Going after God (2): You are what you eat
- Rev Norman Cameron

We are looking at the great subject of pursuing God, learning to go after Him. I think that it is worth saying at this stage that it is clear from the Bible that before we can go after God, God comes after us. Romans 5:8 reminds us that “God demonstrates his love for us in this – while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Before we had our first thought about God He was thinking about us and before the foundation of the world he was planning how we might be rescued from the prison of sin we find ourselves in. In the Bible we see that God always takes the initiative to reach out to his creation and then we need to respond to his gracious call to know him and relate to him.

We saw last time that part of responding to God is realizing that God has created within each one of us a desire for him. God has set eternity in the hearts of men and women. We have a longing, an ache, a desire for the spiritual, for the transcendent, for God. We have described this longing as a thirst, a thirst as strong as our physical thirst but it is a thirst that needs to be satisfied in the right way by the right person and so often we satisfy that thirst in the wrong way. We have seen that you need to be true to yourself and obey your thirst. Go after God, you were made for him and to get to know him.

So that was our starting point - a recognition that we are meant to go after God, we have a desire for him that is natural and normal. The sin that is in us so often obscures this truth but it is there and we cannot ignore it – it is part of what it means to be made in the image of God. If we ignore it we will not be as happy as people as we were meant to be.

But now we ask the question how do we satisfy this desire, how do we go after God? What practical things do we need to do to nurture our spiritual relationship with God. In the rest of this series I hope to offer some guidance as to how we go about satisfying that desire. If we are physically thirsty we get a drink, if we are cold we put on a jumper or turn on the central heating, if we are in need of exercise we play a sport. But how do we go after God and get to know him?

Well today I want to continue our food and drink analogy and talk about going after God in terms of having an appetite that must be fed. If we have an appetite then we need to feed it. God has created in us an appetite for himself and one of the main foods he has given to us is His word – the Bible. This is our spiritual food, this is the staple diet of the follower of Jesus Christ. The Bible is the milk and meat provided for us to help us to be spiritually healthy and to get to know God. The scriptures themselves point up their importance and the vital need to know them for salvation and for growth in Christlikeness. 2 Timothy 3 tells us that “all scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training for righteousness.” The godward life is a righteous life.

So this is our starting point as we talk about how we go after God. Using the word of God, the Bible, is key I believe if we are serious about getting to know God better. Let me try and reinforce this by making three basic points using the food analogy by way of illustration.

1. We must Eat to Live

It is a fact of life that we must eat if we are to live. If we do not eat we will die. What is true in the physical world is also true in the spiritual world. The word of God is food for the soul and if we ignore it we cannot pursue God.

The book of Deuteronomy is a key one in this regard – Jesus knew Deuteronomy well – as a dedicated Jew it is probable that he had memorized large chunks of it. Certainly when he was tempted by satan three times in the desert Jesus replied to satan three times and each time he quoted from Deuteronomy. In Deut.8:3 God says through Moses “man does not live by bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” In other words yes we need physical bread to sustain the body, but that is not enough to be fully alive. To be fully alive we need spiritual bread and that spiritual food is the word of the God. We are both physical and spiritual creatures and God wants both parts of us, as it were, to be fully alive. We must eat to live, we must physically eat but we must also spiritually eat.

We find the same point being made by Moses in ch.6 of Deuteronomy where he ties together the hearing of the word of God with prospering as the people of God. “Hear O Israel and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly….” Hear what? Well, hear the word of God. In v.24 he says “the Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God so that we might always prosper and be kept alive…”

Also in Deut.32:46 he says “take to heart all the words I have solemnly declared to you this day…they are not just idle words for you – they are your life.” So Moses ties together the hearing of the words of God, the right receiving of the words of God, with prospering and with living a righteous life. To go after God and God’s ways we need to eat his word, his commands.

To take it a step further and deeper, the scriptures also make it clear that not only is the word of God necessary for sustaining spiritual life but without the word of God there can be no spiritual life in the first place. A person who is dead cannot go after God. Ephesians 2 tells us that we are dead in trespasses and sins, so before we can go after God we need to come alive. Now we come alive as we receive Jesus into our lives and depend upon the cross for our salvation. But part of this receiving involves hearing and receiving the word of God as the gospel. The word of God, the gospel, the good news, begets life, it brings dead people alive.

Thus the NT writers especially link coming alive to God with receiving the word of God. Note James 1:18 which says “God chose to give us birth through the word of truth”. We come alive spiritually through God’s word as we hear it, receive it and trust it to be true. Or again in 1 Peter 1:23 “For you have been born again not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.”

We could go on but you get the point. The word of God is precious and has been designed by God to be a vital part of our spiritual health. We need to take the scriptures seriously if we are to get to know God. John Piper in Desiring God says “Our spiritual life is quickened and sustained by the word of God.

So to summarise this first point – we must eat to live. As it is physically so it is spiritually – in order to go after God we need to be spiritually alive and healthy. We not only live by constantly feeding on God’s word, but we actually come alive to God through eating his word. Dead men and women cannot go anywhere never mind go after God. We need to come alive out of our trespasses and sins and one of the main ways God brings us alive is through his living and enduring word. These are not the mere words of men, they are the words of God – they are our life. We must eat to live.

