body { font-family: Georgia, ‘Times New Roman’, serif; max-width: 720px; margin: 0 auto; padding: 2em 1em; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; }
h1 { font-size: 2em; text-align: center; margin-bottom: 0.1em; }
.subtitle { text-align: center; font-style: italic; color: #555; margin-bottom: 2em; }
h2 { font-size: 1.5em; margin-top: 2.5em; }
blockquote { border-left: 3px solid #999; margin: 1.5em 0; padding: 0.5em 1.5em; color: #333; font-style: italic; }
.scripture { background: #f5f5f0; padding: 1em 1.5em; margin: 1.5em 0; border-left: 4px solid #8b7355; font-style: italic; }
.scripture .ref { font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; display: block; text-align: right; margin-top: 0.5em; color: #555; }
img.article { width: 100%; height: auto; margin: 1.5em 0; display: block; }
img.article-half { width: 50%; height: auto; margin: 1.5em auto; display: block; }
.caption { font-size: 0.85em; color: #666; text-align: center; margin-top: -0.5em; margin-bottom: 1.5em; }
.nav { border-top: 1px solid #ccc; margin-top: 3em; padding-top: 1.5em; }
.nav a { color: #8b7355; text-decoration: none; }
.nav a:hover { text-decoration: underline; }
.prev-next { display: flex; justify-content: space-between; }
.series { background: #f0efe8; padding: 1em 1.5em; margin: 2em 0; border-radius: 4px; }
.series h3 { margin-top: 0; }
.author { text-align: center; font-style: italic; color: #555; margin-top: 2em; border-top: 1px solid #ccc; padding-top: 1em; }

Excel Even More

1 Thessalonians 4:1-2 · Fear, Delight, and the Hunger That Proves the Light

They love Thee little if at all
Who do not fear Thee much.

That’s Faber. Frederick William Faber, 19th century, writing hymns that most of us have never sung. The line sticks because it says something we don’t want to hear — that the love we’re so proud of might be small, and that the thing we think is the opposite of love — fear — is actually its proof.

The cotton candy isn’t just empty calories — it’s on fire, and you’re sitting in the chair eating it while the room burns, and the sweetness makes you think everything is fine.

The Madness of Almost Everything

You know the feeling. You don’t need me to describe it. The alarm. The phone before your feet hit the floor. The schedule that starts before you’re awake and ends after you’re not. The mortgage. The kids. The doctor’s appointment you keep putting off. The text you forgot to return. The news that isn’t news but won’t stop coming. The evening that was supposed to be quiet and somehow wasn’t. The prayer that felt like talking into a room with nobody in it.

And somewhere underneath all of it — underneath the productive days and the exhausted ones, underneath the good Sunday and the one where you just sat there — a question you don’t ask out loud because you’re not sure you want the answer:

Is this it?

I got saved. I read my Bible — some. I go to church. I pray — some. I try. I really do try. And there are days when the wheels catch and something moves, and there are weeks when nothing moves and I’m not even sure I’m on the track anymore.

Is this it?

No.

But the reason it feels like “this is it” is not because you’ve arrived. It’s because you’ve been fed junk food and told it was a meal.

The modern world does not make you too busy for God. The modern world makes you too full of the wrong things to be hungry for the right ones. There is a difference. The man who eats cotton candy all day is not without appetite. He is without nourishment. His stomach is full and his body is starving, and he doesn’t know it because the sweetness told him he was fine.

The schedule is not the enemy. The mortgage is not the enemy. The phone is not the enemy. The enemy is the fullness that isn’t full — the sense that you’ve got this, that you’re managing, that things are under control, that church is on Sunday and Bible is in the morning and you’ve checked the boxes and now you can get on with the real business of living.

That is Laodicea. Not a church that denied Christ. A church that didn’t need Him. “I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing.” Revelation 3:17. That is not a description of wicked people. That is a description of comfortable people. And Christ’s response to comfortable people is not gentle. He spits them out of His mouth.

But Laodicea is not the only diagnosis. John puts it plainly: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” 1 John 2:15. He doesn’t say the world is a distraction. He doesn’t say the world is junk food. He says the love of the world and the love of the Father cannot coexist. They are mutually exclusive. You cannot have both. Where one grows, the other shrinks.

The world passes away. The lust passes away. The man who loves them passes away with them. This is not metaphor. This is diagnosis. The fullness you feel is the fullness of a dying man eating a dying meal. The cotton candy isn’t just empty calories — it’s on fire, and you’re sitting in the chair eating it while the room burns, and the sweetness makes you think everything is fine.

James is even blunter: “Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.” James 4:4. Not “is missing out.” Not “could do better.” Enemy. The word is echthros — hostile, opposed, at war. You cannot be friends with what God is at war against. The love of the world is not a minor habit. It is enmity. It is taking the other side.

And the world does not need your hatred to kill you. It needs your affection. It needs your comfort. It needs your sense that things are fine, that you’ve got this, that the schedule is manageable and the prayer is optional and the hunger will wait. The world doesn’t devour you with evil. It puts you to sleep with normal.

