Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the disparity in people's spiritual hunger compared to their physical hunger.
Dallas Willard's quote suggests that while many individuals eagerly seek physical nourishment each morning in the form of breakfast, very few exhibit the same level of desire or urgency in seeking a spiritual connection with God. This comparison serves to emphasize the need for a deeper spiritual appetite, encouraging individuals to prioritize their spiritual well-being just as they do their physical needs.
In practice
In a sermon on spiritual growth, you can use this quote to illustrate the importance of seeking God daily.
The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as βChristiansβ will become disciples β students, apprentices, practitioners β of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.
The first act of love is always the giving of attention.
So many people would like to have guidance from God because obviously, if you have a word from God, it's the best possible thing. But they don't relate that to life as a whole. Often they want guidance as a way of opting out of the responsibility of making decisions.
What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.
The basic question 'will I obey Christ 's teaching?' is rarely taken as a serious issue. For example, to take one of Jesus' commands, that is relevant to contemporary life, I don't know of any church that actually teaches a church how to bless people who curse them, yet this is a clear command.
When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.
Between the dreams of night and day there is not so great a difference.
Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.
How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?
In contrast to the knowledge that keeps man in a passive quietude, Desire dis-quiets him and moves him to action. Born of Desire, action tends to satisfy it, and can do so only by the 'negation,' the destruction or at least the transformation, of the desired object: to satisfy hunger, for example, the food must be destroyed or, in any case, transformed. Thus all action is 'negating'.
Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man?
To know God as the sovereign disposer of all good, inviting us to present our requests, and yet not to approach or ask of him, were so far from availing us, that it were just as if one told of a treasure were to allow it to remain buried in the ground.
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