Ever catch yourself irritable or restless for no clear reason—like something deep inside just… isn’t quite right? The Bible calls that the hunger and thirst of the soul, and learning to discern it is one of the most important wisdom principles you can learn. It’s the key to…

• Finding satisfaction in life
• Loving God with your soul
• Gaining long-term victory over temptation
• Understanding why bad moods come out of nowhere

Introduction

Good morning! I’m so glad you’re here. I hope you’re in a good mood this morning. A crowd this size, no doubt someone’s in a bad mood. Hopefully it’s not you. But if it is, I think I can help you with that a little later in the message.

But first, I’m Darrell, and the main thing you need to know about me is that I normally attend this campus, third service. “Why the third?” Glad you asked. I attend the late service because all my life, from the time I was born until now, I’ve had one pattern on Sunday: church, then lunch. You get out of church, and then you eat. I don’t know how the early service people do it—you get out of church and then it’s hours before lunchtime. For me, the moment that benediction’s over, my very next agenda item is eating.

In fact, there are even some times when I find myself daydreaming about lunch during the service. Now, it’s mainly during announcements, so you can stop judging me. Obviously, not during the sermon … (hardly ever) But when I do, I usually repent after just a couple minutes and get right back on track focusing on God’s Word.

Now, I’m sure you don’t ever do that. But here’s the good news. Today only, you have a one time special dispensation of grace that grants full permission to think about food throughout the entire sermon guilt-free, because that’s the topic of today’s passage—eating.

Competing Buffets

So let’s do it—let’s daydream about lunch. Imagine you decide to go out to eat today, and as you roll into the parking lot, you notice there are two restaurants right across from each other, and both of them are all-you-can-eat buffets. Which one will you choose?

Which Will You Choose?

That’s exactly the question we face in Proverbs chapter 9, which is a chapter in God’s Word about two competing all-you-can-eat buffets.

All summer we’ve been in a series on the topic of wisdom. Wisdom is God’s way of guiding us through life. And I don’t know of any wisdom principle that’s more important … and more neglected than this one in Proverbs 9. It’s one of the most crucial principles in the whole Bible for understanding how to love God with your soul and how to gain long-term victory over temptation And it will help you not only recover from a bad mood, but understand what’s causing it.

God Wants Us to Compare the Two Buffets

So let’s look at these two buffets in Proverbs 9. The first one has a big sign out front that says “Lady Wisdom’s Buffet.”

Proverbs 9:1 Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn out its seven pillars. 2 She has prepared her meat and mixed her wine; she has also set her table.

Now here comes the advertising.

3 She has sent out her maids, and she calls from the highest point of the city. 4 “Let all who are simple come in here!” she says to those who lack judgment. 5 “Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed.

Now you look over at that other restaurant, and the sign says, “Lady Folly’s Buffet.”

And she copies everything Lady Wisdom says word-for-word.

… 14 She sits at the door of her house, on a seat at the highest point of the city, 15 calling out to those who pass by, who go straight on their way. 16 “Let all who are simple come in here!” she says to those who lack judgment.

Two competing buffets, right across the parking lot from each other, and wisdom, following God’s guidance through life, is all about which buffet you choose.

And at first, they look pretty similar. Each buffet has a hostess who is inviting you into her house. Verse 1—lady wisdom—verse 13, the woman folly.

And both give an invitation—the same invitation, word-for-word. That’s a clue from the Holy Spirit that he wants us to compare these two banquests side-by-side.

And when we do that, we find that up to this point, they’re pretty much idtentical. But when we get to the actual menu, you find they’re serving very different food. Wisdom’s menu is cooked up by wisdom herself. Verse 5: “Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed.” But look at Folly’s food in v.17. Her food is stolen.

That’s one big contrast. Another one is the requirement for admission. To get into Wisdom’s buffet, she requires that you “leave your simple ways” (v.6). But here’s the interesting thing—when you compare them side by side, on this point, there’s no counterpart in Folly’s buffet. Folly has no requirement—you don’t have to leave anything behind, just come as you are and stay as you are—no demands at all.

And one last contrast—the outcome of eating at that table, and this is the main point. Wisdom’s menu gives you life. Verse 6 you will live

Verse 18, at Folly’s table: the dead are there, her guests are in the depths of the grave. And that’s how the chapter ends. That’s the climax, that’s the main point of the chapter. Two competing buffets that look the same, but they represent two very different paths—one leading to life and the other to death.

Why Food?

