Spiritual Thirst

Kenneth E. Bailey, who spent 40 years living and teaching New Testament in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Cyprus, writes:

While living in the south of Egypt, a group of friends and I traveled deep into the Sahara Desert by camel. As our trek began, the temperature soared to above 110° Fahrenheit in the shade, and there was no shade. On our way, one goat-skin water bag leaked all of its precious contents. With consumption high due to the heat, we ran out of water, and for a day and a half we pressed on while enduring intense thirst.

The goal of the excursion was a famous well named Bir Shaytoun, deep in the desert. Our guide promised us that it was never dry — ah, but could we survive to reach its life-giving liquid silver? My mouth became completely dry, and eating was impossible, because swallowing felt like the rubbing of two pieces of sandpaper together. My vision became blurred, and the struggle to keep moving became harder with each step. We knew that if the well was dry, our armed guards would probably have forcibly seized our three baggage camels, and ridden them back to the valley, leaving the rest of us to die.

As I staggered on, my mind turned to this verse ["Blessed are those who … thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled"]. I knew that I had never sought righteousness with the same single-minded passion that I now gave to the quest for water.

Editor’s Note: The group did manage to stagger to the well, and it was full of “the wine of God,” as water is named by desert tribesmen in the Middle East.

More Americans believe their home is inhabited by someone or something that isn’t a living being. A study from the company Vivint found that nearly half of the thousand surveyed homeowners believed that their house was haunted. Another survey of 1,000 people found similar results, with 44 percent of respondents saying that they’ve lived in a haunted house.

One researcher offers the following explanations for this phenomenon. Haunted houses can be “a way to connect to the past or a sense of enchantment in the everyday world. [Younger generations in particular] might be searching for meaning in new places. If the modern world they live in isn’t providing food for the soul … it’s not hard to figure out that younger people will search elsewhere for that and find the idea of an alternate world — of ghosts, aliens, et cetera — to be enticing to explore.”

Another researcher claims that the pandemic also played a role in society’s relationship with houses and ghosts. The presence of death in our culture increased, igniting a desire for evidence of an afterlife for some people. “Think of all the sudden, and often not-sufficiently-ritually-mourned deaths during COVID. Many times, people lost loved ones with no last contact, no funeral.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

When people stop attending church or believing in Christianity they don’t stop seeking “spiritual experiences.” The spiritual hunger is still there.

Rich Gilson and his wife, Suzanne, purchased a house in Wildwood, New Jersey, about four years ago, and they have been working on additions and renovations to the home during that time. Gilson, who works in home inspections and renovations, was able to start working on the driveway of the house in the area in front of the home’s garage.

Gilson said, “So I start digging. I’m hitting concrete. I'm hitting rock. I'm hitting glass. Then I found these two things, and they look like root balls. I throw them in the soil pile, both of them, thinking they’re just roots.”

As he continued his work outside on Sunday, he came across one of the cylindrical objects again. “I pick it up, and I'm thinking what is this? Why are these things following me, right? I look at the edge, and I think ‘I can see something there.' It looked like paper. So, I started tugging at the edge, and I knew immediately what it was. I thought ‘this is money.’”

The money was wrapped in brown paper. Gilson and his wife began pulling the cylinder apart, and it amounted to rolls of $10 and $20 bills, totaling $1,000. That money would have been worth a lot more at the time: $1,000 in 1934 is the equivalent of more than $22,000 today when accounting for inflation, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Gilson said, “So I start to think, OK, either somebody robbed a bank because all these bills came from the same lot,” or he believes that someone may have taken their money out of a bank during the Great Depression in the U.S.

Gilson added that he’s still curious about the money’s story, where it came from and whether someone simply forgot about it. He also hopes that people who see his discovery don’t come looking for more of the money. Gilson said, “Please don’t come to my house with a shovel. I’m trying to finish the house, not make more work for myself.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

This story brings to life Christ's parable of the treasure buried in a field. Like the kingdom of heaven, sometimes the most precious things in the world are hidden from view for a while. God has surprising hidden treasure which only the diligent can find. The kingdom of heaven (Matt. 13:44), godly wisdom (Prov. 2:3-5), and the Word of God (Jer. 15:16) are waiting to be discovered by the earnest seeker.

Death abounded in America in 2020 and 2021. According to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 570,000 more people died in 2020 than in 2019, with about 350,000 of those attributable to COVID-19. Another 350,000 people died from the coronavirus by the fall of 2021, bringing the death total to 700,000 and counting (as of March 18, 2022 over 969k deaths are attributable to COVID).

