Abridged Worship – August 11, 2024

Back when I was a young child and into my teen years, I remember food was never something I thought to much about. What went into my mouth was simply what my mother or father put in front of me.

I had a relatively normal diet growing, aside from the fact my family was vegetarian, we for the most part ate what everyday people ate. My mother was a bit of a health nut, okay, maybe a but more than that, we use to call her the food Nazi because she didn’t like junk food in the house, but, really, thinking back, she was actually pretty chill about the occasional bag of chips or ordering of the sacred pizza for movie nights. So I can say, even though I was not the most adventurous eater, my stomach was always full of good and nutritious meals growing up with little thought about the nature of how or what I was eating.

By the time I was leaving high school I was a pretty fit and healthy guy. I actually have a picture of me at 18 years old so you can see.

Food would change for me suddenly and drastically over the next calendar year. You see, I began college and set off on my own. Around that time my parents separated and my childhood home we no longer a place for me to land to get nutritious meal. I began to live off, not home cooked meals, but food anywhere I could get it quick and easy. It was cafeteria food at the university for breakfast, fast food for a quick lunch, and let’s not forget the glorious pub food I would down for supper.

The food was quick, cheap, and required nothing from me to prepare, and much of it was delicious. Within 4 year of living off cheap, heavily processed, and chemically laced food – it changed me. Let’s look at a picture of me at 22.

I went from 230lb hard lean muscle build to a 340 lb man made of fat in less than 4 year. I started to put junk into my body and my body turned into a landfill. And here is the thing, I didn’t just put on weight, in fact, the weight was the least of my worries.

Within four years, I developed crippling arthritis-like pain in my ankles, wrists, and sternum. My blood pressure was through the roof. I began suffering a lot of forgetfulness, irritability, and mood swings. I couldn’t sleep. I started to feel depressed, and anxious, and I went from a friendly kid full of hope to someone who barely cared for himself or others. I remember at one point, sitting in the entryway of soon to be mother-in-law’s house, in the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep, balling my eyes out, because of how much pain I was in physically, and how much pain my life was causing the people around me.

It was in the moment I found appreciation for the old expression, you are what you eat.

I decided to start taking care of myself, first I had to name what was wrong and then I needed to make changes. What was wrong was I was consuming junk for quick and easy relief, and for the addiction to sugary and greasy food.

I went on an intense diet. For those who might know the diet terminology, I did a low carb and natural diet combination of Paleo Ketogenics, basically, if it can be found naturally in the wilderness, or if it has high levels of carbohydrates, I didn’t eat it. I began eating what was good for me, what my body was meant to eat. Within three months, my anxiety, depression, and mood swings disappeared. I began sleeping through the night, my blood pressure disappeared, my arthritis vanished, and I lost close to a hundred pounds. I had never felt so healthy in my life as I did on that diet.

You see what we put into us for food is such an amazing metaphor for our Spiritual Life as Christians. If we in our pursuit of God consume the bread of life, something that is our natural spiritual food, it will nourish us, it will build us up right, it will make us strong and able. But if we consume fake substitutes, the cheap and ease quick fixes for our souls, it will rob us from the life that God is trying to nourish us with.

This is such an important message, that Jesus compares the necessity of being feed on the bread of life, to a miracle that God performed for the Israelites.

Jesus is saying this is so important for us to do, that he is not going to compare it to some pagan practice of old, but he will actually compare it to a miracle from heaven, he will compare it to manna from heaven, showing us that this is even more important that a material manifestation from God. Being Spiritual feed from Christ will grant something to you, that not even the manna from God could do. Because the manna from God was there to sustain material life for a short time, but the Bread of life is fuel for eternal life in Christ Jesus. The bread of life is what we were designed to consume and to live upon for eternity.

If you remember from last week, Jesus spoke about this topic of the bread of life in relation to and idea of the “work” God wants for his people to be, a belief in Jesus. It is the work, because we continually need to be living a life which consumes what Christ is, who Christ is, what Christ has done, is doing and is going to do day in and day out. Christ become not just the bread we eat but the very natural surrounding what we call our home.

Think about this, remember also from last week I said, that the work of believing in Christ was the meaning of life. Think of it this way, in Genesis, when God is creating the world, when God wanted to create plants, God spoke to the land, let the land produce vegetation. What happens when you remove a plant from the land, it dies, it cannot feed itself, and stable itself enough to keep living.

When God want to create fish, he spoke to the waters, let the water teem with living creatures. What happens when you take a fish out of the water, it dies.

When God created all the creatures of the land, he said, let he land produce living creatures, if you drop a land creature into the middle of the ocean, or into the sky, or into space, it cannot live.

When God created humans, he did not speak to the land, the sky, the seas, but he spoke to the Trinity, He spoke to God, saying, let us make him in our image.

God is our natural habitat which is why when we are separated from God we die. God is our natural food which we need to consume to be healthy, and since you are what you eat, God becomes the fruit of the life that is granted to us. 

And even when humanity, decided to turn away from our natural habitat, the bread of life, the very image from which we were inspired, and we choose death, God sends his son, the source of life to die the death which was owed to us, to take on the fate of the fish which is pulled from the waters. And, in that sacrifice and victory over death, God invites us back to the table, where the bread of life is, He invites us back into the kingdom, where our true life is, He invites us back to embrace the very image from which we were created, and invites us to make that belief in Jesus our whole meaning, our life’s work, and our forever more.

Let’s not degrade that wonderful gift, that daily bread, by polluting our Spiritual body with the material things, the false idols, and the toxin of sin, which does nothing by offering us fleeting taste, and an abundance of spiritual illness and death.

Remember folks, you are what you eat.

Thank you for joining us this week. If you have any thoughts, feelings, or prayers, feel free to leave them in the comment section below. Please be respectful of others’ posts and make room for all those joining us.