June in January: Part 2 - Ditch the Diet and EAT!

Not exactly the words you expect to read so soon after the first of the year I suppose.  However I mean it – eat already, girl!  First, I don’t care what your weight is or what your current diet plan is (no, really I don’t).  If people would be as concerned about their standing before God as they are about that number on the scale in the morning the world would be a much healthier place in the ways that really count (see 1 Tim. 1:8).  Eat for the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31).  That’s all you need to practice (yes, I struggle with this too, but realize it is a heart issue above all).

My mother used to tell me how my Grandma June would occasionally set their table for supper when they were young.  She would prepare the meal and set a plate out for each person: my mother, her two brothers and herself.  Food would fill the plates of the children, but on her own plate Grandma June would set her big black Bible. While the children ate, she read the Word of God.  All were feasting.

This is the second and more important way I am encouraging you to eat.  Consume the written Words of God.  I’m not sure if Grandma June was fasting to conserve money, lose weight, or out of pure devotion to God.  However, I do know she LOVED the Word of God.  She consumed it readily and stored it within her heart like David in Psalm 119:11: “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.”  I told you last week of her passion for Jesus; this passion only comes through deep devotion to God’s Word.

This is a beautiful picture of depending on God to provide our sustenance, our daily bread.  A plate set out and a Bible on top.  Did that speak volumes to her children?  You can bet it did.  In this action she was stating that God’s Word was more important to her than food and through it she found her strength and all she needed to continue on.  She ate it up.
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You eat up too, Ladies.  So many of you are emaciated.  Whether your waistline is thick or thin, whether your doctor has given you a clean bill of health, whether you attend church or not.  We wander around and discuss the dust (aka food) we consume or don’t consume and do nothing to fix the problem of our true starvation.  Continually suffering from a preventable disease for no good reason.  The cure lies covered in dust on our bookshelves or even at times in our very hands.  We may take a small sampling on Sunday mornings yet decide to starve ourselves throughout the week.
We wonder why we are weak and don’t feel up for the task of living this life.  Always seeking strength through other avenues; trying to fill that Jesus shaped whole in our soul with more dust (food, hobbies, TV, love).

Stop.  Go to the table and eat.  Not just a crumb here and there, gorge yourself on it.  God’s Word is an anomaly.  The more we get the more we want.  If you don’t feel a craving for Scripture, here is what to do:

1 – Pray for God to give you the desire, “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.  And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.”  Do you think it is God’s will that you read the Bible?  Absolutely!  Ask already.

 2 – Read it anyway, read God’s Word whether you feel like it or not.  Someone who is truly starving eventually loses their appetite for food, it is an illness, and it can kill you (it kills thousands every day).  Read whether you feel like it or not, trusting God that his word brings life.  “My soul clings to the dust; give me life according to your word!”  Psalm 119:25

Grandma June read her Bible not just at the dinner table but nearly everywhere.  She would heartily agree with David’s 176 verses of adoration in Psalms 119. How appropriate that in God’s Word the longest chapter contained in it is a love song about that very Word! 

Eat, ladies, and stop starving.  Fill your body with the life giving words of God.   Like Peter when Jesus asked if he wanted to stay with him or go, reply, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” John 6:68