Food is Energy (or Learning to Feed Yourself)



Have you ever had your body just stop because you had nothing in your stomach it could use as fuel? I have, and it’s a weird feeling. Most of the time, I push through this feeling but man it can be tough. During my workout today, I swam 30 minutes at the YMCA and in the middle of it I heard my stomach yell, “feed me!” The food I had eaten before was all gone. I had enough energy stored to finish with no problem but last week was a different story. I had decided to forgo a small snack before heading out for a short 3 mile run. Right in the middle, my body told me that I was dumb and I could feel my energy slowly dissolving. It was as if I could see the needle on the gear of my body slowing moving to zero.

I’m slowly learning that the more I exercise, the more I need to eat. That’s hard for me because I do not want to regain the weight I’ve lost; it’s always in the back of my mind. Teresa has told me I need to treat food more like an athlete instead of a dieter. My body needs the fuel to burn as I weigh train, run, bike, and swim. Having a balanced diet with exercise will keep me healthy and moving.

If I know I can’t rely on the food I ate yesterday to fuel my activities today, why is it we think differently when thinking about Spiritual nourishment? We think that Sunday’s sermon is all we need to be a healthy Christian. We think that being spoon fed a spoon full of Bible will get us through our week. WRONG!

We need to view Bible studying the same way an athlete views eating enough protein and carbs. It’s about fueling the machine. The church as a whole has done the members a disservice in recent years by not teaching them to study the Bible on their own along with weekly insights shared by the pastor. We have way too many malnourished saints who live defeated lives because they have not a clue what the Bible says about how they should live their lives.

We have Christians who have been saved for decades who don’t know how to lead anyone to Christ because they don’t know the scriptures. They only know that they are heading to heaven and that’s good enough. Wrong! The church has traded being a place of learning to being a social club where all you’re “felt needs” are met. Instead of having 6 steps of how to be debt free, we need a series on what the Bible says about homosexuality, sex before marriage, unmarried couples living together, and so on. It’s a sad state when a church has to do a 6 week series on why the book and/or movie “The Da Vinci Code” is only a story and is not based on facts because your average Christian is clueless.

It’s time that the church trains its members to be the warriors of Christ instead of being “dumb and dumber.” It’s my passion as a man called to pastor to do what Ephesians 4:11-12 (“And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ”) has told me to do. Like the athlete in me that loves sharing the value of exercise and eating right, the pastor in me wants to walk up beside my fellow Christian and make sure they know how to feed themselves the wisdom of God’s word.