Hungry and Thirsty...for what?

[mini]

(a thought God placed in my heart)

Matt 5:6

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

I read a article this week about fans of Dale Earnhardt Jr.

A half hour before the doors to the store open, the line stretches to nearly 100 people. Fans are working themselves into a frenzy, dancing awkwardly for the chance to win free T-shirts and chanting their favorite driver's name over and over.

"You folks know Dale Earnhardt Jr. isn't actually here, right" the author of this story asked one fan.

Krystle Forsythe said this as she stood at the front of the line: "We've already seen him, we've been stalking him all week.''

Judging by the scene outside the Sports Authority store across the street from Daytona International Speedway on Friday, the new clothing line could become the racing equivalent to Apple's iPhone or Nintendo's Wii.

Well, it's more important to me, because I don't have either of those,'' said 23-year-old Forsythe.

She and her mother, Diana Brock, flew all the way down from Collingwood, Ontario, to attend Sunday's Daytona 500.

And if that wasn't enough of a show of loyalty to their favorite driver -- who's ``just funny and he can drive really good,'' according to Forsythe -- they also lined up early to get first crack at Earnhardt's new souvenir line.

How early?

Try 10:30 Thursday night.

By Friday morning when this article was written, Ms. Forsythe would have spent nearly 12 hours in line to buy a souvenir. That my friends, is absurd.  As Mr. Earhardt probably already knows, this is why the police have such things as restraining orders.  The sad thing is that someday, Dale Earnhardt Jr will stop winning, or maybe someday he will not be the most popular NASCAR driver ever. And at that point, I wonder if Ms. Forsythe will realize that the time and energy she put into worshiping him wasn't worth it.

The bible says "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled." A person will not satisfy you. The alcohol or drugs wont satisfy you. If you think they will satisfy you, ask yourself why do you feel so guilty when you wake up.  You hate yourself for doing those things, and yet you know it wont satisfy you. A new car, or new job wont satisfy you. More money, or fewer bills wont satisfy you. The only thing that can satisfy you is GOD!

So to look at that verse, hunger means this: you are so poor that you are starving, you are so poor cant afford food, and you so poor cant even afford a scrap of bread.  Thirst on the other hand takes us to a place where the thirst in unquenchable.  It means that a trip to the sink wont quench your thirst. Dr. Pepper or Pepsi, or Mt. Dew wont cut it. You can even try Diet Soda, but it wont quench it.  Milk, coffee or tea. Nothing can quench the thirst you have for God, except God.  Nothing can satisfy the hunger you have, except God!

But the verse doesn't stop there either.  It says that you will be filled.  Once again, this means you will be so stuffed, that when you push away from the table you are not thinking of any other kind of food.  In the KJV, it literally means to feed, to fill, to SATISFY!  Its like you've had Grandmas fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, coleslaw, hot rolls with butter, iced sweet tea to drink and apple cobbler and homemade ice cream for dessert.  When you get up from that table, you are satisfied.

If we could read the verse in a different way, it would say this "Blessed are they which are so poor that they starving for it, and and so thirsty nothing else can satisfy their desire for God: for they shall be absolutely stuffed with Him!"  Now thats what I'm talking about!  The New Century Version says it like this: Those who want to do right more than anything else are happy, because God will fully satisfy them.

It is said that the body of David Livingstone was buried in England where he was born, but his heart was buried in the Africa he loved. At the foot of a tall tree in a small African village the natives dug a hole and placed in it the heart of this man who they loved and respected. If your heart were to be buried in the place you loved most during life, where would it be? In your pocketbook? In an appropriate space down at the office? Where is your heart?  What have you spent your time trying to do, or what empty things have you tried to "satisfy" your longing heart?  David said this in Ps 42:1-2: "As the deer pants for the water brooks, So pants my soul for You, O God.  My soul thirsts for God, for the living God."  What are you hungry for?

To truly have a hunger and thirst for God, you have to make him your desire above all desires.  Hes got to be more important than your car, your hobbies, your family.  Thats right, even your family.  To many couples try to put each other as the main focal point in their lives, and we find God on a back shelf in their lives.

Read this:
Matt 13:44-46
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.

You may have read about this man.  His story circulated on the email circuit (and is actually true, believe it or not).  It goes like this:

A art collector who spent $4 at a Pennsylvania flea market in 1989 for a dismal painting because he liked the frame now finds himself the possessor of a first printing of the Declaration of Independence. It is expected to bring $800,000 to $1 million at an auction on June 4.

Mr. Redden said the unidentified owner bought the painting, "a dismal dark country scene with a signature he could not make out," for its gilded and ornately carved frame. He told Mr. Redden that he discarded the painting, which he disliked. When he realized the frame was crudely made and unsalvageable, he said he got rid of it also.

"But he kept the declaration, which he had found behind the painting," Mr. Redden said. "It was folded up, about the size of a business envelope. He thought it might be an early 19th-century printing and worth keeping as a curiosity."

Then the owner showed it to a friend "who became quite enthusiastic and urged him to look into it further," said Selby Kiffer, an Americana printing specialist at Sotheby's "At that point he called us."