When roughly that same number died over the four years of the Civil War, it had a widespread impact on American culture. Historians say changes included increased attention to cemeteries, the rise in the importance of family photographs, and rapid growth in the popularity of practices of spiritualism, a new religious movement that claimed to help people communicate with the dead.

What impact today’s pandemic deaths will have on American culture remains to be seen. But one shift is notable now: The percentage of people age 40 and older who say that religion is “very important” in the funeral of a loved one has gone up for the first time in a decade.

The importance of religion at funerals jumped 10 percentage points in 2020. It went up another 2 points in 2021. Most Americans still don’t think religion is important at funerals, but a growing number are feeling a new need for it.

Sarah Jones, an atheist raised in a strict evangelical home, wrote about this experience:

I could plant a flag for my grandfather . . . but the gesture feels thin. I don’t know what exactly I would want from a memorial—whether it’s catharsis or meaning or something else altogether. I thought several hundred times this year, Maybe I should go to church.

Author Kate Bowler, associate professor at Duke Divinity School, has fresh insights on the “Gospel of Hustle” that has pervaded American culture for decades. She laments popular, accepted axioms like “everything is possible if you will only believe” and "everything you need is already inside of you”.

She says, “American culture has popular theories about how to build a perfect life. You can have it all if you just learn how to conquer your limits. There is infinity lurking somewhere at the bottom of your inbox or in the stack of self-help books on the bedside table.”

At age 35, Bowler was diagnosed with incurable stage IV colon cancer, which caused her to rethink ideas about hustle culture--doing more, pushing more to achieve success. She wonders what “enoughness” feels like. She has been able to manage her cancer with immunotherapy and has a new perspective:

We are believers in the gospel of hustle, the gospel of efficiency and the gospel of time management. We are convinced that we need to just discipline ourselves into better routines. But the whole idea of a formula breaks down when it can't solve the problem of being a person. It doesn't solve the problem of pain. For example, the gospel of hustle, the more I worked, the more work I got. Even success looks like failure, and I was just trying to get to the end of the mythical workday.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This is exactly why Solomon mourned the futility of life in Ecclesiastes. The ultimate answer to life is not found in working harder, but in what Jesus said, “Come unto me all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).

Singer/Songwriter Sandra McCracken writes in CT magazine:

There’s a call button above every seat on commercial airplanes. In all my travels, I don’t think I’ve ever used it. I’m not sure if that is due to shyness or to pride, as there have certainly been times when I acutely needed help while seated.

While traveling recently, for example, I endured some delays and was thirsty. Yet I waited to ask for anything until the plane reached 10,000 feet, when the flight attendants came row by row to grant our drink requests. I didn’t press the call button. It always seems more courteous to wait.

As Jesus hung on the Cross, one of the last phrases he spoke out loud was “I am thirsty” (John 19:28). This three-word inclusion in the Gospels is a subtle yet significant acknowledgment of Jesus’ human need. His thirst dignifies our humanity. He offered up this holy complaint, a declaration of his physical need. He pushed the call button.

God is the one who is responsible to supply our needs (Ps. 23:1; Phil. 4:19). Jesus invites us to participate, to receive, and to ask. Sometimes we are to ask and ask again (Luke 11:9; 18:1–8).

Jesus invites us to hit the call button. And he invites us to wait for him, sometimes well beyond when the plane has reached 10,000 feet. Ask and wait. Hope and receive. The springs of living water that he gives will never run dry.

Dr. David H. Rosmarin, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School argues that “Psychiatry Needs to Get Right with God.” That’s the title of his recent article in Scientific American, Rosmarin writes:

Nearly 60 percent of psychiatric patients want to discuss spirituality in the context of their treatment. Yet we rarely provide such an opportunity. … Of more than 90,000 active projects within the National Institutes of Health, fewer than 20 mention spirituality anywhere in the abstract, and only one project contains this term in its title.

In the wake of COVID-19, Rosmarin observed our hunger for a connection with God and the church. In the early days of the pandemic, Jeanet Bentzen of the University of Copenhagen examined Google searches for the word “prayer” in 95 countries. She identified that they hit an all-time global high in March 2020, and increases occurred in lockstep with the number of COVID-19 cases identified in each country.