And if you’ve been with us all summer, that’s like a broken record—two paths. You see it over and over throughout the wisdom literature—the most fundamental principle of wisdom is to choose the right way, not the wrong way. And most of the time, that choice is described in those terms—two ways, two paths, two roads. Jesus talked about the narrow road and wide road.

But here, instead of two roads, it’s two meals. Isn’t that a little strange?

When you give guidance to your kids, you might say… , “Make sure you don’t take the wrong path, stay on the narrow road.” But have you ever said, “Hey kids, as you make your way through life, make sure you choose the right buffet”? It seems like a strange way to talk. Why describe wisdom in terms of choosing the right food and drink instead of choosing the right path?

There’s a lot we could learn from Proverbs 9, but today I just want to explore that one question. Instead of two roads, two ways, two philosophies, two directions in life, two value systems—why two meals?

I think it’s because God wants us to understand something deeply important about how God designed your soul.

Soul Thirst

The Hebrew word for soul is the normal, everyday word for appetite. Sometimes it’s translated “soul” and other times it’s translated “appetite” depending on the context. Your soul is the part of your inner man where all your desires come from. Cravings, longings, appetites, yearning—all of that is the activity of your soul. And so Scripture speaks repeatedly about the hunger and thirst of the soul. Did you know your soul gets thirsty?

Just as God designed your mouth to keep drying up and getting thirsty so you need to get a drink every so often, he designed your soul the same way. And you see that frequently in Scripture. The psalmists routinely cried out to God:

… my soul thirsts Psalm 42:1

Psalm 63:1 … my soul thirsts

Psalm 143:6 my soul thirsts … like a parched land.

Isaiah 55:1 Come, all you who are thirsty … 2 eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the fatness of food.

That’s just a sampling. God has something he wants us to understand that can only be communicated with the metaphor of the hunger and thirst of the soul.

But what does the metaphor mean? If you walked up to someone at work and said, “Hey, how are you doing?” and he said, “I’m OK. My soul’s a little thirsty,” – what would he be saying? Chances are, no one has ever said that to you. No one talks that way—not even Christians—even though it’s all over the Bible.

My guess is, people don’t talk that way because they don’t know what soul-thirst is. We’ve all felt it. I promise you’ve felt it—you might be feeling it right now. But most people miss it because even though they feel it, they don’t know what that feeling means. We tend to be like infants. A little baby gets hungry but he has no idea why he feels so miserable. He doesn’t know it’s hunger, so he just cries. We tend to be the same way when we get spiritually thirsty because we don’t know what it is.

But it’s not hard to detect. The hunger and thirst of the soul is just simply the emptiness or dryness you feel when your soul lacks something it needs. Something inside you just doesn’t feel good. It has a lot of forms—sadness, anger, moodiness, irritability. Sometimes it comes in the form of feeling discouraged or hopeless. Maybe bored, fearful, drained, unmotivated, unable to enjoy the pleasures of life—any kind of discomfort in your inner being—that’s soul thirst.

I started the sermon by saying I hope you’re not in a bad mood this morning, but maybe you are. If so—that’s soul thirst. If you’re irritable and you don’t know why—it doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you. That’s just what it feels like when your soul gets dry.

“But wait a minute—how do you know it’s as soul issue? Couldn’t those negative emotions be caused by lack of sleep, hormones, chemical imbalances, a fight with your spouse, lower back pain …” Sure. There are all kinds of things that make your soul thirsty—just like there are a lot of activities in life that make your mouth thirsty. But regardless of what caused it, it’s still thirst.

If you don’t get anything else out of this sermon, I’d count it a success if you got this one thing—learning to discern thirst. You feel moody or irritable or dissatisfied, just stop and realize, “Oh, I know what’s happening here—my soul is thirsty.” Learning to do that is one of the greatest wisdom principles you can ever gain.

But once you figure that out—then what? What’s the solution to soul thirst? You feel lousy, brokenhearted, angry, stressed, what can you run to to feel better?

The Search for Bread

One thing’s for sure—you run to something. When your soul dries up, the drive to find something to satisfy it is one of the most powerful forces in life. Your soul isn’t like a little pond that gets some ripples and just needs a few pleasant thoughts to get back to its placid state. No. God made your soul a black hole of desire—a volcano of appetite that cannot be ignored, and it will drive you to whatever your soul thinks is food and drink. Whatever your soul thinks will make it feel better.

Some people reach for pills or alcohol. For others it’s exercise or family or music. Others lean in harder to their work or get lost in gaming. For some, it’s sex or golf or Netflix or sleep or a glass of wine. Some of us try to scroll our way out of soul thirst. Just turn to your phone when you don’t feel good.

