Feed On Him
Although I try to eat healthy – vegetables, chicken, turkey, whole foods, and ample water, there are times when I allow busyness to take me prisoner and lead me to the seductively beautiful town of “Snackdom.” My typical pattern is busyness leads to imbalance, and imbalance leads to unhealthy eating habits. I resort to eating fast food, junk food, and food that has no nutritional value at all. In doing so, I gain weight, I become sluggish and easily fatigued, I increase my chances of diseases, and I believe I speed up the process of death. In essence, unhealthy eating habits can and will decrease my quality of life. I know this and could do better.
Not only can busyness cause imbalance, unhealthy eating habits and decrease the quality of our life physically, but it also can cause unhealthy eating habits spiritually and decrease the quality of our spiritual life. We resort to feeding off the fast foods of self-sufficiency and yesterday’s blessings, and the junk food of sin, disobedience, spiritual cliches and misinterpreted and misapplied texts from God word.
Jesus is calling us to slow down, minimize the distractions, and develop healthy eating habits, the habit of feeding on him – his words, his life, his thinking. In feeding on him, we lose the weights of the sins that so easily entangles us, we are energized with his resurrection power, and we respond to life like he would. In Jesus are all the nutrients of real life and living.
My present spiritual eating habit is the “Gospels in 30.” I am reading through the Gospels in 30 days here and journaling about what junk foods of disobedience need to be taken out of my diet and what healthy foods of Jesus’ life need to be added.
What are your present spiritual eating habits? What needs to be taken out of your diet and what needs to be added?
Popularity: 7% [?]
Tags: Bible, Reading Habits
January 29th, 2010 at 8:57 pm
wow, i could have written this post myself as these are my very same struggles. To break out requires planning, and planning requires us to SLOW DOWN, as you point out. thanks so much for sharing. It's a God tap on the shoulder for me. love to you bro and the beautiful fam.
January 29th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
I too had fallen into a bad eating habits of partial scriptures and wondering why I was still thirsty after drinking so called motivational words and quotable sayings.
Never one to make resolutions, with the beginning New Year I found myself wondering how I had gotten so fat on junk food of fast prayer and quick-shakes of meditation. I have written my SOUL- business plan for living, loving and dining on the Word of God. I have began a Ten week dining experience of the Psalms ( a discipleship bible study program) which requires me to journal and study daily what I have to release, reject and rejoice for a right relationship with the Father, and Son.
I am no longer rushing through the day, worried that I had too much to get done and not enough time. As I have slowed down to study and digest the word , I have rediscoverd that I have time for all the Lord has placed in my path. My tasks at work and home are being completed with time to spare, Time I am using to spend with Jesus and the Word of the Father.
As always, your words are timely and on point. thank you.
Kym
February 2nd, 2010 at 12:06 am
My wife and I sit down and read a whole chapter from a book in the Bible (currently walking through Luke) in four of the five days of the week, in the same room, and we discuss what we have read and what we feel we have received through the spirit in our reading. Sure, some days are full of epiphany (such as Luke 20, when Jesus displays his scholarly and holy prowess among the chief priests and other "scholars"), others seem mundane. But that's okay. We seek him daily; the three days we do not sit down and read the Bible together, it is because we participate on some church-related function (Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays).
Maybe it's just me being in the field of English, but it's rather frustrating to me, or at the very least unfulfilling to take in paraphrases of the scriptures, or take them "out of context." I'm participating in one "Bible study" of sorts which uses the The Living Bible (TLB) and Good News Bible (GNB) "translations" of the Word, and I was disturbed when I cross-checked the scriptures in my Bibles (I use/NIV; KJV) and they were almost completely changed.
Remember when you heard/were told, "Spare the rod, spoil the child"? Well, it really sounds something like,
""He who spareth the rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him correcteth him betimes" (Proverbs 13:24) and "Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell." (Proverbs 23:13-14)"
Yeah…I understand that the purpose of those scriptures is to reach a wider audience, but I'm sorta uncomfortable with trying to separate the WORD from the words.
I see those Bible reading plans. I've tried a few. It does not work for me. I'm better at going at my own pace. If I do a chapter in the OT and a chapter in the NT per day, I'm cool. That way, I know that I can read at a slow pace, covering every line, re-reading lines, reading the notes in my study Bible, in a more meaningful way instead of filling a "God quota" for the day.