"The discovery of any first-printing copy of the declaration, even a fragmentary one or a poor copy, would be exciting," Mr. Kiffer said. "But on this one, the condition is beyond reproach. It was folded up when we first saw it -- the way the owner said it was in the painting, less than one-tenth of an inch thick. I had to agree with him it was just as well that he kept it that way.

"There has been absolutely no restoration, no repair. It was unframed and unbacked." Only 7 of the 24 copies are unbacked, he said, which increases their value.

You see, it wasnt the painting that made it worth so much.  It wasnt the frame.  It was was what they found inside the painting that was so valueable.  So on June 13, 1991, it auctioned for $2,420,000 at Sotheby's.  My friend, we have a treasure inside of us.  But do we truely understand its value?

March 2006 saw a smaller-scale repetition of Scheer's experience when Michael Sparks was browsing a thrift shop in Nashville, Tennessee, and happened upon a yellowed, shellacked, rolled-up document. Learning from a clerk that the item could be had for a mere $2.48, Sparks purchased it, took it home, and after doing some online research eventually learned that he had bought one of 200 "official copies" of the Declaration of Independence commissioned by John Quincy Adams in 1820. He spent nearly a year authenticating and conserving the document before selling it at auction in March 2007, where it fetched $477,650.

After Michael Sparks' lucky find made the news in February 2007, Stan Caffy contacted reporter Mary Hance of the Tennessean and told her that he was the one who had (unwittingly) donated the valuable document to the Music City Thrift store in March 2006:

"I bought it at a yard sale in Donelson about 10 years, ago, in Donelson Hills, I think," said Stan Caffy, a pipe fitter.

For years, the document hung in Stan Caffy's garage, where he works on bicycles as a hobby.

He married his wife, Linda, a little more than a year ago. As part of the ritual of combining households, she pushed him to clean out the garage, which had filled up with all sorts of extraneous things.

"I used to be a packrat but now I am trying to get rid of things. The best I can recall, we had a little debate about whether to keep it (the Declaration) or donate it and she won."

And so it was that Linda took the Declaration along with a pile of other stuff an antique table, a shower massage head, and a faucet to donate to the Music City Thrift store last March.

"I'm happy for the Sparks guy," Stan said. "If I still had it, it would still be hanging here in the garage and I still wouldn't know it was worth all that. It is just life. So I'm not really upset. But you can't help but feel not very smart for doing it."

I wonder how many times Stan Caffy faced a financial short fall in the 10 years he owned the document?  I wonder how his life would have changed if he had only realized that the garage sale knick-knack he gave away was worth nearly five hundred thousand dollars?  But yet, read what he said again: "I'm happy for the Sparks guy," Stan said. "If I still had it, it would still be hanging here in the garage and I still wouldn't know it was worth all that. It is just life. So I'm not really upset. But you can't help but feel not very smart for doing it."  Listen to that!  It would still be hanging here in the garage?  Yet, we play carelessly with God and "set him on the shelf" in our lives.  When our problems come, we find him in the garage of our lives, behind a oil can or two, covered in dust, because we never learned to hunger for him, or thirst for him.  We fail to realize the value of God!  The devil wants you to think that what God is of no value. Its not worth seeking God. "You have to many issues, or to many problems." Or "Its ok to go to church, but you dont have to do all the things that they preach about."  Yet Paul wrote Timothy and said this about those kind of people: 2 Tim 3:5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

We must be hungry enough for God that we wont settle for second best, we wont stop searching for him or seeking him.  Imagine what the thrift store clerk thought when they found out that the $2.48 peice of junk was really worth nearly $500,000.  Imagine what the flea market seller thought when they realized that the $4 dollar painting was sold for a little under $2.5 million dollars?  Would you want to know that you let that slip through your hands?  Yet, how many times do we face a situation that could we could easily gain victory over, but we have God hanging in a frame, out in the garage? We must learn to seek God!

Matt 6:31-33
31 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?
32 (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.
33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

We must seek God first!  We have to hunger and thirst for him!  Then, and only then, will we be filled!

Ps 84:2
My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord: my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.

David Garrett is said to have movie star looks and it is said he plays the violin like a virtuoso. But for everything musician has, there's one thing he may lack - a sense of coordination. The 26-year-old is a superstar in the world of classical music but on December 27th, 2007, he was a bit of a klutz.

He was leaving a performance in Britain on that date, clutching the precious violin he bought for $1 million in 2003, when he tripped and fell. He survived, but his expensive fiddle didn't. It smashed into several pieces.

"I had it over my shoulder in its case and I fell down a concrete flight of stairs backward," Garrett admits. The news was only revealed this past Friday. (Feb 15, 2008) "When I opened the case, much of my G.B. Guadagnini had been crushed."

The violin dates back to 1772 and is a one-of-a-kind piece. Now Garrett is looking to find another one-of-a-kind - an expert who can actually repair it. But it's too soon to say if anyone really can.

We must ask ourselves if we have been careless with our relationship with God? Have we forgotten to taste and to see that the Lord is good? Have we sat him aside, to be found by someone else? Have you damaged the relationship you had with him? Have you put your hope in people, and forgotten that they will never please you? God wants you back. All we have to do is seek him! Hes standings at the door knocking! Hes waiting for you to call for him!

Are you going to seek him?

Ps 107:9 For he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness.

[SippinTea]

Excellent, Mini.