THE OPPORTUNITY OF EXPRESSION

In one of the messages that I have preached, I talk about the eight days of feasting and after every one has eaten to their fill, after every appetite has been satisfied, I ask the question, can we still hunger for God? Many of us are not hungry for Christ, but have developed appetites for revelation and ministry. Appetites are not really hunger, but they give comfort and satisfaction in us. To find that place of fulfillment in Christ, we have to come to the place that our senses no longer satisfy us. The children of Israel when they came into the desert, they had food, but they longed for the quail. When you are a slave, food has a total different meaning than when you are free. A free man has a total different relationship to food and the senses. That is why Moses was not tempted in the desert because he was a free man.

When I grew up in East Germany food had a total different meaning, and I know people that have gone to Russia will say that these people do not have a poor man’s mentality. They will give you everything that they have and will go hungry the rest of the week because it is an expression of their hospitality and their love. My family did the same. We would give everything we had on one day, and the rest of the week we would go hungry.

When we are free, we do not need to do that because we can express our gifting on a total different level. When we are oppressed, our gifting can never come through. In some places in Africa today, there are a few gifted people, not because they do not have it within them, but because they do not have the ability to express it as they are under oppression and tyranny. Hunger and survival kills their ability to express. God gives us the opportunity of expression and liberty, but some of us have lived so on the surface in our relationship to God that our needs kill the power of expression. When God wants to use The Church as a picture of who He is, He has to deal with our needs. Therefore, we have to come face to face with the things that drive us and the things that make us a man or a woman, so that we do not relate to Him as a man or woman, but as a vessel that God can fill with His glory.

In His Love,
      Sigi

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