When asked about my favorite food, I only half-jokingly answer “buffet.” The beauty of a buffet is that you can sample anything you want. Fried chicken? Good! Mashed potatoes? Good! Fettuccine Alfredo? Um…well, that isn’t exactly what I would get with fried chicken, but hey, why not? And throw a scoop of ice cream on the plate too, just for good measure!
Each December, I conclude my fall Bible Study class by making an appeal for the students to consider their Bible intake as just that, intake. Is it a discipline? Absolutely. Should it be daily? Well, yes, but I like to explain more when I say that. Checking off a “reading list” is a very good habit, one we are cultivating in our own kids. But if it becomes legalistic (my standing before God is somehow better if I have read that daily reading), well, that becomes a bit pharisaical and also a bit oppressive when you miss a day. And that is partly because we easily tend to view our performance as the thing that God sees, rather than our standing in Christ.
But I have found it more valuable to view Bible reading like I view eating. The metaphor seems to fit better the longer I ponder it. Here are a few “axioms” I have come up with that have helped me to think through the way I am regularly consuming God’s Word.
You need to eat to live physically. You need to study to live spiritually.
Life ends when food ends, but there is a gap between those two events. A quick web search reports that a healthy human can live around 3 to 8 weeks without food. But consider how that looks. Early on, the body probably sheds some fat and cleans up a bit (autophagy). But soon the energy begins to dip and weakness sets in. Much of that time, the body will spend cannibalizing itself until eventually, bedridden, it just dies.
Spiritually, there are some alarming similarities. Life without Biblical truth becomes a spiritual starvation event. We are designed to meditate on, live in, and love the truth. God’s Word is the source of this truth. When we go without this truth, we still must face the trials and temptations of our day-to-day lives.
Your body wasn’t meant to starve. Junk food wins against going hungry.
The 90’s was an era of low-calorie, Weight-Watchers, rice-cake-eating, one-grape-and-I’m-full dieting philosophies. Essentially, these all leaned heavily toward creating a calorie deficit to reduce pounds on the scale. The issue was that they didn’t always promote the nutrient-dense and healthy alternatives. A rice cake may be low in calories, but it’s low on all the things my body needs…including flavor!
In those situations, we all know someone (or experienced this ourselves) who held out strong for a time, but then couldn’t handle it. Starving and a little “hangry” (hunger + angry), they raided the pantry or the gas station, and busted out some junk food. That was the end of their diet.
The trouble with starving is that any food looks good, even junk food. If I show up starving at a healthy restaurant or an all-you-can-eat buffet, it won’t matter which one. I’ll be 3 plates deep in a matter of minutes. But if I have eaten my fill of healthy food, to the point I am quite satisfied, and then you offer me those little plastic (chocolate) donuts, I’ll be able to say no every time.
And it’s no different, spiritually. When we starve ourselves and don’t eat from God’s Word, we will turn aside to any sugary (think “fleshly” or sinful) option. When you scroll mindlessly and then happen upon a lustful image, you need to have true satisfaction on your side to be able to say no to that. Without tasting and seeing that God is truly good, any temptation offering satisfaction will seem appealing.
Flour doesn’t taste great by the spoonful. Bread is a gift from God.
I have watched a lot of food shows in my time. Often in a food competition, one contestant will mess something up in the recipe and need to salvage the dish before it goes to the judges. One typical move is to serve the meal “deconstructed.” Nope, that doesn’t mean the meal becomes agnostic or atheist. Rather, the components of the dish are set on the plate, and it is up to the judges and their forks to combine the flavors.
This is often underwhelming, as you might expect. A piece of bread, a pile of mustard, and a hunk of ground beef? A deconstructed burger. A square piece of pasta, a schmear of sauce, and a sprinkling of ricotta cheese? Deconstructed lasagne. In my years of watching Chopped I have never once found a dish like that appealing. That is probably because sometimes the components of the dish themselves are not that great until they are combined. Imagine a deconstructed cake: flour, egg, water, sugar. I could eat the sugar, but it would not be as nice as candy. I could eat the raw egg, but I would need to not think about it. But the flour? Who can eat that by the spoonful? And yet, flour is one of the most important elements in a cake.
Bible study can be similar. Skill and observing the text rightly, studying the context historically, and understanding the original recipient are all essential to truly understanding the text. I had a friend once read Obadiah 7 and believed God was telling him that his friend was setting a trap for him. Yikes! Talk about taking the Word out of context!
So too, just a little study and knowledge of Biblical backgrounds, access to a basic Bible commentary, and some guidance from your pastor, all make the difference over the long haul of learning God’s Word. Learning the O-I-A method of Bible study can take your devotions to the next level, just like the proper treatment of a recipe can result in a delicious slice of cake!
You can’t eat once a week. You get fat by eating a little at a time.
The average human needs around 2,000 calories a day to live. More if you are active, but that’s a good starting average for our next illustration. How many calories does that person need for the next 7 days? That would be 14,000 calories. Let’s consider that the average meal has around 700 calories, which would be a home-grilled burger, a serving of broccoli, chips, and an apple.
How many of those meals would need to be eaten on a Sunday if we tried to eat all of our calories for the week? Roughly 21 burgers, and 21 helpings of all those sides. Now stop and consider what would happen if you actually forced that many burgers and sides into your body in one day.
I won’t describe it, but suffice it to say the calories would be coming back out of you, and fast! Your body is not set up to process a week of calories in one day. God has designed us to eat on a more daily schedule than a weekly schedule.
Is it possible this is true spiritually too? Can we pray and read our Bibles enough on a Sunday to be able to skip the rest of the week? In my experience, you can’t get too full when you pray or study, but you can quickly become empty. Studying 7 chapters and praying for 3 hours might not cause vomiting. But skipping 6 days of those nourishing activities does induce a form of spiritual starvation.
Let’s consider this illustration from one other angle. People often gain weight, not by eating all their calories for the week on just one day. No, they simply eat just a little extra for many days. That extra milkshake on the way home adds up after two months. Soon the belt isn’t stretching far enough, and the seams of our pants start to split. All because we added one extra treat a day.
But consider the corollary. Spending a few minutes praying on the drive home, reading a few verses and thinking about them while your coffee maker is brewing coffee, those little moments add up. I have made it halfway through Jeremiah just reading a chapter while my coffee maker in my office brews. Just as we can gain physical weight by eating a little extra, so too we can gain some spiritual benefit by using those little moments to meditate on God’s Word.
Just Keep Eating
Bible intake is both more and less complicated than we tend to make it. Some skills in understanding the context of the Bible are very helpful, and some Biblical training can go a long way. But the simple, habitual, daily, humble practice of reading and thinking through God’s Word can produce much good in the life of the believer.
So, why not try it? Why not start making it a goal to use those extra moments to ponder a verse in the book of the Bible you have been reading? Why not spend some time on your drive into work listening to the Scripture? Why not spend time daily taking advantage of the ubiquitous access we have to God’s Word? Unlike overeating, reading more of the Bible won’t give you a tummy ache.
Thoughts Worth Thinking 