Food for Thought

Today we began our one year walk through the book of Matthew, a challenge for each of us to become disciplined in reading the word, praying, and spending just a few moments with our God; feeding our Spirit! The reality is whether people read this devotional or whether they are disciplined enough to feed themselves in other ways, the key is daily feeding. It seems rather ironic to me that as my fleshly body becomes hungry I feel the pangs in my stomach, if I wait long enough soon there will be growling followed by discomfort. My desire to eat and feed my flesh cannot be ignored, I have no other option, if I don't eat I will eventually die. There any number of reasons people consume food, we eat to satisfy our emotions, to occupy our mind, to help us get through boredom, we eat socially, sometimes we eat just because its there, not even needing it for sustenance. Feeding our flesh is a habit that all too many of us have become overly familiar with.
Lately I have been studying the definition of evil, it's cause, and effects, something we would all do well to understand a little more. However in a nutshell evil is best defined as, "the absence of God". If our Spirit is the abiding place of the Holy Spirit then evil cannot be present in us, or can it? If spirit is not fed it like our bodies will soon shrivel up and become atrophied. As I ponder this I think about John 1 where we are told that Jesus is "the Word of God." He (the Word of God) is the literal food upon which our spirits must feed in order to be sustained. Truly we do have more control over evil than we have realized, you see we determine the degree to which our spirit is aligned with God's Holy Spirit. We are free-willed beings, that He has made as such, and it is that will which keeps us from, or draws us to Him. What would happen if believers suddenly stopped waiting for their weekly gorging and began to eat healthy, small bites more often, accompanied by a good old fashioned Sunday meal, like the one at Grandmas house? What if we ate of the Spirit when we were bored, needing emotional satisfaction, or for the same reasons that we feed our flesh? Hmmmm now there is some food for thought.
Gene Burroughs Servant