Many times, we mistake spiritual hunger for physical hunger and we try to address problems like loneliness or boredom with a pint of Haagen Dazs or a bag of chips. Emotional eating is an attempt to satisfy spiritual hunger with physical food. When you open the refrigerator and see hundreds of dollars worth of food and think, “There’s nothing to eat”—when that happens, you’re hungry all right, but it’s your soul, not your body that’s hungry.

This is one way people get caught up in addictions.

Fake Bread—Why This Is so Important

So can you see why one of the most important wisdom principles in the whole Bible is choosing the right buffet whenever your soul is empty and dried up? How much trouble do people get in by going to the wrong source when they don’t feel good? How many lives have been destroyed by using the wrong thing as water?

In Isaiah 55, right after God said, “Come to me, all you who are thirsty,” you know what the very next thing he said was?

Isaiah 55:2 Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?

Our natural response to soul thirst is to run to fake bread. Isaiah calls it fake bread. Jeremiah calls it broken cisterns that cannot hold water (Jeremiah 2:13). Proverbs calls it Lady Folly’s table because choosing the wrong thing to satisfy the thirst of the soul is the opposite of wisdom. It’s folly.

It’s folly because nothing on that table satisfies. And not only does it fail to satisfy, but it robs you of life. Remember? That’s the final conclusion of Proverbs 9.

Proverbs 9:18 her guests are in the depths of the grave.

But Wisdom’s food gives life. Everything on wisdom’s table makes you more alive. It refreshes and strengthens and restores your motivation and fills your soul with health and vigor and energy. But folly’s fake food, drains life from you. It saps your strength, dampens your joy, weakens your spirit—the opposite of health and thriving.

Counterfeit Food

So what is it that’s over there on folly’s table? What is the fake food? You probably noticed, when I gave you that list of things people run to when their soul dries up, some of those things I listed are sinful and others are good. If you respond to soul thirst by getting high or drunk or using porn or anything else forbidden in Scripture, that’s obviously not true bread. We all understand that.

But what about family, grandkids, work, exercise, friends—aren’t those good things? Yes, they’re good. But can you think of any place in the Bible that ever calls any of those things food and drink? All that stuff is good, and it has its place to be sure, but it’s not food. The Bible never calls any of it food or drink.

And that’s important to know because what did we learn last week about unfulfilled desire? According to James 4, unfulfilled desire causes fights and quarrels. You look to your wife as water—something to satisfy your soul thirst, and she looks to you to satisfy hers, neither one of you is water, so you both go unsatisfied, and that just makes you irritated at each other and you fight. People with dried up, parched souls can get awfully ornery.

What Is the Food and Drink?

The Food Is God

So if the Bible never calls any of the remedies we normally run to food and drink—is there anything the Bible does call food and drink? Yes—one thing. Jesus said it: “I am the bread of life. I am the living water.” You read this chapter and say, “Where is God in Proverbs 9? There’s Wisdom; there’s Folly—where’s God? He’s on the table. He’s there on the platters and he’s in the cups and pitchers. God is the food. When Jesus said, “I am bread” and God says, “I am a spring of water,” he’s describing his nature to us. This is an attribute of God—the fact that his presence satisfies human soul thirst.

Suppose your body gets dehydrated and you take a big swig of nice, cold gasoline, will it solve the problem? No. Why? Because gas doesn’t have the properties needed to hydrate the human body. Water does.

And when your soul dries up, only one substance in the universe has the properties that will hydrate the human soul, isn’t actually a substance; it’s the presence of God.

And not only can it satisfy—it will always satisfy—just like water always works for quenching thirst. It’s impossible to experience God’s presence and come away dry, because the fact that his presence satisfies soul thirst is part of his very nature.

If you buy a book on the attributes of God, you’ll never see a chapter on the food-likeness of God. That’s a huge miss in Christian literature because the Bible repeats that attribute of God over and over and over—much more often than it speaks of other more celebrated attributes. In Jeremiah 17:13 God says, “I am the spring of living water.” And not just water, but in Isaiah 55, he’s also like milk, wine, and the fatness of food—not just food, but specifically fatty food. Water refreshes. Wine was a festive drink—for times of celebration and joy, like at a wedding. Milk was a luxury and a sign of abundance—remember, the “land flowing with milk and honey”? And fatty food—think ribeye and porterhouse—not chia seeds and kale. In Psalm 19 and 119 his words are sweeter than honey—that’s the biblical word for dessert. It was their version of doughnuts—which, by the way—I would never want to badmouth my own campus, but I have to say—you have way better doughnuts. That’s good, because delicious desserts help us understand something about God.

