Man does not live by bread alone . . .
Feed me, O God. Feed me yourself, that I might know you more closely, love you more strongly, walk with you more constantly. I need to hear and to heed your words – not mine, not those of my friends or family or government or culture. I need to hear from you. How my soul thirsts for the living God and for a word from Him!
A growing boy needs to eat. When I was a child, I remember my mother saying, “Now eat your dinner. If you want to grow strong, you’ll have to eat.” And, of course, she was right. People who don’t eat, grow thin and weak. They are more prone to cold and sickness; they move more slowly and are often more irritable.
But when it comes to food, the message, “Eat” is incomplete, for growing boys need not just food but the right food. That’s why my mother would also say, “No dessert until you eat your vegetables,” for she knew that a healthy growing boy needed to fill his belly with healthy foods and not just any food. In fact, in America at least, we have all sorts of health problems not because people don’t eat but because they gorge themselves on cakes, chips, sodas, and fast food. If you eat too much junk, pretty soon your body becomes junk. You really are what you eat.
The soul is this way, too. Just as the body needs healthy food so, too, does the soul. But food for the soul is not beef or broccoli. Food for the soul consists in the thoughts you think, the ideas you read, the attitudes you see in movies or TV, the words you hear and speak – in short, the worldview you expose yourself to. And just as people often eat too many cookies and donuts, so, too, do people often feed their souls on too much junk food.
In the spiritual realm, healthy food is Biblical food, and junk food is everything else. Some of that junk food is spiritually neutral. It’s background noise – the cooking channel, a soccer team, your job. Everyone has such noise in their lives, and, like chocolate, it is not necessarily harmful in and of itself, but a diet consisting mostly of background noise will not move the soul toward God. Too many people cannot hear God through the noise. Other junk food is poison – sexual content in movies, celebrities who proudly mock Biblical teaching, peer pressure to think like your culture. These phenomena actively move the soul away from God. What you expose your mind and heart to affects how you think and live.
In the physical realm, the solution to too much junk food is simple. Eat more meat and vegetables and fewer pies and cakes. The same is true in the spiritual realm. The soul that feeds on the Bible grows strong, while the soul that neglects the Bible withers away. The soul with heavy exposure to the surrounding earthly culture and light exposure to God’s culture becomes thin, shallow, and distant from God. You really are what you eat.
This means that the Bible is essential for a vibrant spiritual life. The Bible is God’s message for the human race. It grounds people in ultimate matters and places their lives firmly on a solid rock, so that they can stand even when the waves of culture hit. Remove that rock, and people just bob in the sea, flowing back and forth wherever the waves take them.
The Bible points the soul to God. It shows us how God thinks, what He is like, and what He has done. It shows us why we are here and where we are going. It shows us our own hearts and what God wants those hearts to be. It shows us what a new life looks like and where the power comes from to live that life. The Bible is the meat and vegetables for a healthy spiritual life. It is where you go to renew your mind. It is what the soul must feed on. Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
Most souls, however, do not consume the Bible, and a majority of souls that identify as Christian do not consume the Bible. I don’t mean that none of them ever reads the Bible at all. I mean that most people in the church pay such scant attention to the Bible that they might as well not read it. The lack of Biblical content in the average “Christian” is staggering. Most people who identify as Christians spend minimal (if any) time each day feeding on the Bible but hours a day on social media, viewing movies, or listening to pop music. In other words, they feed on junk food. And their consumption shows. They have difficulty standing against the culture they feed on, and their walk with God is shallow. They feed their souls large amounts of donuts and cupcakes every day but rarely eat healthy.
They don’t know how God thinks because they don’t take the time to find out. They grow weak, fat and spoiled, and they hurt themselves and the church.
If you want to walk with God, you have to set time daily to get to know what He has said in Scripture . . . to meditate on it from the heart . . . to yield your soul to its authority. If you have access to the Bible and choose to ignore it, you cripple your soul.
But if you devote yourself to it, you have something substantial to build your life on, for it will point you to Christ. You are what you eat. Even in the soul.
