Bread For The Hungry

Spurgeon opens with a lesson on providence drawn from Israel's forty years of eating manna — arguing that the sustaining power behind all food is not in the food itself but in God's direct command, so that he could just as easily nourish his people through any other means if he chose, as proved by long fasts, miraculous deliverances without any visible intervention, and the stories of Henry Erskine finding money in a marsh and a martyr fed from his persecutor's table — and applies this to any believer facing temptation to sin in order to survive: God is not limited to one channel of provision, so it can never be right to do a wrong thing, and faith must simply stand still and wait for the salvation God will supply. He then turns to the spiritual application, describing the hunger God creates in the soul before conversion — painful and insatiable, resisting every substitute offered by amusements, moralism, or philosophy, growing sharper rather than duller with time, driving a person to crowd wherever the bread of Heaven is genuinely preached — and the heavenly food that satisfies it: the Word of God in its written and preached forms, which is simultaneously rich and plain, unfailingly sweet, perfectly wholesome, always abundant, and which unlike any human writing never grows stale after decades of feeding on it. He closes with the practical duty this privilege creates: just as Israel's manna did not fall into their mouths but lay outside the tents to be gathered fresh every single morning, believers must open their Bibles daily, carry a text under the tongue throughout the day, and come to preaching with open mouths expecting to be fed — and he turns to those who feel no such hunger at all, warning them that the soul's appetite suppressed here will awaken in eternity where nothing can satisfy it, and pleading with them to trust Christ now, since the granary of Heaven is never locked to any soul willing to be nothing so that Christ may be everything.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on November 10, 1861.