This is how God describes himself—like fresh spring water and milk and fine wine and porterhouse and ribeye and homemade cherry pie with ice cream.

In Isaiah 58 he is a feast. In John 6 he is the real bread and real drink. In Psalm 63 he is the richest of foods that brings joy to David’s withering soul. In Jeremiah 2 and 15 and Psalms 1,42,63, and 143 he is the spring of living water that satisfies so much more than the broken cisterns and that never fails, and that supplies our roots and makes us flourish like a tree, and that David longed for like a thirsty deer.

In Psalm 36 he is a storehouse of food and river of delights. And in Psalm 34 he is the delicacy that your soul will crave if you just taste and see. This is how God wants us to think of him. He is food and drink.

Counterfeit

But is he really the only food and drink? What if you find that some of this world’s remedies do seem to satisfy your soul thirst?

Well, remember, when Folly sets up her table, she copies Lady Wisdom. Everything on Folly’s table is a counterfeit of what’s on Wisdom’s table. And Wisdom’s food is the presence of God, so Folly’s food is all a counterfeit of God’s presence.

And it’s a convincing counterfeit—that’s why it seems to satisfy at first. It all looks and smells and tastes like real food. Look at v.17—what folly offers is delicious. A lot of things in life seem to make you feel better, for a time, but long term they are leaky cisterns that can’t hold water, and after that temporary pleasure or relief, they will drain life from you.

That’s why there are billionaires who are miserable. Some of them get hooked on drugs, work themselves into the grave, or even go insane. They can have anything they want in this world, but that black hole of desire God put inside you is so massive, not even the whole world is enough to satisfy it. Only real food. This is what Augustine was talking about when he said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.”

How Important Is This?

The Lord’s Table

And if you wonder how important this is, consider this: Other religions might have all kinds of rituals and rites and ceremonies. How many rituals did God give us for worship? Just one. Just one recurring ceremony mandated in the Bible for our worship in the church—what is it? The Lord’s … table. The only worship ritual the Lord requires of us is eating and drinking—a symbol of experiencing the Lord Jesus Christ as food and drink.

The Sweep of Human History

Think of the whole sweep of redemptive history. The Bible begins with the whole creation getting wrecked when mankind ate the wrong food. And how will it all get fixed? Go all the way to the very last page of the Bible. The final conclusion of Scripture:

Revelation 22:17 … Whoever is thirsty, let him come … take the free gift of the water of life.”

That’s how the Bible ends.

Loving God with Your Soul

What did Jesus say is the greatest commandment? It’s to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your … soul. How do you love God with your soul? Your heart is the part of you that is devoted; your soul is the part of you that hungers and thirsts. It’s the seat of desire and appetite.

And part of the greatest command is to love the Lord with that part of your being—the craving, desiring, thirsting part. Make God the object of your cravings—that’s how you love God with your soul.

Come to God dry and walk away refreshed. Come with anxiety and walk away in peace. You go from weakness to strength, sadness to joy. Those are the kinds of things that happen when you experience God as food and drink.

Let this revolutionize the way you interact with God. I posed the question earlier—why present the two options as two meals instead of the normal metaphor of two paths or roads? One reason is that the successful Christian life is not just a matter of making proper left and right turns in life. Wisdom is not just about making good decisions. It’s about what you do with your thirst and what kind of interactions you have with God.

Your interactions with God should be similar to those times when you’re so hungry that your body is weak and shaky and you feel miserable, then you get a good, wholesome meal and now you have strength and energy and life. And choosing those kinds of interactions with God over any other fake food is the essence of wisdom.

Preferring: How to Resist Temptation

And it’s also the best way to defeat temptation. When your deepest cravings are satisfied with real food, fake food loses its appeal.

So often our approach to resisting temptation is to stand at folly’s table and try to fast. “I’m not going to take a bite! I won’t eat. I’ll just say no!” That won’t work for long, but even if it did, how does that honor God?

If your friend is a world class chef, and you want to honor him for his skills, would you go to him and say, “I went to your competitor’s restaurant and just sat in there all day and ordered nothing”? Would that honor your friend? No, it would just be … weird.

The way to show everyone what a great chef your friend is would be to go to his restaurant and pig out. Don’t try to fast at folly’s table; pig out at God’s table. Go to Wisdom’s buffet and just say yes. That’s how you love God with your soul—with your desire.