In the past year, American mental health sank to the lowest point in history: Incidence of mental disorders increased by 50 percent, compared with before the pandemic, alcohol and other substance abuse surged, and young adults were more than twice as likely to seriously consider suicide than they were in 2018. Yet the only group to see improvements in mental health during the past year were those who attended religious services at least weekly (virtually or in-person): 46 percent report “excellent” mental health today versus 42 percent one year ago.

Pastor David Hansen writes of our need to rely on the Holy Spirit:

I live near a river. Fish live in it, and the willowy river bottom is home to mice and mountain lions. From my kitchen window I watch bald eagles, ospreys, golden eagles, and hawks. These birds of prey ride the wind. It doesn't take much energy on their part. However, when geese fly, they must (expend energy by) flapping their wings, but birds of prey soar by catching currents.

Birds of prey seek thermals; columns of warm air that rise from the earth filled with energy. The birds glide on the heated currents of air. A good thermal can lift them high into the sky without so much as a single flap of their wings. From their higher place they can see more ground and can fly longer and farther, and when the time comes to dive on their prey, they can plummet with great speed.

As I watch these birds, I think of pastoral ministry. I too seek thermals. The Spirit lifts, gives vision, direction, and power. Ministry is riding on the free winds of the Spirit that lift us to heights we cannot climb on our own. We can't stay in the air very long on our own strength, but we can seek thermals. Our soul-wings are made large that we might catch the Spirit.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Although this passage is written to pastors, the illustration itself can easily be directed toward our church members encouraging them to seek the filling of the Holy Spirit through prayer.

The largest buried treasure find in America, known as the Saddle Ridge hoard, was discovered in February 2013. A couple who owned the property were walking their dog in the morning. They spotted what appeared to be a rusted portion of a can and decided to unearth it. The rusted and deformed can was unusually heavy as if it were filled with iron or lead. The can was so heavy that while taking it back to their house, the lid of the can cracked open and revealed glistening gold coins! Not the sort of thing that you stumble across on the average day!

After that first can, the couple went back to the site to dig up the land in search of more cans filled with coins. Eventually, they unearthed a total of eight cans throughout their property on Saddle Ridge. After their discovery, the couple protected their find by hiding it in an old ice chest, then burying it under a pile of wood.

The hoard has a total of 1,411 gold coins with a total face value of $27,980. The actual value of the coins has been estimated to stand at a whopping $10 million dollars. The secret origin of the largest buried treasure find in America remain a mystery to this day.

Possible Preaching Angle: God also has surprising hidden treasure which only the diligent can find. The kingdom of heaven (Matt. 13:44), godly wisdom (Prov. 2:3-5), and the Word of God (Jer. 15:16) are waiting to be discovered by the earnest seeker.

In an interview with NPR, musician/singer Paul Simon was asked about the great mysteries of life:

We don't have the capacity to understand the great mysteries of life and God or no God or infinity, we just can't get it. It's beyond us, but that's fine. We're not meant to get that. But the pursuit is so interesting. That, I think, is life sustaining and I think when you lose the interest in that pursuit you're finished.

A 2012 Pew study tracked the rise of a new religious group: the “nones,” or the religiously unaffiliated. One-fifth of Americans—and a full third of adults under 30—say they belong to no religion at all.

Yet, argues Casper ter Kuile, a researcher at Harvard Divinity School, this group is still looking for elements of religious experience. His later study explores ways modern millennials seek out meaning, community, and ritual in the absence of organized religion.

The study started by profiling organizations they deemed particularly formative in the lives of their students. One of the most striking spaces? Fitness classes. Institutions like CrossFit and SoulCycle are offering their students more than just a chance to lose weight or tone up. They function, ter Kuile argues, like religions.

“People come because they want to lose weight or gain muscle strength, but they stay for the community,” he said. “It’s really the relationships that keep them coming back.” We heard people say, “Well, Crossfit is my church,” or, “Soulcycle is like my cult,” in a good way.

“Once that religious perspective had been opened in our eyes, so many things came out. Whether it’s the flag [on display] in every CrossFit [gym]; the way that the space is set up; or how you could follow a kind of liturgy in a SoulCycle class, especially through their use of light and sound. So it’s really an emotional and spiritual experience as well as a physical one.”

Possible Preaching Angles: Church; Body of Christ; Meaning of life; Relationship - Young people are searching for self-actualization, fulfillment and a ‘spiritual’ connection. The role of the church is to show them that what they are searching for comes through a deep relationship with the living God and His people. If you want a workout, find a gym. If you want meaning, come to Jesus.

