Are you Hungry? (Ecclesiastes 5-6)

Are you hungry? I’m hungry.

I’m not talking about physical nourishment here, but what my heart clamours after. The goading words of the preacher are at it again. As I sit in these chapters, I feel my heart flinch as he talks of the ‘roving appetite’, the one who ‘never has enough’, the one who is ‘never satisfied’. His words are tethered to the worship of wealth in these chapters, but why box my appetite there?

My fingers flit between apps. My mind consumes yet more, all in an effort to quench the roving appetite of my heart. And whilst I profess with my lips that I worship Yahweh, the creator of heaven and earth, my thoughts, words and deeds betray a far more scattered affair. Lurking within me is an appetite all too easily pleased by the shimmering created, rather than fixed on the weight of our glorious Creator.

Oh Lord, you are in heaven, and I am on earth. What will it take for my heart to be stilled before you, unfettered in worship to you?

The world clamours for my attention, beckoning me to satisfy my appetite with the cheap, dulled pleasures offered up to me. And yet the more it clamours, the more satisfaction is eluded, my hunger staunchly remaining.

I am so slow to come. So slow to turn. So hesitant to see that an appetite created for the Lord cannot be satisfied by hankering after the vapour of this world.

And yet as I come, as I remember my place before Him, I already sense my appetite growing, ‘not for the food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give [me].’ In his grace, this word begins to nurture and feed my appetite with that enduring food. O Lord keep growing my shrivelled appetite, that I may increasingly hunger after you.

For in his extraordinary providence, as I bow before Him in worship, and draw near in humble reverence, fearing him above all else, he tells me that deep satisfaction and gladness of heart will follow.

What extraordinary grace. What gifts from our loving Father in heaven.

A grace that surely fuels not only my awe and fear of Him, but my appetite to know him more deeply.