Tuesday, October 31, 2017

What is your soul-appetite?

Whatever one eats reveals the internal appetite of his/her stomach. It reveals what the person was thinking about in terms of food, what the person was desiring to satisfy their hunger cravings.

It seems that the same could be said of the soul -- the immaterial part of humanity where the will, mind, and emotions reside. Whatever one feeds into his/her soul reveals the desires of one's mind and heart. Then, it begins a cycle -- the more we feed it that "thing", usually the "more" we desire that "thing".

And, certainly, there is an internal battle going on for the Christian. We've been "born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead". We've been "quickened" by the Spirit of God from being "spiritually dead". And, yet there is still a "tendency" for our souls to crave the "passions of our former ignorance", that is our life without God and apart from God's supernatural intervention. God, in his great work, gives us a "new heart" with God-directed desires and impulses through the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Yet again, there is a battle for the feeding of our soul -- that which is "soul-nourishing" vs. "soul-desensitizing" and ultimately "soul-destroying".

Think about the chemical reactions in the brain when we eat sugar -- think Krispy Kreme donuts. Yeah, when the "hot donuts now" sign is lit. When you eat just one...there is a chemical reaction in your brain that says, "give me more, give me more!" If you keep eating the donuts, what happens...you have to eat more to get your "sugar fix" -- it's the exact same thing for a drug addict...same part of the brain, same chemical reaction. Continuing to eat "sugar" foods in this manner will begin to destroy one's appetite for things that are healthy and good for one's physical body.

If we feed our souls "spiritual junk food", our soul will begin to "crave" more and more of that "spiritual junk food" -- like a sugar craving in the brain. We might still "live", but we are desensitizing and destroying our soul and it's desire for the spiritual food that our soul truly needs -- the food of God's Word.

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

A Stable Faith

I was listening to John MacArthur preach the other day. He was preaching on spiritual stability and the elements of a spiritually stable Christian. In part 5 of his series, he preaching on "Godly Thinking". Here is something he said that hit home:

"Bill Hull, in a book entitled Right Thinking written in 1985, writes, “What scares me is the anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking philosophy that has spilled over into the church.  This philosophy tends to romanticize the faith, making the local church into an experience center.  Their concept of church is that they are spiritual consumers and that the church’s job is to meet their felt needs,” end quote.  And what is happening in the church is that people are going to church not to think, not to reason about the truth, not like the noble Bereans to search the Scriptures to see what is true, but they’re going there to get a weekly spiritual fix, a weekly spiritual high, so they can feel that God is still with them.  They are spiritually unstable because they live on feeling rather than on thinking. 

The Christian must not be a victim of his feelings.  He must not get caught in a pragmatic trap of does-it-work/is-it-successful.  John Stott has written in his helpful little book, Your Mind Matters, this:  “Indeed, sin has more dangerous effects on our faculty of feeling than on our faculty of thinking because our opinions are more easily checked and regulated by revealed truth than are experiences,” end quote.  Very wise statement."

A stable faith can be attained as our minds are renewed in the truth (Romans 12:1-2) of God's Word. It's not that "feelings" are unimportant, but they are so fickle and unstable that we must not let them drive the care of our lives.

Just something to think about...