A little boy only identified as Mason was focused on a new toy in a claw vending machine at a local Beef O'Brady's restaurant. But it was out of reach, behind the glass of the vending machine. So when he saw an opening, he went for it. Unlike most children, little Mason's hastily-devised plan was eventually successful.

In this case, the opening was literal. Undeterred by the glass panels of the claw vending machine where his parents were enjoying dinner, Mason climbed inside, and quickly got stuck.

It just so happened that off-duty firefighter Jeremy House and several colleagues from the Titusville Fire and Emergency Services were also enjoying dinner at the restaurant. While telling patrons nearby to call 911, House and company sprung into action, and within about five minutes, they rescued the boy unharmed, and the claw machine suffered only minimal damage.

A post on the Titusville Fire Facebook page summarized the situation: "Thankfully he was never in any distress as one of our own Lt.'s happen to be there off duty and … made short work of the situation. [Our firefighters] were able to get Mason out in short order with minimal damage to the game. We love a happy ending and are glad everything worked out."

Potential Preaching Angles: 1) Like the Titusville Fire and Emergency Services, the church and her members must be ready to spring into action when people are in peril. 2) Blessings; Rewards - How badly do you want God's blessings on your life? What are you willing to do to obtain wisdom? 3) Sin; Temptation- Sin is attractive and can lure us into embarrassing or dangerous situations if we yield to it.

According to Robert Krulwich's blog on NPR, a small bird called the bar-tailed godwit grows up in northern Alaska, but every fall they fly nearly 7,000 miles to New Zealand. When the young birds mature and start to migrate, something wired in them also directs them to New Zealand. Though they are land birds, and cannot fish or rest on the sea, they will cross most of the Pacific Ocean, and fly all the way to New Zealand. Many of them are young, and have never done this before.

How they do that, many of them never having been in the southern hemisphere, never having seen the southern stars, nobody seems to know. But they manage. One female, dubbed E7, because that was the code on her wireless transmitter, flew 11,680 kilometers (7,369 miles) in 8.1 days. Non-stop. The same homing signal that guides them over treacherous waters to New Zealand also navigates them back to their parents.

Similarly, humans also have "homing signals" for God and eternity. He has put eternity in our hearts.

In his book Unbelievable, Justin Brierly shares the story of Jennifer Fulwiler who grew up in a loving family, but one in which religion was painted as clearly false. Jennifer says that she never remembers a time when she believed in God as a child. Raised on a diet of "science, reason, and evidence-based rational thought," her bedtime reading was Carl Sagan's astronomy book Cosmos. From a young age, she knew that the world ran according to a well-established set of natural laws, and science was the de facto way of understanding everything. Jennifer remained a happy atheist as an adult and into the early years of her marriage.

However, shortly after the birth of her first child, she experienced a dramatic shift in her thinking. Jennifer describes it this way:

I looked down and thought: "What is this baby?" And I thought "Well, from a pure atheist, materialist perspective he is a randomly evolved collection of chemical reactions." And I realized if that's true then all the love that I feel for him is nothing more than chemical reactions in our brain. And I looked down at him and I thought: "That's not true. It's not the truth."

This moment was a turning point for the young mother, one which would eventually lead her to Christian faith as described in her book Something Other Than God. Something had clicked for Jennifer. The scientific explanations she had grown up with weren't enough to explain the totality of what she was experiencing in the bond with her child. All of her knowledge of science couldn't explain the actual experience of fully fledged love.

In an interview, actor Jim Carey was asked about his views of Jesus. Carey struggles with believing in the deity of Jesus but he still can't stop thinking about Jesus.

He's constantly coming up in my head. I definitely remember the first time he came up in my work: It was in art class, grade three or four, and because I was in Catholic school, I decided to draw a really beautiful picture of him. I was so proud of it, and I couldn't wait to bring it home and show my parents, because I'd show them all my art and they'd flip out and throw me the metaphorical dog bone and tell me how special I was.

But on the way out of the school yard, some bully got in front of me, and this gang started picking on me for it, saying, "You drew a picture of the lord." A fight started, and I just remember seeing the picture float through the air between bodies and a mud puddle, because it had been raining, face down. And then I became like a whirling dervish and just started punching faces, any face that I could find. I lost my mind. It was like somebody killed my baby. I don't remember what happened exactly—all I know is I punched a lot of people that day. [Laughs.] Maybe not the reaction you want, and not the reaction Jesus would have wanted, but it just took over. There was love in that picture…

Robert Morgan provides this thought provoking illustration in Moments of Reflection: Reclaiming the Lost Art of Biblical Meditation:

When Harry Truman became president, he worried about losing touch with common, everyday Americans, so he would often go out and be among them. Those were in simpler days, when the president could take a walk like everyone else.

