“Don’t fill up on junk; you won’t be hungry for dinner!” My mom must have said that to me and my siblings a million times when we were growing up. She knew if we ate too many Twinkies in the afternoon, we wouldn’t be hungry later for the healthy dinner she was preparing for our family.

The Pharisees in Matthew 12 were filled with themselves. They were self-satisfied, even sated, by their positions of power as interpreters and enforcers of the Mosaic laws and the temple codes. They had left no room for Jesus.

In contrast, Jesus’ disciples gave up everything to follow him. They walked miles and miles of dusty roads with him every day, teaching and healing. These men were hungry! This hunger is the advantage the disciples of Jesus had over the Pharisees. This hunger is the advantage Christ says the poor have over the rich. This is the advantage followers of Christ have over worldly men. They feel their need more keenly. They admit their insufficiency.

As adults, we still fill up on junk; we are terrified of emptiness. We stuff ourselves with sex, alcohol or drugs, work, politics, social media—anything to fill our emptiness. But emptiness is good. No one who is already full can be filled by God.

Let us be like the disciples. Let’s travel light and stay hungry. Instead of stuffing ourselves with what we think we need, let’s carve out some “empty” time each day—time to be quiet and still, time to deepen our interior capacity for Christ. Let’s walk with him through fields of wheat and let him fill us. There is something greater than the temple here. There is something greater than the whole world here. There is Christ Himself.