I think sometimes we forget how important desire is in a love relationship. Imagine a man comes home from work one day looking beaten down and haggard. The wife says, “What’s wrong?” “It was a hard day. There’s this woman at work who’s just so beautiful and all day long all I wanted to do was flirt with her, take her in my arms, kiss her, and just run away with her. But, you should be proud of me. I just gritted my teeth and resisted—even though every fiber of my being wanted to be with her, I stood strong and finally, at the end of the day, painful as it was, I forced myself to come home to you. That’s how much self-control I have.”

If you’re that wife, I don’t think you feel very loved at that point. That’s not how your wife wants you to choose her. Your wife is honored when you don’t just choose her, but you prefer her above all the other women in the world. She wants you to choose her out of desire, not discipline.

That’s true in your marriage, and it’s true in your relationship with God. What Proverbs 9 teaches us is that in our battle against sin, the way God wants you to win it is not through sheer willpower in denying yourself what you really want. It’s by having such satisfying experiences at his table, that you don’t want Folly’s fake food. That’s the key to resisting temptation, and it’s the only way that will work long term.

God didn’t design you to go without food. He doesn’t want you to go through life saying no to all your strongest desires and feeling deprived. God designed you to desire good things, and to indulge to your heart’s content. That’s how God wants his people to live—full, satisfied, delighted, refreshed.

The way God wants you to overcome bad desires is to overwhelm them with stronger good desires. That’s how you change desire.

Did you know you can change your desires? I don’t know how many times I’ve gone into a gas station and bought some garbage snack that tastes terrible and that’s completely unsatisfying and I regret it the rest of the day, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t resist it in the moment. What’s the solution to that? Easy. Just sit me down at a table at Cheesecake Factory and bring out some of that hot bread and butter, and then a sizzling medium rare steak with mashed potatoes, and then a slice or two of the pecan turtle cheesecake with extra whipped cream. At that point, someone could offer me all the food in a 7-11 and resisting it would be the easiest thing I do all day. It would require zero self-control. That’s how God wants us to defeat temptation.

How to Eat

So that leaves us with one last question. We know what the hunger and thirst of the soul is, and we know God is the only food and drink that can satisfy it. But there’s one more piece. How do you eat?

If you’re sitting at home on a Tuesday night, you’re feeling a little off, you say, “Oh my soul is thirsty, I need to eat some food from the good buffet”—what would you do exactly?

Because let’s face it—we’ve all had a dried up soul, read the Bible, and came away just as dry as ever. You spend time in prayer, and it wasn’t like pecan turtle cheesecake. Instead it was just … kind of … boring. You come to church and sing songs and other people seem to be having these amazing experiences with God but if you’re honest with yourself, nothing’s really happening for you.

What’s going on? Well, if I go to a buffet and come away hungry, there’s only one explanation—I didn’t eat. If I read my Bible, pray, and sing praise songs and come away dry, it means I didn’t experience God as food and drink. I didn’t eat.

So how do you eat and drink God? Jesus gave us the answer in John 6:35.

John 6:35 Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who trusts in me will never be thirsty.

The way to experience God as food and drink so that your soul is refreshed and satisfied is by trusting something he said. Every time you lean on something God promised—you rely on it, trust in it, bank on it—you are eating and drinking and that will nourish your soul.

You might have been one of the ones who, a half hour ago, wasn’t in a great mood. But maybe now you’re thinking, “Wait, what happened to my bad mood? It’s gone.” What happened?

It could be that somewhere along the line over the last 30 minutes, you ate and drank a little bit. You saw something in God’s Word and trusted it. Or you had some other kind of direct interaction with God through faith and experienced his presence. That’s eating and drinking. That’s why your soul isn’t dry anymore.

If that didn’t happen for you, your soul is still thirsty, maybe what you need is a different promise to trust—Scripture is loaded with them.

Conclusion

The next time you feel that familiar dryness — that irritability, that restlessness, that vague dissatisfaction, identify it as soul thirst, , instead of going to the refrigerator or the medicine cabinet or your phone , just ask, “How long has it been since I’ve had a drink of living water?”

Then take a drink. Do what Jesus said to do. Come to him, enjoy being on the receiving end of some of his attributes, and trust some of his promises.

Maybe all you need is a sip—a couple minutes alone with God and your mood will be right back on track. Maybe you need a big meal or a long-term eating plan. But one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty—the food-likeness of God is just as much a part of his nature as his omniscience or omnipotence or love or any other attribute, which means his presence, if you experience it, will always, always satisfy the cravings of your soul.

Summary

Proverbs 9 takes the familiar choice of two roads/paths/ways, and puts it in terms of 2 meals because there is more to wise living than making right decisions. It’s also about where you go with your soul thirst. God is the only true food and drink, and you eat and drink by coming to him and trusting something he has said.