The One Stone Nobody Wants to Turn Over

I know a man, and so do you, because some mornings he is you and most mornings he is me.

He has been asking God for one thing for about two years. And he has worked at it. He has a prayer list in a black notebook and a second copy in his phone in case the notebook goes missing. He has read the books. The one on breakthrough. The one on the courts of heaven. The one his buddy swore by that he never got past chapter three of. He keeps a book of declarations beside the bed and a second one in the console of the truck. He has prayed at 5 a.m. and he has prayed at midnight. He has prayed out loud, prayed in tongues, prayed walking the same loop around the same field until he wore a trail in the grass. He has anointed his doorposts, sowed into three ministries, and stood in prayer lines in two provinces.

He has turned over every stone but one.

Hunger.

Of all the things we are willing to try, getting hungry is somehow the last one on the list. We will do 453 kinds of prophetic intercession before we will do one honest day of wanting God more than we want lunch. And the whole time, the one thing God responds to more than anything else is the one thing we keep skipping.

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be

satisfied." (Matthew 5:6, NASB)

He did not say blessed are the well studied. He did not say blessed are those with the right model of prayer, or the right father in the faith, or the correct position on the end times. He said blessed are the hungry. And Mary said the same thing about Him a thousand ways in one line: He fills the hungry with good things, and He sends the rich away empty.

The fisherman who watched the wrong water

Two men fish the same lake.

The first one is standing on the point one evening when a fish jumps twenty feet off the end of his rod. Water everywhere. He nearly falls in. He has never seen anything like it in his life, and from that day forward, that rock is his rock. He builds a little bench there. He takes his son there. He tells everybody at the coffee shop about the night the fish jumped, and he is not lying, and it is not a small story. It really happened.

Ten years later he is still on that rock. Nothing has jumped in nine of those years. He is using the same rod, the same knot, the same corner of the same lake, and he cannot understand why the lake has gone dead.

The lake is not dead. The fish moved.

And here is the part that stings. Down at the far end, past the reeds, some kid he does not know and would not have picked is standing in the water in running shoes catching fish two at a time, with his little sister’s Barbi fishing rod and a technique that would have gotten him laughed off the point.

The greatest hindrance to the next move of God is the last one

We assume God is going to do it the same way, in the same place, through the same family. So when He shows up somewhere else, in a way we would not have chosen, through somebody else's kid who we do not resonate with and disagree with on a list of things, we are shocked. Then offended. Then critical. And we stay on our rock and call the far end of the lake deception.

But ask yourself the honest question. Why did He come to that first place at all?

It was not the location. It was not the song selection, or the sound of the room, or the order of service. It was not the personality of the man on the platform. And I am going to say this one carefully, because it will bother some people: it was not even the doctrine. God has never once come down because a group of people got their paperwork in order.

He came because they were hungry. Starving, actually. Desperate people usually are.

And when the hunger got satisfied, He went looking for hunger somewhere else, while they kept singing the same songs and preaching the same sermons and wondering what happened.

That is not God being unfaithful. That is God being consistent. He responds to the same thing every single time. We are the ones who keep mistaking the container for the reason.

A church can go from "God, if You do not show up we are finished" to "we have need of nothing" in about one generation. Read what Jesus said to the church in Laodicea and tell me it does not sound like a group of people who used to be hungry.

So how do you get hungry?

Three ways, and you already know all of them.

Find some. Go get around people who are actually hungry, not people who are merely busy. Hunger is contagious, and so is the other thing. If everybody in the room has already arrived, you will arrive too, and arriving is the problem.

Cultivate some. Feed the appetite you want to grow. Whatever you spend the most time with is what you will want more of, so turn some things off. Nobody accidentally gets hungry for God at eleven o'clock at night on their phone. Hunger has to be fed on purpose, and the only thing that feeds a hunger for God is God.

Or stop eating until it shows up. I say this gently and I mean it hard. Fasting does not twist God's arm. It puts your body in a position to finally tell you the truth about what you are actually full of. Skip a couple of meals and you'll meet the person you actually are around three in the afternoon. Fasting doesn't make you impatient, angry or afraid. It just pulls back the blanket that was hiding your impatience, anger and fear. Stop eating for a few days and the monsters you’ve been feeding will come out of the basement to say hello.

There is a fourth thing that will get you hungry, and I would not wish it on you, but it works, and most of us got here that way. Trouble. Loss. A diagnosis. A prodigal. The end of a business. Desperation makes hungry people out of comfortable people faster than anything else on earth, and the ones God keeps showing up for are usually the ones who have nothing left to protect.

You can get there on purpose or you can get there by circumstance. Those are the options.

One last thing

If you are standing on a rock where God moved twenty years ago and nothing has jumped since, He is not mad at you. He is just not there anymore. And the invitation is not to defend the rock. It is to get up, walk the shoreline, and find out where He is feeding.

Revival is not a location. It is an appetite.

Get hungry.