A Final Word — To the Hungry Believer Who Is Still Saying “I Wanna Know More

Based on Matthew 5:6 — “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

If you have read every article in this series — or even most of them — I want to say something to you before we part.

Not as a writer wrapping up a content series. As a fellow traveler on the same road — a person who started asking the deep questions at 14 years old on a farm in the Philippines and has never been able to stop, who has been through enough to know that the hunger is not a problem to be solved but a gift to be followed, and who believes with everything in him that the God who gave you the hunger is the same God who satisfies it.

You are hungry. I know, because you are here.

You did not stumble into a series of thirty-six articles about transformation and identity and organic community and the inside-out life by accident. Something in you was looking for this — or something like this. Something in you resonated with the questions being asked, with the stories being told, with the framework being offered, because something in you has been carrying those same questions, living inside a version of that same story, and looking for language that matches what you have been sensing but not yet been able to fully articulate.

That hunger is not a sign of spiritual immaturity. It is the sign of genuine life.

Jesus calls it a blessing.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness — dikaiosynē, not merely moral correctness but the full, comprehensive, God-given rightness of a life fully aligned with God’s purposes, God’s character, God’s kingdom. The hunger Jesus is describing is not the polite, manageable, Sunday-morning variety of spiritual interest. It is the desperate, physical, survival-level hunger of someone who genuinely cannot live without what they are seeking.

Hungry. Thirsty. The language of biological necessity, applied to spiritual longing.

And Jesus says: this person is blessed. Not because the hunger itself is pleasant — it isn’t. But because the hunger is evidence of something genuinely alive in the person carrying it — and because the God who placed the hunger there is also the One who satisfies it.

They will be filled — chortasthēsontai, fed to the full, satisfied to overflowing, given not a partial satisfaction that leaves the hunger merely dulled but a genuine, complete, abundant filling. The God who authored the hunger is fully capable of, and fully committed to, satisfying it.

He does not give you the hunger and then withhold the satisfaction. He gives you the hunger because He has the satisfaction — and because the hunger is the very capacity that makes the satisfaction possible.

Bob Hamp describes the hunger for more as one of the primary indicators of genuine spiritual life — and one of the most reliable guides to genuine spiritual formation.

“The person who is no longer hungry,” he writes, “is not the person who has arrived. They are the person who has settled — who has found a version of the Christian life that is comfortable enough to suppress the hunger without genuinely satisfying it. The hunger is not a problem to be managed. It is a compass to be followed. It always points toward the next room in the inexhaustible house of God’s nature — the next dimension of encounter, the next layer of formation, the next depth of the inside-out life that is available and waiting. Follow the hunger. It knows where it is going” (Think Differently, Live Differently, p. 491, Bob Hamp).

Follow the hunger. It knows where it is going.

That has been the story of my entire life. Every significant chapter — the Bible storybook at 14, the baptism at 17, the house church movement in the Philippines, Lois, Japan, Michigan, the family fellowship, the Lk10 community, this framework — every single one of them began with hunger. With the specific, persistent, undeniable sense that there was more — more depth, more encounter, more genuine formation, more of the inexhaustible God — and with the willingness to follow that hunger wherever it led.

Even when it led somewhere I didn’t expect. Even when it cost something I didn’t anticipate. Even when the road was slower and harder and less glamorous than I had imagined.

The hunger always knew where it was going.

Graham Cooke describes the hungry believer as God’s favorite kind of person — not because God plays favorites, but because hunger is the posture that makes everything else possible.

“God cannot fill a person who is already full,” he writes. “He cannot form a person who has decided they are already formed enough. He cannot reveal Himself to a person who has decided they already know enough about Him. The hungry person — the one who comes with empty hands, with genuine need, with the specific, honest, unashamed admission that there is more and they have not yet received it — that person is in exactly the right posture to receive everything God has to give. Hunger is not a spiritual deficiency. It is a spiritual advantage. It is the open hand that heaven fills” (Being with God, p. 183, Graham Cooke).

The open hand that heaven fills.

That is you. If you are still hungry after everything you have read — still saying somewhere in your spirit, yes, but I want to go deeper, I want more of this, I want the life these articles are pointing toward — then you are in exactly the right posture. Open handed. Available. Positioned to receive what the God who is always already ahead of you has already prepared.

John Eldredge describes the hunger for more as the echo of eternity in the human soul — the specific, aching resonance of a creature who was made for something that no finite experience can fully satisfy.

“There is a longing in every human heart,” he writes, “that nothing in this world fully answers. Not relationship, not achievement, not experience, not even the best moments of genuine spiritual encounter. The longing remains — not because something is wrong with you, but because you were made for more than this world contains. You were made for the full, unmediated, face-to-face encounter with the God who is the source of everything your longing has been pointing toward. The hunger is not a problem. It is a prophecy — a declaration by your own soul that what you were made for is real, and that you have not yet fully arrived at it, and that the arrival is genuinely coming” (The Sacred Romance, p. 211, John Eldredge).