The anglerfish puts out a light that looks exactly like what you need. The instinct that saves also kills. “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope.” Romans 8:20

The Creature That Wouldn’t Eat

There is a fish in the deep ocean called the oarfish. It can grow to eight meters, silver and red, like something out of a sailor’s nightmare. It holds position vertically in the dark, head up, sustained by what it reflects. When it surfaces — rarely, usually dying — people call it a sea serpent.

Giant oarfish (Regalecus glesne), up to 8 meters long. In captivity, the larvae refuse to eat. Something about captivity is so fundamentally wrong that they would rather starve than participate.

Scientists have tried to keep oarfish larvae in captivity. The tanks are clean. The water is filtered. The temperature is controlled. Brine shrimp and plankton are placed right there — the standard laboratory diet that keeps everything else alive.

The oarfish larvae will not eat.

Their mouths work. The food is right there. Something about captivity is so fundamentally wrong that they would rather starve than participate. They die in the presence of food, because what is offered is not what they were made for, and they know it — not by thought, but by design.

The full verse — not just the part Jesus quoted — says God caused the hunger first. Then He fed them with something they had never seen. Manna that could not be stored. Bread from heaven that taught dependence.

The oarfish in the tank is offered bread, and it will not eat it, because what it needs does not come from our hand. And that refusal is not weakness. That refusal is the most honest thing in the room. It is the creature saying: I was made for something else, and I will not pretend this is enough.

Modern life is the tank. Clean. Controlled. Correct by every visible standard. And the oarfish is the part of you that knows it’s not enough — the part that sits in the pew and feels nothing, the part that prays and hears silence, the part that checks the boxes and wonders why the hunger won’t go away. That part is not broken. That part is the only honest thing in you. It is the part that was made for real food, and it is starving on what is being offered, and it refuses to pretend otherwise.

The question is whether you will listen to it.

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). At seventeen, God opened his eyes. What followed wasn’t comfort — it was vehement longings of soul after God. Prayer became breathing. He couldn’t help it. Public domain, Princeton University Art Museum.

The Man Who Prayed Like Breathing

In 1720, a seventeen-year-old boy in New England was converted. Not a dramatic road-to-Damascus event — he described it as a sense of inward sweetness that came, he said, “as it were, from the breath of God.” He started spending most of his time in contemplation and prayer. Not because someone told him to. Not because it was disciplined. It was breathing. He couldn’t help it.

His name was Jonathan Edwards. He was the oarfish that refused the tank — not by instinct, but by sight. He tasted something real, and the artificial wouldn’t satisfy anymore. He would go on to pastor the same church for twenty-three years, and he and George Whitefield would be the instruments God used to shake a continent in the Great Awakening. MacArthur went looking through Iain Murray’s biography for the key to his power — what made him progress so far, what lifted him above his peers, what produced the kind of life that leaves a mark on history.

The answer wasn’t his intellect. Plenty of brilliant men are spiritually dead.

The answer wasn’t his opportunities. Northampton was a small town.

The answer was strong religious affections. Not discipline. Not duty. Not a schedule. An appetite so fierce it rearranged his life around itself. “Vehement longings of soul after God” — that’s how he described it at seventeen, and it never stopped.

And before you say, “Well, that was Edwards” — before you say, “That was a different time, a different kind of man, a different kind of Christianity that doesn’t exist anymore” — sit with this for a moment. The modern says: if somebody has heaven so much on his mind, he is no earthly good. That would be this guy. A teenager who prayed like it was air, who walked the fields alone because he couldn’t stop talking to God, whose contemporaries thought him strange and whose church eventually voted him out.

Heaven so much on his mind that it shook a continent.

Two sides of the same longing:

Fear — not terror, but the kind of reverence that makes sin feel like sawdust in your mouth. You see who He is, and the things you used to run after don’t run after you anymore. Not because you white-knuckle it. Because you’ve seen something that makes them small.

Delight — not obligation, not “I should pray more,” but the thing David described: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” Psalm 42:1. You rush into His presence the way you rush toward water when you’re dying of thirst. Not because you’re supposed to. Because you can’t not.

Faber again: the fear of God is not the fear of punishment. It is the dread of offending someone you love — and love’s excess makes fear but love’s excess. They are the same motion. You cannot separate them.

The Church That Had Everything and Grew Nothing

Paul wrote to a church that was doing well. 1 Thessalonians 4:1 — “Furthermore then we beseech you, brethren, and exhort you by the Lord Jesus, that as ye have received of us how ye ought to walk and to please God, so ye would abound more and more.”

He’s not correcting them. He’s not saying “you’re doing it wrong.” He’s saying: you’re walking. You’re pleasing God. Now excel still more.

The word is perisseuō. Overflow. Surpass. Exist in full quantity. It’s not “try harder.” It’s not “do more.” It’s “you’ve stepped onto the path — now walk further than you thought possible.”

But then there’s Corinth. First Corinthians 1:7 — “Ye come behind in no gift.” Every spiritual gift present and active. And what did it produce? Drunkenness at the Lord’s Table. Incest nobody confronted. Lawsuits between brothers. Pride. Chaos. False teachers eating everything served to them without discerning a thing.

