Welcome to a year of reading Richard Sibbes together! The reading plan for the entire year can be accessed here. I encourage you to stick with us, allow yourself time to read, and soak in the riches of this gifted and prolific Puritan preacher. You will be edified and encouraged.
If you have trouble with how Sibbes used words, check out the Lexicons of Early Modern English for definitions from the period.
Summary/Engagement
Last night I took my wife, son, and mother in law out for dinner. We went to our favorite Thai restaurant that also has a very good sushi chef. Since Amy is pregnant she couldn’t have the raw stuff, so we had a few sushi rolls comprised of cooked ingredients. We had great Thai food and enjoyed checking out the new location. I had this spicy yet sweet shrimp dish they make, that if I in inhale at all while chewing on it I descend in to coughing fits. Something about the spices used in Thai food don’t agree with my respiratory system. I keep eating it though. So good.
I still woke up hungry this morning. My satisfaction was temporary though pleasant at the time. We eat and are filled and yet we hunger again. Our appetite is aroused, we put it to rest with food, only to have it come back again, perhaps stronger than the last time.
We eat for pleasure as well. Many, if not all of you who read this, eat not what is merely necessary but what you enjoy. We have the luxury to eat that which pleases us. I eat too much of what pleases me and carry the evidence.
This week Sibbes expounds John 6:27 and what it means for us not to labor for this food that perishes, but for the food that endures to everlasting life. We are to work for the food that satisfies, that will last as long as we will. Christ, our Passover Lamb, is the only food that endures to everlasting life. Only Christ satisfies the holy longing, the holy discontent placed in each of us, that holy appetite that we have for that which satisfies eternally.
“Only Christ and grace, and the comforts we have by him, satisfy, and that everlastingly. They are as a spring that never dies.”
Application / Further Discussion
We are a foolish bunch. We grow up in the eyes of the world yet still pursue passions and pleasures like children throwing tantrums for candy. It is indeed a burden to be rich, and hard to enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matt 19:23) If you’re reading this, you are rich. Rich is a comparative term and too often we compare ourselves with the wildly ridiculously rich of America. It is hard to consider one rich in comparison to them. Yet if we compare ourselves to the world, we are wildly ridiculously rich. My point is not to shame us for wealth. God gives it, after all.
We have to recognize the dangers we face, however. Our wealth enables the indulgence of our appetites for worldly things. We want that which perishes, and we work for it. Computers, smartphones, cars, houses, food, clothes, etc. All of which are not in and of themselves bad, but our desires may be.
“..We are so desperately set on earthly things, that neither faith nor experience, nor the strength of discourse, no reason, is sufficient to take us off, till God by his Spirit convince us throughly of this.”
God planted in each of us an appetite for himself. Are you working to satisfy that hunger? We can eat and drink and enjoy the things of this life, we are not called to asceticism. The enjoyment of those things is not our chief end, our reason for being. What is the chief end of man, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism asks? “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
You were made to enjoy, to satisfy your hunger, to live with such peace and contentment that should make your soul weep for joy. What Sibbes argues, what the Bible indeed says, is that we must labor the food that endures as long as our soul does, eternally. Jesus Christ is the satisfaction of that appetite. Jesus Christ is the only food which produces eternal life and not merely the temporal physical satisfaction and sustenance of all worldly things.
We are at war with ourselves and must subjugate our fleshly appetites for our spiritual appetite. This takes work, as Sibbes notes, and we must work towards that gift of Christ, because God freely gives him. Do you hunger and thirst for Christ?
“Let us every day spend our spiritual strength in spiritual exercises, in resisting temptations, in withstanding the snares of Satan, in bearing those daily crosses that God lays upon us. Live as Christians should live, and the exercise of a Christian life will enforce us to go unto Christ to feed on him, to fetch from him spiritual strength. When in our daily exercise we shall see the continual need we have of pardon for daily sins, of comfort and strength against daily corruptions and infirmities, this will make us feed on Christ and on the promises made in him–not only on the promise of forgiveness, but on the promise of a supply of necessary grace, on that sweet promise, that ‘he will not quench the smoking flash, nor break the bruised reed,’ Matt. 12:20– feed on him as a King to subdue our corruptions, etc. The daily exercise of a Christian life will force us unto Christ.”
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Last week, I was overwhelmed and missed the post.
Next week, we read The Bride’s Longing.
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