The Spiritual Impact of What You Put in Your Mouth
The religious lifestyle has long been considered a healthy one, with its constraints on sexual promiscuity, alcohol and tobacco use. . . . However, overeating may be one sin that [people] regularly overlook.
Kenneth Ferraro
Sodom’s sins were pride, gluttony, and laziness, while the poor and needy suffered outside her door. She was proud and committed detestable sins, so I wiped her out, as you have seen.
Ezekiel 16:49–50
An unaddressed sin is undermining American Christians today—one we have come to accept as normal, even though it has the potential to derail us completely. It is not what you might expect—not an addiction to drugs, alcohol, or pornography, even though these struggles are very real for some. No, this issue is sneakier. It cloaks itself in a shroud of normalcy and engages us in a daily battle so subtle that many of us don’t even realize we are at war.
This sin tiptoes into our days in the form of cakes and cookies brought to the office by well-meaning coworkers, large cups of sweet tea sweating in our car consoles on hot summer days, the weekend potluck table filled with creamy casseroles and fried fixings. It thrives thanks to our almost universal addiction to sugar, fat, and refined carbohydrates—to all those things that excite our taste buds, course into our bodies, make us feel good for a moment, and then leave us a little thicker around the middle, a little unhealthier than before, and a little less vibrant.
Have you guessed it yet? Yep, the sin that is tearing us down is gluttony. A glutton is commonly defined as “one given habitually to greedy and voracious eating,” or as “one who eats to excess or who takes pleasure in immoderate eating.”1 Gluttony is so prevalent that it is almost invisible. Its signs and symptoms are accepted as a normal part of life. You may not think you have a sin relationship with food, and, sure, yours may not be as severe as the next person’s, but if you have been raised in this country and consistently carry more weight than you’d like to, the odds are not in your favor.
Picking and Choosing
We in the American church are notorious for picking the sins we want to make a big deal out of and overlooking the ones that don’t bother us so much. Gluttony is a classic case of that type of thinking. While it is just as much a sin as theft or pride or drunkenness, we have chosen to give it a wink and a smile as we drive through the fast-food lane and upsize our meals.
Can you imagine if a huge percentage of America’s professing Christians were bound by drug addiction or involved in illicit affairs? The church would collapse. We would be called hypocrites and run out of every town. Biblically and culturally, we all understand just how unacceptable those sins are.
But while gluttony is also unacceptable biblically, it has become an accepted vice culturally. We embrace this sin. And not only do we embrace it but we also like to get together to commit it. While we hold ourselves and others accountable for more obvious, less accepted sins, we don’t have any problem stuffing ourselves to excess and then parading our bulging bodies—the public evidence of our private downfall—around for all to see. Some would say that we are testing God. Actually, Scripture says, “They stubbornly tested God in their hearts, demanding the foods they craved” (Ps. 78:18).
Sure, we have a hundred excuses for why our weight and health problems aren’t our fault. We look to the ways and wisdom of the masses to justify our eating habits. Every weekend many of us promise ourselves we will start eating better on Monday. But when Monday rolls around, nothing has changed, so nothing changes. We fall into the pattern we are used to. We eat what we want, when we want, to the point of excess . . . and our enemy smiles.
Defending Our Indulgence
Some skilled biblical debaters use Scripture to try to argue their way around taking care of their bodies. They claim that, based on Scripture, we can eat whatever we’d like. They point to one passage in particular:
“It’s not what goes into your body that defiles you; you are defiled by what comes from your heart.” Then Jesus went into a house to get away from the crowd, and his disciples asked him what he meant by the parable he had just used. “Don’t you understand either?” he asked. “Can’t you see that the food you put into your body cannot defile you? Food doesn’t go into your heart, but only passes through the stomach and then goes into the sewer.” (By saying this, he declared that every kind of food is acceptable in God’s eyes.) (Mark 7:15–19)
A close examination of this passage proves that dietary leniency is not really its point. The Old Testament is filled with specific dietary laws addressing what is okay to eat and what isn’t. Most of these laws focus on clean versus unclean meats. Later, the book of Acts records a vision God gave to Peter in which he told Peter that all meats had been declared clean (Acts 10:9–16). Mark’s account above sets the stage for that vision. Jesus is underscoring the point that God made to Peter: a person can’t be defiled by what goes into their stomach—spiritually speaking, that is.
Many Christians cling to this passage, and to Peter’s vision, to prove that they have permission to eat whatever they want to eat. “Food can’t hurt me,” they say. “God said I can eat anything I want, so pass me a fork.” Unfortunately, this argument is based on complete misinterpretation. The vision God gave to Peter and Jesus’s discussion in Mark are both making the point that we are no longer spiritually bound by dietary laws. Jesus abolished those requirements.
The verses are referring specifically to holiness in the eyes of God. By declaring all things clean, God said there are no longer direct spiritual consequences for eating something that was once considered off-limits. Thanks to that mandate, sticking to certain dietary guidelines no longer makes or keeps us holy. But (and this is a big but) that doesn’t mean the wisdom contained within them for our physical health is null and void.
What is interesting is that most of the Old Testament laws concerning food coincide with what modern science tells us about the healthiest ways to eat. And why wouldn’t they? God designed our bodies, designed food for them, and then put dietary boundaries in place for our own good. Paying attention to what God says about food gives us the greatest chance for excellent health. For example:
And the list goes on. Take a look at what Rex Russell wrote in What the Bible Says about Healthy Living:
The primary message of both the Old and the New Testaments is salvation; and salvation comes through the blood sacrifice of the Messiah, not through eating habits. Nevertheless, a large portion of the Scripture focuses on commands, ordinances and statutes that show us how to live on this carefully designed earth. Many of these passages pertain to subjects such as economics, law, government, interpersonal relationships, nutrition and health. The sacrifice Jesus made for our sins does not cancel the wisdom in these other teachings. As Paul said, they are still profitable.2
The foods we choose to eat can’t influence our spiritual standing in God’s eyes, but that reality has absolutely nothing to do with how those same foods affect our physical health. As Paul wrote, “You say, ‘I am allowed to do anything’—but not everything is good for you. And even though ‘I am allowed to do anything,’ I must not become a slave to anything” (1 Cor. 6:12).
Have you become a slave to what you put in your mouth? It is easy to do—and it is even easier to justify in today’s food culture. Let us ask another way: Are the foods you put in your mouth doing more to serve your immediate desires or your future dreams and goals? God wants you to make choices that will set you up for success down the road rather than just satisfy your appetite in the short term. He wants to produce self-control—the direct antithesis to gluttony—in you, through his Spirit. Galatians 5:22–23 says, “But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
Be careful of letting others convince you that God isn’t concerned with what you eat. You are his careful creation. You are his hands and feet on this earth. He wants to put you to good use and shine through you mightily. The everyday choices you make to keep yourself healthy are so important, both to the quality of your life and to your ability to do all God has planned for you.
Making excuses and using Scripture to justify the sin we love leaves us playing right into our enemy’s hands. There is nothing he would rather do than convince us that God is okay with us overloading our bodies with foods that will eventually kill us. After all, when our bodies fail, then we are out of service. Let’s decide to stop ignoring our own gluttony and get on with living a better life for the glory of God.