”:

They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. “Therefore they are before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

Then, from the Bible’s final two chapters. Revelation 21:6:

It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment [that’s Isaiah 55].

And then one last time, Revelation 22:17:

The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price.

The day of full satisfaction is coming, and even then our satisfaction will not be final. So, rather than “day,” we say “an endless age of ever-increasing satisfaction.”

How do we talk about what it means to be fully satisfied and yet to keep eating? To have your thirst slaked and keep drinking? To come into a full satisfaction that doesn’t end or fade, but somehow grows and expands and deepens and thickens?

Feed His Sheep

Brother preachers, do you love Jesus? Feed his sheep.

I say, brother preachers, do you love him? His sheep are hungry for him, they are thirsty for him, some are starving for him and don’t even know it. Feed his sheep.

I say, brother preachers, do you love him? (Are you grieved to be asked a third time?) Feed his sheep.

Keep feeding your own soul on him. Seek to satisfy your soul in him. Drink him; eat him; feast on him; delight yourself on the bread that came down from heaven. And feed his sheep.

I finish with the conclusion of The Supremacy of God in Preaching:

People are starving for the grandeur of God. And the vast majority do not know it. . . . Most do not discern that they were made to thrill at the panorama of God’s power and glory. They seek to fill the void in other ways. . . .

Christian preachers, more than all others, should know this truth — that people are starving for God. If anyone in all the world should be able to say, “I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory,” it is the herald of God. And as we look out over the wasteland of our secular culture, must we preachers not ask, Who but us will say to this people, “Behold your God!”? Who will tell the people that God is great and greatly to be praised? Who will paint for them the landscape of God’s grandeur? Who will remind them with tales of wonder that God has triumphed over every foe? Who will cry out above every crisis, “Your God reigns!”? Who will labor to find words that can carry the “gospel of the glory of the blessed God”?

If God is not supreme in our preaching, where in this world will the people hear about the supremacy of God? If we do not spread a banquet of God’s beauty on Sunday morning, will not our people seek in vain to satisfy their inconsolable longing with the cotton candy pleasures of pastimes and religious hype? If the fountain of living water does not flow from the mountain of God’s sovereign grace on Sunday morning, will not the people hew for themselves cisterns on Monday, broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jeremiah 2:13)? . . .

If we love our people, if we love the “other sheep” that are not yet gathered into the fold, if we love the fulfillment of God’s global purpose, we will labor to “spread a table in the wilderness” (Psalm 78:19). People everywhere are starving for the enjoyment of God. (151–53)

Brothers, they need not go away. You give them something to eat.