Thomas Watson wrote, ‘If a friend invites guests to his table he does not expect that they should bring money for their dinner, only come with an appetite.’

Thomas Watson delightfully puts it, ‘God keeps open house for hungry sinners.’

In a book on personal evangelism C H Spurgeon wrote, ‘Another proof of the conquest of a soul for Christ will be found in a real change of life. If the man does not live differently from what he did before, both at home and abroad, his repentance needs to be repented of, and his conversion is a fiction.’

J I Packer finely puts it, ‘Holiness is no more by faith without effort than it is by effort without faith.’

Christians are called to a constant, life-long, self-denying, costly, painful struggle, but just as the reward of an Olympic medal drives athletes to almost unbelievable lengths in terms of training and self-discipline, so the promised reward of godliness ought to draw the Christian on to do whatever it takes to bring it about.

Don Whitney rightly says, ‘If your picture of a disciplined Christian is one of a grim-faced, joyless half-robot, then you’ve missed the point. Jesus was the most disciplined man who ever lived and yet the most joyful and passionately alive.’

join the nineteenth-century Scottish preacher Robert Murray McCheyne in praying, ‘Lord, make me as holy as it is possible for a redeemed sinner to be’, you have reason to believe that you are hungry and thirsty for righteousness; and if not, what good reason can you give for not beginning now?

The American missionary Jim Elliot, who was to be murdered in Ecuador eight years later by Auca Indians whom he was trying to reach with the gospel, wrote these words in his Journal in 1948: ‘All I have asked has not been given, and the Father’s withholding has only served to intensify my desires. He knows that the “hungrier” one is, the more appreciative he becomes of food, and if I have gotten nothing else from this year’s experience he has given me a hunger for himself I never experienced before. He only promises water to the thirsty, satiation to the unsatisfied (I do not say dissatisfied), filling to those famished for righteousness.’ God, and God alone, can fill the hungry soul with the righteousness it craves. Those who seek him are unanimous in their testimony that he does.