You can have every gift and produce nothing. The power is available — “in the Lord Jesus” — and still be stunted. It’s possible. It happens. Three things halt progress in Corinth, and they halt us:

1. Corrupted worship — going through the motions while the heart is somewhere else. The form without the fear. The Sunday you sat through but weren’t really in.
2. Indulging in sin — not the dramatic kind. The comfortable kind. The kind that doesn’t interrupt your schedule. The grudge you’ve carried so long it feels like furniture. The compromise you’ve stopped calling compromise.
3. False teaching — and the most dangerous false teaching isn’t the obvious heresy. It’s the comfortable one. The one that says you’ve arrived. The one that says this is it — Sunday morning, check the box, you’re good. That one.

The Starving Ones Were the Hungry Ones

MacArthur told a story about Russia, right after the Soviet Union collapsed. He visited churches there. The conditions were almost unimaginable — 250 rubles a month, less than a hundred dollars. Thirty-one people sharing one bathroom. Ten-year waits for an apartment. Faces blank. Only the children laughed.

But in the churches — in the churches — there was a longing after God that MacArthur said he had rarely seen in America. “Forget the junk food,” they said. “Give us the real stuff.” They knew they were wretched, and they wanted it different.

Deep sea corals at Wagner Seamount. The creation was subjected to futility — not willingly, not by its own choice, but by the One who subjected it in hope. NOAA, public domain.

The contrast wasn’t subtle. America: fat, sassy, “having need of nothing” — Revelation 3:17, the church at Laodicea. Overfed on spiritual junk food. Know much, hunger little.

Russia: starving, and hungry.

Now hear the contrast and don’t misplace it. The point is not that suffering is good. Plenty of suffering people are just bitter. The point is not that you should feel guilty for having a warm house and a full fridge. The point is this: the Russian believers had nothing else. The junk food was gone. The entertainment was gone. The comfort was gone. And when the noise stopped, they discovered what they were actually hungry for.

You don’t need to lose everything to find that out. But you might need to stop eating long enough to realize you’re starving.

Edwards wasn’t suffering when he was seventeen. He was a young man in colonial New England with every advantage. The hunger didn’t come from deprivation. It came from sight. He saw God, and the sight produced appetite.

That’s the key. Not deprivation. Sight produces appetite.

Not a Zap

“Excel still more” is not a second blessing. It’s not a crisis experience that catapults you into a higher life. Paul doesn’t say “receive a second work of grace.” He says walk further.

It’s progress. You put one foot in front of the other. More often. More faithfully. More consistently. Not everyone grows at the same rate. Failure doesn’t end growth — you get up and you go again. Progress may not always be visible. Your circumstances don’t necessarily reflect God’s commendation. Sometimes the holiest people in the room are the ones nobody notices.

But the direction matters. The trajectory matters. You are either moving toward God or drifting away from Him — because the current is always away. Nobody drifts toward holiness. Nobody accidentally becomes more like Christ. The river only runs one direction, and it’s downstream.

The Command Behind the Request

Verse 2: “For ye know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus.”

Paraggelia. Military directives. Commanding officer to subordinate. This is not a suggestion. This is not “here’s a nice idea if you’re into that kind of thing.” This is Christ’s authority behind a command.

Paul says “you know” — and he’s said it about six times already in this letter. They haven’t forgotten. The question isn’t knowledge. The question is obedience. You will either obey Christ or you won’t. And what He commands is not mediocrity. He commands excellence. Not the excellence of achievement — the excellence of hunger. The excellence of the man who saw God and couldn’t stop praying, the woman who tasted grace and wanted more, the church that was doing well and was told: walk further.

If the Desire Is There

Here is the promise embedded in the command:

If there is a desire in your heart to excel still more — if you read this and feel something stir, not guilt, not pressure, but hunger — that desire is not self-produced. That desire is evidence. It is the Spirit confirming what He started.

The desire itself is the proof that the Light didn’t just open your eyes. It gave you an appetite that the darkness never could.

Two Sides, One Longing

Fear and delight. Terror and sweetness. The dread of offending the One you love, and the rush of running toward the only fountain that satisfies.

They are not opposites. They are the same love seen from two angles. The fear of God is not the fear of a tyrant. It is the fear of a child who has found a Father who is too holy to approach casually and too good to stay away from. The delight of God is not the delight of a religious hobby. It is the delight of a starving man who has found bread, and the bread is infinite, and the more he eats the more he wants, and the more he wants the more he is given.

Not “blessed are they who have arrived.” Blessed are they who hunger. The filling is promised. The hunger is the qualification.

Paul told the Thessalonians: you are walking. You are pleasing God. Excel still more.

The command is not a burden. It is an invitation to the only thing that satisfies — and the only thing that, the more you get of it, the more you want.

I’m writing in Kansas. This is a Bible study, not a motivational speech. Christ is the point. The longing is the evidence. The desire to excel is the proof that the Light did something real.