Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him! Psalm 34:8
I have the finest nutritious food available to me. Food that most of the world is literally dying for and would be considered a blessing to eat. A lot of that food is not just available in my community and within my means to obtain, but is actually within the walls of my home. My head knows how fortunate I am.
Yet often, more often than I’d care to admit, my hand passes over the variety of rich greens and reaches for the processed food. And it’s not just laziness in having to prepare it that stumbles me. My mind and body crave the taste of that nutritionally inferior meal. My emotions look for that hit of sugar in the easily obtained snack.
If I’m not careful, this pattern repeats itself in my spiritual life. I have God’s word available to me in many forms. In my house are a variety of translations to read, technology so I can listen, and a myriad of study tools. I have the body of Christ in my community, the Spirit dwelling within me and access to the Father in prayer. God has assured that I lack nothing for my spiritual health and growth.
Yet often, more often than I’d care to admit, my hand reaches past the Bible to turn on a screen where I fill up on fare that is weak and bland at best and harmful at worst. Or I fill up on feel good ideas that are theologically light and sugarly optimistic. It’s not just that I am having a lazy moment. My mind sometimes craves the pablum that I allow into my home and my mind.
Occasional snacks are fine, but I want to make sure I am deriving nutrition from the proper sources and avoiding those things that are actually harmful to both my body and my soul. I want to feed on Truth and work it out by exercising the spiritual disciplines. It is all available to me, if I will make the right choices.
For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. Hebrews 5:12-14
