"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled" (Matthew 5:6)
The problem of the spiritual life is not to persuade God to fill us, but to want God sufficiently to permit Him to do so!
Jesus Himself spoke of our hungering and thirsting after righteousness. Hunger and thirst are physical sensations which in their acute stages may become real pain. It has been the experience of countless seekers after God that when their desires became a pain they were suddenly and wonderfully filled.
Occasionally there appears on the religious scene a person whose unsatisfied spiritual longings become so big and important in the life that they crowd out every other interest. Such a man or woman refuses to be content with the safe and conventional prayers of the frost-bound brethren called upon to "lead in prayer" week after week in the local assemblies. His yearnings carry him away and often make something of a nuisance out of him. His puzzled fellow Christians shake their heads and look knowingly at each other, but like the blind man who cried out after his sight and was rebuked by the disciples, he "cries the more a great deal."
And if he has not yet met the conditions or there is something hindering the answer to his prayer, he may pray on into the late hours. Not the hour of night but the state of his heart decides the time of his visitation!
It is easy to learn the doctrine of personal revival and victorious living; it is quite another thing to take our cross and plod on to the dark and bitter hill of self-renunciation.
Here many are called and few are chosen!
~A. W. Tozer~
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