“Open your mouth wide and I will fill it… O that my people would listen to me… I would feed you with the finest of the wheat; and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.” Psalm 81:10, 13, 16
What a wonderful promise, “Open your mouth wide and I will fill it.” It is like another of my favorite verses, Isaiah 55:1 “Ho! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who have no money come, buy and eat. Come by wine and milk without money and without cost.” God so often appeals to our hunger drive to call us to itself. This is why he designed hunger, to be able to teach us how we ought to seek after him. Yet the phrase “open our mouths,” in this verse, is a metaphor. We do not literally walk around with open mouths, waiting for food to drop-in. Nevertheless, this metaphor is used to indicate how urgently we ought to seek after God. With the same intensity that our hunger drive seeks after food to satisfy itself, our souls need to seek after God for their satisfaction.
The parts of this verse that relate to food are metaphors, but there is another part that is literal and concrete, “Oh that my people would listen to me.” What does it mean, practically, for us to seek God with great hunger? It means to listen to him. Again in Isaiah 55 this connection between metaphorically eating God’s abundance and listening to him is made “Listen carefully to me and eat what is good…” If we are hungry for God and want to be satisfied we must listen to him.
How do we listen to God? We can listen carefully to God by listening to his word. We can read it, we can meditate on it, and we can study it. We can read it out loud to ourselves and by so doing, quite literally listen to it. We can also speak it to one another, or listen to the Word preached. The apostle Paul said that faith comes through hearing and hearing by the Word of Christ.
If we want to be satisfied with abundance we need to go to the banquet. The banquet is found in the Word of Christ. We must do this hungrily. Simply reading, so as to check it off from our list of devotional duties, will not satisfy our appetite. Only in hungrily reading, meditating, and digesting the Word, will we hear and be satisfied with His abundance.
O Lord please increase my hunger for you. Let me go to the feast and hungrily eat what is good. I desire to listen carefully to you and to hear your voice that I might be fed the finest of wheat and honey from the rock.
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i enjoyed your post friend.
Praise the GOD of Israel. Bless HIS name
A blessing to read! Hunger for God’s Word is the very 1st step to abundant life and an intimate walk with the Bread from Heaven and the fountain of Living Waters -Jesus Christ!
Thanks for the Word and the meditation!
God continue to use and bless you, Brother!