2. You are what you eat

Over recent years there has been a spate of TV chefs – Delia Smith, Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and time after time the message coming across is that you are what you eat. We are encouraged to eat 5 pieces of fruit a day or whatever. It is said that obesity is a growing problem because we are eating too many crisps and fast foods. We are what we eat. As it is physically so it is spiritually. If we are wanting to get to know God, and go after God then we are what we eat. If we feed on God’s word then a number of things will happen – we will be able to understand God better for a start.

As we have said God is invisible – he is not seen and heard as we see and hear other people. How do we know what he is like? Partly we can see what he is like from the creation around us – but that tells us so little. We need to know more and the place where God has revealed himself best to us is through his word written. If we are to get to know what God is like and worship and follow him in a right way then we need to feed ourselves the right information. We are what we eat. The Message translation of Psalm 19 which speaks of the wonderful characteristics of Gods word translates v.12f. this way –“God’s word warns us of danger and directs us to hidden treasure. Otherwise how will we find our way or know when we play the fool.”

Perhaps there are people and they believe that they have found God and they are going after him and relating to him. But actually their idea of God, their vision of God, is totally wrong. It is wrong because they have false information about God, they are worshipping an idol and not god, perhaps a god made in their own image. We are living in days when it is not politically correct to say that someone’s ideas about God are wrong.

Remember when Jesus was speaking to the samnaritan woman at the well and he says to her at one point “You samaritans worship what you do not know, we worship what we do know for salvation is from the Jews.” People can be totally sincere in their worship of God, but actually their worship is misinformed. They are going after an idea of God that is not true to what he is actually like. They are going after a different type of God to the one who exists.

Surely it is important that we worship the right God in the right way. If we feed ourselves on the word then we are more likely to glorify him. Campbell McAlpine in his book on Biblical Meditation says “We can only give to God what we receive from him. Why is the worship of so many Christians so poverty stricken? One reason is that they have drawn so little and therefore can give so little. The more the word of God becomes part of our lives the more of the word we will pour out to the Lord.” In other words we are what we eat. A healthy following of God involves a healthy receiving from God.

A right following of God involves discernment. We need to educate ourselves, and as we read God’s word that is what happens. The truth fills our minds and helps us in our understanding of who God is and of what he expects of us. Discernment comes from a right hearing of God’s words. In Deut 6 the word Hear O Israel, literally means discern O Israel. Hear, discern, listen to God’s word. God has spoken, listen to Him.

We must eat to live; we are what we eat.

3. We hunger for what we feed on

If our going after God is so dependent on eating or receiving God’s word, if we can only be rightly informed about God by receiving the right information then it is important that we are having a regular balanced diet of spiritual food. That food may be the bible, it may be good Christian books, it may be listening to sermons or attending a bible study, these are all good ways to digest the word and some may be more intellectual than others. John Ortberg talks about the seven pathways to God – the different kind of personalities that God has made and their preferred ways of knowing God – and I will come back to that another time. But I believe that the word of God is so important that we must make time and take time to read it if we are serious about getting to know God.

Again we live in days of fast food and instant this and that and nothing quite replaces quality, healthy eating. The Bible is an acquired taste but it is a taste we must acquire if we are to be spiritually healthy. We need to feed our spiritual appetite with appropriate food – our souls, like our bodies, desire what we feed them. If we feed ourselves junk we acquire a taste for junk food and we desire more junk. Pretty soon we turn up our noses at good food, we forget what good food is. This is the problem that the govt. is dealing with today – children who would live on a diet of chips and fizzy drinks every day if you allowed them.

As we mature we need to realize that we need good healthy nourishing food. Spiritually we get this from the Bible so we need to set aside a part of each day to read the Bible. There are no shortcuts here. We hunger for what we feed on. The more we feed on God’s word the more we find we want it. The less we feed on God’s word the less we hunger for it. If we want to go after God then we need to acquire a taste for him. The bible whets our appetite for more of God. Psalm 107:9 says “the Lord satisfies the longing soul and fills the hungry with goodness”. God cannot satisfy our souls if our souls are full of other things, sometimes other good things, sometimes other things that are just junk.

What are we feeding our minds, hearts and souls on? Deut. 6:5 says “love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength”. We cannot do this if we ignore God’s primary means of loving him – through his word. Perhaps this is one of the main reasons for apathetic christianity in our churches – we get more excited about food magazines and house magazines and music magazines and car magazines and golf magazines and` newspapers than God’s word. There is a place for such magazines, but in our balanced diet of feeding the physical and the spiritual where does spiritual nourishment come in your list of priorities? Is the bible a closed book for you – are you a spiritual anorexic?

What is one of the first signs that you are physically sick? You lose your appetite? So it is spiritually – a sign of spiritual sickness is not having an appetite for God’s word. Will you dine at the Lord’s table this week. Will you feast upon him?

Here is one of the first things we need to do to go after God. We need to taste and see that the Lord is good.

You must eat to live, you are what you eat, you hunger for what you feed on. May God help us to hunger for Him in these days for he is the bread of life.