Want More of His Spirit? This is Your Key

Hunger is necessary and it has an essential role in sparking, and even hosting, revival.

When I (Billy) first began in ministry, I knew I wasn’t another T.D. Jakes. I realized I wasn’t the best preacher. I just wasn’t that guy. I had a friend who was an amazing preacher. He would preach like a house on fire. He was also a dancing machine and could sing like Michael Bolton. And then, sometimes, his messages would be thirty minutes of funny jokes, and everyone would be laughing and entertained by him. And he could turn it on a dime, and the next thing you knew everyone was weeping and travailing under the conviction of the Holy Spirit. I mean, he could do it all and do it well.

Whenever I watched him, I remember thinking, If I have to be that, I may as well quit ministry right now because I can’t. I also remember during that time encountering passages of Scripture in Psalm 63, Psalm 42, and especially Matthew 5:6, which says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” And then the light went on for me: Hunger doesn’t require giftedness. I don’t have to be the all-in-one singing, dancing, preaching machine. I don’t even have to be able to talk. To be hungry, all I have to do is desire. I could do desire. I already had an appetite on board. If hunger was the necessary requirement to see God’s infilling happen, I could hunger.

Psalm 42:2 and Psalm 63:1 both speak of thirsting for God, so when I realized I had a desire resident within me for something “other,” something more or greater than myself, I figured I could stir that hunger and feed that desire. My giftedness was not required, but hunger was essential.

I know it is the same for so many of you who are reading right now. You may not be the most gifted person, but that doesn’t have to stop you from experiencing an amazing inbreaking of God’s glory. He doesn’t promise to pour Himself on the most gifted. He promises to pour Himself on the most hungry and thirsty (see Isa. 44:3).

What’s interesting with the Lord is He is the only One who can satisfy. He is the greatest addiction there is. How do I know this? Because the more I got of Him, the more I hungered for Him. The more I drank from His wells of salvation, the thirstier I grew for more of His life-giving water. I don’t have a great singing voice, and I can’t dance. I’m not able to do those things, but I can present myself to Him and hunger for Him.

I remember reading about Kathryn Kuhlman, a healing evangelist during the 1970s. She had a failed marriage. She wasn’t very pretty by most standards. She didn’t necessarily have a great speaking gift. But she did something that made all the difference: She hungered for God in a profound way. She said,

I was born without talent.…One day I said, “Wonderful Jesus, I don’t have a thing. But if you can take nothing and use it, here’s nothing. I offer you nothing. I know I love you. All I can give you is my love. I’ll give you every ounce of strength in my body.”

Her testimony deeply touched me. All she did was offer herself to God and acknowledge He was the only thing she desired. The power of God was released in her life. A captivating anointing came upon her, and her connection with the Holy Spirit was evident in her meetings. People testified that they could hear the sounds of lightning crackling out of her as she prayed for healing. The power of God released through this woman came from her hunger and desire for God.

Beloved, we get one go-round in this life. We get one life to live where we’re behind the veil in that we don’t see God. This is the only opportunity that we will ever have to yearn for Him, to put our desire for Him on display. I don’t want to waste this life hungering for stupid stuff that’s not going to amount to anything, that’s not going to produce anything in my inner man, or that’s not going to release something of eternal value. I want to hunger for Him to see His invasion on the earth in my day.

Corey: Jesus simply did things for hungry people that He didn’t do for others. Whether it was the Syrophoenician woman of Matthew 15, or blind Bartimaeus in Mark 10, or the woman with the issue of blood in Luke 8, we see time and time again that hungry, desperate people pulled things out of Jesus that no one else did. It’s because hunger moves God. Hunger isn’t something you make happen, but it is the awareness of your need—the revelation of your need. When spiritual hunger touches you, it’s God revealing to you how much you need Him.

The Syrophoenician woman of Matthew 15 had to press past three denials of Jesus to receive her breakthrough. She was an unoffendable woman who refused to be denied. She even took Jesus’ offensive statement of saying, “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs,” and she turned it into intercession (Matt. 15:27). This is the nature of hunger. It refuses to be denied.

Bartimaeus had to press past everyone telling him to be quiet and calm down, yet the Bible says, “But he cried out all the more” (Mark 10:48). Friend, how many times do you let the Christian culture you live in dictate your hunger and passion for God and for breakthrough? This blind man refused to let his culture dictate his passion, and he literally stopped the Son of God in His tracks and received healing.

The woman with the issue of blood pressed through the crowd and physically pulled virtue out of Jesus. With all the other healings, we witnessed Jesus initiating the healing, but in this story, she initiated it and pulled it out of Him.

This is what hunger looks like. It’s desperate awareness of how much you need God.

I’ll never forget a message that I read by John G. Lake on spiritual hunger. This man who shook Africa with the gospel said that the greatest gift he could give to anyone would be hunger. Here is the thing about hunger—you always are grateful yet never satisfied. One of the stories that absolutely wrecked me was Lake’s baptism in the Holy Spirit. For years, Lake had experienced a measure of the Holy Spirit’s intimacy and power through a dynamic healing ministry, yet he knew there was more. Though everyone around him told him to calm down, he knew there was more.

The exact phrase from him that provoked me deeply was:

“I felt myself on the borderland of a great spiritual realm, but was unable to enter in fully, so my nature was not satisfied with the attainment.”

It was shortly after this that Lake had a life-altering encounter with the Holy Spirit, where he said that he felt his soul and the soul of Jesus Christ become one. The love of God that flowed in him and through him absolutely wrecked him for anything else.

You must understand that there is an internal longing inside you. God put that in you. And living with a raw, violent, aggressive, desperate search is not human zeal. It’s not emotionalism. It’s a work of God in the soul. It’s a gift of God. It may be loud and expressive. It may be very quiet. It’s not about what it looks like. It’s about a deep gnawing, about a hunger inside that possesses you.

Over the years, I’ve found that the deeper and longer my prayer life has gone, the shorter and deeper my prayers are becoming.

Pray to get hungry and then pray to sustain it. Go after Philippians 3:12–14, where Paul said:

Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

I see many people who get hungry for God for about a year. They will push and go for God, but the subtle and seductive nature of the heart lures them away from what they were doing, especially if they have received some increased measure of God. They get that, and then it becomes a distant memory instead of fuel to their hunger.