The hunger is a prophecy.

A declaration by your own soul that what you were made for is real. That the fullness is coming. That the God who placed the longing in you is moving toward its satisfaction with the same unhurried, prevenient, always-already-ahead confidence that has characterized every other movement of His grace in your story.

Frank Viola closes the circle that this series began with — the eternal purpose of God that preceded creation and that is moving, through every broken vessel and every surrendered life, toward its ultimate and glorious fulfillment.

“The hungry believer,” he writes, “is the person in whom the eternal purpose of God is most actively at work — because hunger is what keeps the vessel open to what the Spirit is always trying to pour in. The goal of the Christian life is not the suppression of the hunger through sufficient religious activity. It is the progressive, ever-deepening satisfaction of the hunger through ever-increasing encounter with the God who is always more than you have yet discovered. That is the life He came to give. That is the fullness He promised. And the hunger you carry right now is the very capacity through which He intends to give it” (From Eternity to Here, p. 378, Frank Viola).

The hunger is the capacity through which He intends to give it.

So here is my final word to you — the hungry believer who has read every article and is still saying “I wanna know more.”

Keep saying it.

Not as an admission of deficiency. As a declaration of life. As the most honest, most accurate, most spiritually alive thing you can say about where you are in your journey with the God who is always already more than anything you have yet discovered about Him.

Keep saying it in your morning prayer, when the Scripture opens a door you didn’t know was there and you sense there is a whole room behind it you have not yet entered.

Keep saying it in your community, when someone says something that breaks open a dimension of God’s nature you had not yet seen, and the hunger that rises in you is the Spirit saying — yes, this, go deeper here.

Keep saying it in the suffering seasons, when the pain is exposing something in you that needed to be exposed, and the God who wastes nothing is doing His most extravagant formation work in the most uncomfortable territory of your soul.

Keep saying it in the slow seasons, when nothing visible seems to be happening and the underground root system is being built in the dark, and the only thing you have to go on is the prevenient God who was already there before you arrived.

Keep saying it in the fruitful seasons too — when the formation is visible, when the community is alive, when the mission is moving, when the inside-out life is producing the overflow that it was always designed to produce. Even then — especially then — keep saying it.

Because the God you are pursuing is inexhaustible. And the life He came to give is full. Abundantly, extravagantly, overflowingly full.

And there is always — always, in every season, at every depth, in every new room of the house of His nature — more.

I want to close with the most personal thing I can say.

I was 14 years old, sitting alone on a hot afternoon on my father’s farm in the Philippines, crying without knowing why. I did not know what I was hungry for. I did not have language for the ache. I only knew that something in me was looking for something that the visible world was not providing.

That hunger has taken me across oceans and through marriages and into house churches and out of institutions and into Japan and back to Michigan and into a home fellowship and into a Lk10 community and into the writing of these thirty-six articles.

It has cost me things I wish it had not cost me. It has given me things I could not have received any other way. It has led me to people — Lois, David Lim, the believers in the Philippines living rooms, the small gathering in Japan, the friends around our Michigan table, the Lk10 community — who have carried pieces of God’s nature that I needed, and who have received pieces of mine.

And it has never — not once in all the years and all the chapters — been satisfied to the point of extinguishing itself. Because the God it has been pointing toward is too deep, too wide, too high, too inexhaustibly rich for any finite amount of seeking to exhaust.

I am still hungry. I am still saying it — in every gathering, in every conversation, in every new morning that opens onto a day full of the prevenient grace of a God who is always already there:

I wanna know more.

And I believe — with the specific, tested, from-experience confidence of a person who has followed the hunger through enough chapters to know it is reliable — that the God who placed that hunger in you is already, right now, preparing the satisfaction.

Follow the hunger. Stay available. Go deeper.

There is so much more.

TAKEAWAY LESSON:

The hunger for more is not a spiritual problem — it is a spiritual gift. It is the open hand that heaven fills, the prophecy of your soul that what you were made for is real, and the capacity through which God intends to give you the fullness He promised. Keep saying “I wanna know more.” The God who gave you the hunger is the God who satisfies it — always more, always deeper, always ahead.

A Final Practice — Your Own Ongoing Journey: Write a letter to yourself today. Date it. Describe where you are in your hunger right now — what you have received through this series, what has shifted, what has been confirmed, what new hunger has been awakened. Seal it. Open it in one year. Then write another one. This is the practice of the inside-out life — the ongoing, honest, forward-moving record of a person who is being formed from the inside out by a God who is always already more than they have yet discovered.

And one last thing — whatever you do, wherever this journey takes you next:

Keep saying it.

I wanna know more.

— Ed Baulete Lifechoicely.com