One evening, Truman decided to take a walk down to the Memorial Bridge on the Potomac River. When he grew curious about the mechanism that raised and lowered the bridge, he made his way across the catwalks and came upon the bridge tender, who was eating his evening supper out of a tin bucket. The man showed absolutely no surprise when he looked up and saw the best-known and most powerful man in the world. He just swallowed his food, wiped his mouth, smiled, and said, "You know, Mr. President, I was just thinking of you." According to Truman's biographer, David McCullough, it was a greeting that Truman adored and never forgot.

The Lord adores it when he finds us just thinking about him.

The poet-singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen died in November 2016. For many people Cohen became famous with his moving and biblically-infused song "Broken Hallelujah," especially with one of its last lines—"I'll stand before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah." Though he would often protest that he (in his own words) "wasn't really a religious man," Cohen seemed unable to sing or speak for very long without bringing up God. Shortly before his death, in an interview with the New Yorker, Cohen said, "I know there's a spiritual aspect to everybody's life, whether they want to cop to it or not. It's there, you can feel it …"

Although Cohen primarily identified as a Jew, he was drawn to the person and work of Jesus. Commenting on his song "The Captain," Cohen said, "What I mean to say [in this song] is that there are many things about Christianity that attract me. The figure of Jesus is extremely attractive. It's difficult not to fall in love with that person." After praising Christ's emphasis on resurrection and rebirth, he concluded, "When we have this notion that there is no mechanism for resurrection, there is no redemption from sin, then we are forced to embrace evil and we get the kind of activity like genocide."

In the classic French film Jean de Florette, townspeople in a small village in Provence, France conspire against a local landowner named Jean who has just inherited a plot of land. They want to force Jeans's little farm to fail so they can possess the land. The land receives only scant rainfall so they sneak on to his property and plug a healthy stream, cementing it shut and covering it with dirt.

Jean does not know about the nearby spring, but he knows of another, more distant water supply over a mile away. He initially makes progress, but eventually getting the water and dragging it from the distant spring becomes a backbreaking experience. Sadly, he never discovers that he already has an inexhaustible supply of water underground but nearby.

Possible Preaching Angles: Holy Spirit; God, power of—In the same way, Christians have an inexhaustible supply of power—the Holy Spirit—living within us. Sadly, some of us are like Jean in this film—you spend our lives in backbreaking effort trying to haul another supply.

The popular novelist Andrew Klavan was raised in a non-practicing Jewish home. For about the first 45 years of his life, he lived as a "philosophical agnostic and a practical atheist." Klavan explains some of the steps along his journey that eventually led him to faith in Christ:

Jesus never appeared to me while I lay drunk in the gutter. And yet, looking back on my life, I see that Christ was beckoning to me at every turn. When I was a child, he was there in the kindness of a Christian babysitter and the magic of a Christmas Eve spent at her house. When I was a troubled young man contemplating suicide, he was in the voice of a Christian baseball player who gave a radio interview that inspired me to go on. And always, he was in the day-to-day miracle of my marriage, a lifelong romance that taught me the reality of love and slowly led me to contemplate the greater love that was its source and inspiration.

But perhaps most important for a novelist who insisted that ideas should make sense, Christ came to me in stories. Slowly, I came to understand that his life, words, sacrifice, and resurrection formed the hidden logic behind every novel, movie, or play that touched my deepest mind.

I was reading a story when that logic finally kicked in. I was in my forties, lying in bed with one of Patrick O'Brian's great seafaring adventure novels. One of the characters, whom I admired, said a prayer before going to sleep, and I thought to myself, Well, if he can pray, so can I. I laid the book aside and whispered a three-word prayer in gratitude for the contentment I'd found, and for the work and people I loved: "Thank you, God."

It was a small and even prideful prayer: a self-impressed intellectual's hesitant experiment with faith. God's response was an act of extravagant grace. I woke the next morning and everything had changed. There was a sudden clarity and brightness to familiar faces and objects; they were alive with meaning and with my own delight in them. I called this experience "the joy of my joy," and it came to me again whenever I prayed. Naturally I began to pray every day.

This would lead to a full acceptance of Christ as Lord. Later, Klavan was baptized and wrote a book about his spiritual journey titled The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.