Famine For the Lord’s Words

“Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord God, “That I will send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread, not a thirst for water, But of hearing the words of the Lord,” (Amos 8:11).

Most of my life in the natural, like most Americans, I have lived off processed, refined foods, not organic, real foods. Foods, with the nutrients sucked out through processing and packaging. Some very wise friends in learning the benefits of good, right, healthy, real foods are helping Jane and me right now. For years others have tried to share with information with us, but I don’t think we were ready.

But I also think this has been the sad state of our spiritual diets as well. We have given most of our lives to the consumption of spoon-fed teaching. And as good and admirable as many of these fine teachers were and are, we were, in fact, being fed and have learned to live off processed or refined theology. Someone else’s recipe, someone else’s mix, someone else’s diet.

Once again, I repeat Bill Hybels apology to thousands of Christians. (Bill Hybels is the Founder/President of The Willow Creek Association).

The Willow Creek Association has undoubtedly had some of the greatest influence on the evangelical church in America as a movement in the last 30 years. In response to the experience-based environment of programs and participation so prevalent, Bill recently said, "We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’ We should have ... taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own."
While some use the Amos 8:11 text for their personal reinforcement of more teaching, more preaching, I personally believe it is just the opposite. It is a famine for the personal nourishment when the Lord speaks to you. When He speaks to you personally, out of the heart of hunger and His heart to respond and fill.

John 14:26, “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in My name. He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things I said to you.”

Outwardness and Inwardness

We all have two sides. Calvin Miller in his classic, “Table of Inwardness,” reminds us that outwardness as a Christian has for its greatest strength and greatest weakness the same thing: visibility. Outwardness has great appeal to all of us, even as it did in Christ’s day, but misused is fatal. “Beware of practicing piety before men in order to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1). You have heard me for years refer to leaders who have a public identity without a personal/private history.

But likewise, the strength and weakness of inwardness is the same: invisibility. Inwardness draws us to that unseen reality. Inwardness says there is always more than what we see, always more than what appears or appeals to the eyes.

Outwardness too quickly denotes modern Christianity: going to meetings, doing things, teaching, preaching, testifying, praying for others, all in front of the rest of the world, or at least in front of other Christians, and many times in front of the room. And if we do these things well, man, the kudos will come, the pats on the back, the applause, even more to do these outward things more, which unfortunately has been too much of the motivation to keep on being better at being outward.

Man has always been addicted to outwardness, as God speaks to the prophet’s heart in the OT when He says, “Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart,” (I Samuel 16:7).

When it comes to inwardness, only you can tend that garden, and you tend it alone. Your guardianship of your inwardness is utterly crucial, since out of the heart come “the issues of life,” (Proverbs 4:23). And again, if you would survive the famine, it will be because you have tended your own personal inward garden well.

As someone pointed out we are like a ripe fruit which, when squeezed, displays its real contents. To this Jesus commented, that it is not what goes into our mouths, or even what we eat or drink, but what comes out of our hearts that defiles us, (Matthew 15:11).

What comes out shows or reveals what is in us, “As a man thinketh in his heart so is he” (Proverbs 23:7). There is and will be an increased hunger to meet with God and be fed by God as we move into these difficult days. The world will also get a sense of who we have been with, somehow they will just know we spend time with Poppa, because of the individual sounds, the individual appeal we will carry. Our culture is already so skeptical of the canned, processed church. The one hour and fifteen minutes (the average meeting time of the successful, evangelical services) we devote to God has not produces health, nor hungers, except maybe in us.

Three Paradoxes of Inwardness

Aloneness-is-presence - However you find it. Spending time completely alone with God is really about the ultimate increase of His presence. Inner silence comes when you beat those demons that too often clutter and distract and fill us with you with every other sound. Inner silence only comes when there is true outer silence, and this only comes when you and God are alone.

Retreat-is-advancement - Go ahead, leave the “To Do List” behind, knowing that most of those screaming assignments will take care of themselves if you address the “tyranny of the urgent,” and go on a retreat with the Lover of your soul. Luther’s attitude was, “I have so many things to do today, I dare not ignore my time with God.

Beyond-is-within - No, you can’t do life in God, without God’s life in you. You must constantly be making room for more of Him. You must always be pressing out in order to press in. He is ready and willing to enlarge your capacity to receive more of Him. Yes, the “heavens do declare the glory of God,” (Psalm 19:10), but we get to be possessed by a transgalactic Omnipotence who comes to indwell us.

A DVD Diet

I am almost tempted to encourage everyone to lock up their CD’s, their DVD’s, shut off their podcasts, and maybe even leave some of the new books on your shelf. Just dedicate this new season to private meals between you and the Father. Go after God in the secret place, and treat each day as a steward by giving Him sacred space.

If we want be a people who survive the famine and even learn to help others survive, it will not be because we feed them, but because we model, by our own appetites and our own insatiable hunger for the fresh, full word directly from the Lord.

It won’t be easy, it is always war to shift our priorities towards Him, so remember, He will even, “prepare a table before you in the presence of your enemies,” (Psalm 23:5).