spiritual food

Be careful to follow every command I am giving you today, so that you may live and increase and may enter and possess the land the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors. Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.

                                                                      - Deuteronomy 8:1 - 5

This is God speaking to the Israelites but also speaking to us. Consider how God has led you through the vicissitudes of life. He leads us through challenges to humble and test us - to purify and refine us - to make us grow. He humbles us and causes us to hunger. 

For the Israelites, the passage is talking about literal hunger and how God fed them with manna, which was a kind of bread which came from the sky at night and they gathered each morning. But for us, it's talking about spiritual hunger, and the bread from heaven - as the Bible makes clear in other passages - represents Jesus and also the word of God - the Bible. In the New Testament, Jesus is referred to as both the bread from heaven, and the word of God. So, through challenges, God causes us to hunger and then he feeds us with his word.