On a Special Diet

 "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby: If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious." 
1 Peter 2:2-3

It was love from the start! I know this is how this father felt at the sight of each newborn God has added to this family. To see each of our babies come into the world, added unthinkable joy and thrill to us as parents, along with a deep sense of new-found responsibility and an overwhelming feeling of wanting to protect and provide. I guess this is the story of every loving couple who has been blessed with having children, and the follow up to that beginning, (as the same mums and dads have no doubt discovered), is that there is a whole lot more to raising children than there is to conceiving them! 

From the beginning of life outside the womb, the healthy baby seeks nutrition from mum. This is an intense desire and so strongly built into the human make up, that when it is not fulfilled on time or enough, there is a very clear message, an unmistakable outcry from that little person that solicits urgent action to fulfil the need! We have all smiled at the distinctive happy grin on baby’s face, when the tummy is full and contentment washes away the tears, easing the infant into blissful sleep!

The necessary nutrition and sustenance of food is not something babies measure, reason or can even plan, they just desire it! They crave it so much that it takes precedence over all other needs. A healthy baby needs little or no encouragement to consume a nutritious meal. Something God has written somewhere in our being, incites us to want this sustenance. This is not because as babies we know or understand the processes by which it works in our bodies, but simply because somehow we know we need it! Without it we cannot survive - and survival, growing, becoming stronger must be our first and greatest priority.

It should be the same on the spiritual plane, with us and God's word. The desire to receive, eat, be filled with and digest the word of God and pray should hold priority over all else. We may not fully comprehend how God make it all work within our spiritual person, but somehow we know it does. This makes prayerfully feeding on God’s Word our daily, necessary priority, vital to our spiritual survival. The indication in our text is that even as we grow in Christ, we should not lose the healthy appetite and desire for God and His word that we had as new born-again spiritual infants! The initial milk of God’s word and the more solid food which follows, is the necessary diet for our soul, for spiritual growth and well-being.

God has provided the most appropriate and nutritious fare for our souls by giving us His Word. Nothing should replace our desire to feed our minds, hearts and souls upon it. Sadly, as in our physical eating, our spiritually healthy diet is often replaced with ‘junk food’, which can never truly satisfy nor bring benefits in the long run. In fact it has the opposite effect. Feeding on the wrong things, results in spiritual health issues, the obesity of the flesh and other inner problems, all of which threaten the loss of our spiritual life in Jesus!

Peter reminds us that if we have tasted of the grace of the Lord, His great love and salvation, we should continue to appreciate the savour of His Word and Spirit, and subscribe for life to the spiritual diet that brought us back from spiritual death to life in the first place!



See also:
http://dailybiblefocus.blogspot.com.au/
http://www.pentecostalfamilychurch.com.au/devotion

A Prescription for Health

Proverbs 3:7-8 "Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil. It shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones." 

 God has made a way for us to remain well and strong at all levels of our being. The process begins with fearing the Lord. This is not a dread or terror as of a tyrannical ruler, but a wholesome honour and awe of who God is, a heartfelt respect for what He does, and for the principles He teaches in His word. It means making Him so present in all areas of our lives that we will not want any part of evil. If there is to be a dread at all, it would be just that – an anxiousness to avoid doing anything that might affront our Lord or hamper our relationship with Him!  

This same wholesome fear and awe of God, precludes us from thinking of ourselves as wise in ourselves; experienced and confident in our own abilities without due acknowledgement that we need the Lord and cannot do without Him! When we become wise in our own eyes, we are proud and are attempting to impose our own thinking and ways over those God wants for us. This is not only self-deceiving, but also self-defeating because it replaces the true and God-honouring wisdom we are to have as believers.

We can make the mistake of claiming we honour and fear God and yet subscribe to ways of life which He considers evil. This is not wisdom from above! In serving God there must be a concerted effort to make our departure from what our Lord and Sovereign God sees as offensive to His holy nature. Second guessing God and His word is hardly living in awe of God!

True wisdom begins with fearing God. This is healthy and makes us vigorous at all levels, but self-conceit and arrogance can only bring ailment and self-destruction, whilst at the same time damaging relationship with others.

The 'navel', was seen as the centre of all human emotions, the place where the strongest feelings are formed and acted upon. We still refer in our modern language to the ‘butterflies’ in our belly and the ‘churning’ of stomach, or that 'gut' feeling, in an effort to describe certain emotions.

Fearing God and avoiding evil brings health to the navel and so is presented to us as a godly process of gaining and maintaining emotional stability and fortitude. In a modern world, with humanity marked by mounting troubled emotions and escalating mental traumas, we surely need an answer to our plight! God provides us with His prescription for the problem.

It has been said that the greatest evidence of the fear of God is obedience to Him. Perhaps we would not be hounded and conquered by so many fears and phobias, or overcome and destroyed by the ever-present stresses of life, if we truly obeyed and gave the correct place in our lives of honour and respect to God, the One who knows us best and loves us most! 



See also:
http://dailybiblefocus.blogspot.com.au/
http://www.pentecostalfamilychurch.com.au/devotion