by Kevin Kim
Have you ever wandered into your kitchen just moments after having an entire meal and opened the fridge looking for something to eat? Your stomach tells you that you’re still full, but something inside of you has a need to be filled, and your mind takes you to what would normally feed you. It’s hard to explain because you know you’re not actually hungry, but for some reason, you find yourself in a place looking to eat yet again. What you need to understand is that even though you are physically full, the hunger you have is VERY REAL. Dr. Rob Reimer (doctorate in preaching, not in nutrition) describes this phenomenon as us mistaking our hunger for something physical while it is actually spiritual. Our souls are hungering to be filled and we don’t realize that we are hungering for God… so instead we proceed to pour a bowl of cereal or grab a stick of cheese.
We’ll get back to this in a little bit…
Have you ever heard of imposter syndrome? Well if you haven’t, here is a quick definition from one of the most reliable resources out there (Wikipedia):
Imposter syndrome is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are frauds, and do not deserve all they have achieved. Individuals with “impostorism” incorrectly attribute their success to luck, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent than they perceive themselves to be.
There are some days, usually when I’m at my worst, that I feel like I have imposter syndrome in just about every area of my life. I currently work at the NBA, and in my first week, a co-worker told me that statistically, it’s harder to get a job here than to get into Harvard. I was definitely not the best student in school and my GPA was too embarrassingly low to even put on my resume (vulnerability is power). So there are days that I literally sit there and think to myself things like: “How/why am I here…?”, “When will they realize that I somehow stumbled in here by accident and fire me?”, “I don’t even watch the NBA…” and so on. I’m also currently on the leadership team here at Pursuit NYC. Some people might look at me and think I’m “spiritual” or maybe even at least a “good guy”, but have you seen our team? I’ve never met any other people so in love with Jesus Christ – on fire for God – sold out for Him – in FULL pursuit after Him… They seriously go after God with all they have and continue to grow more and more each day.
I promise I’m going somewhere with all of this!
So why did I talk about eating cheese at night and then suddenly go on to confess my insecurities? All this to say there is one thing that is VERY REAL and undeniable in my life… and it’s my hunger. I may not be the most polished, spiritual, successful, theologically-sound, intellectual person around, but what God revealed to me was that something He DID put in me was hunger. Hunger is just something that you cannot deny. If you deny it, you will literally die. These days, there are times where I’m so desperate and so hungry for God in my life that I won’t be able to pray any words but just weep. I believe that in being hungry for Him, we are fulfilling the great command that He gave us: to love the Lord with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. What’s awesome about hunger is I believe each and every single one of us has this in us, but we just need to steward it!
In our time, there seems to be way too many things to feed ourselves – it may sound obvious but the way to get hungry is to empty ourselves. And while we are empty, we need to stop ourselves from getting full off of the wrong things. I’ve heard many times that the way we grow and get healthier as people is to stop sinning, stop watching Netflix, stop whatever “bad” things there are in your life. I think that’s only half of it… Think about it this way. If you have health issues because you eat junk food all the time, do you just stop eating? No, because you will die. Yes, of course you have to stop eating junk food, but you also have to start eating healthy! With that in mind, it’s one thing to rid yourselves of what’s not of God, but you also must remember to fill yourselves of what is of God! As we feed ourselves of things of God, we start to see that we want even more. I believe every single one of us has an eternal appetite that will not be filled until we see Jesus Christ face-to-face. Until then, we just keep going deeper in Him. As we experience more of God, we are in one way satisfied, but at the same time brought to a place where we crave even more. It sounds backwards (what isn’t backwards in the Kingdom…) but the way that we stay hungry is to actually fill ourselves with things of God! Hunger begets hunger.
We need to understand that our hunger is not only for our sake. Plenty of times in history we see people’s hunger for God lead them into making a tremendous impact on humanity. Let me give you a quick lesson in history that you didn’t hear about in school. Do you remember learning about George Washington Carver, aka the peanut guy, in school? To be honest, the only things I remembered about him was that he had something to do with peanuts and that he wasn’t the first president of the United States… but in a recent devotional book on prayer I learned something about him that blew my mind. GWC was a man of God and would wake up at 4:00am routinely to walk and talk with God, asking Him to reveal the mysteries of nature. On one of these walks, God revealed to him the mystery of the peanut! After much time in the laboratory he found over 300 uses for the peanut… from soap, to fertilizer, to PB & J sandwiches, to peanut paste which is today’s single greatest weapon in the fight against malnutrition. Either GWC was a crazy man with an irregular sleep pattern, or he was a man hungering after God each and every day. Because of the hunger that George Washington Carver stewarded, people are still being impacted to this day. At Pursuit, our hunger to see God move in our lives has led us to see people’s hope restored, hunger deepened, healings, prophetic words connect, people set free, and people come to Christ. We don’t know what else God has in store for us, but we’re hungry and we’re going to keep pursuing. Don’t get me wrong, all of this started because God chose to reveal Himself to us first, which sparked our pursuit after Him! It’s all from God, through God, for God, to God.
What I hope this blog post does is to drive every reader to their knees to just cry out for more… As we ask, seek, and knock, that we will receive and ask for more! That every single believer will be hungry for more of God in their lives, and if they do not have the hunger, to even start by asking for hunger. Why? Because hunger begets hunger.