Imagine you are 40 years old, have no health conditions which affect you physically or intellectually, yet you require someone else to chew—not cut or puree, but chew—your food. All of it. Now imagine you only eat maybe 1-2 times per week. For some of you, it may be more often, but for others, it’s less, leaning closer to once a month or somehow only 1-2 times per year.
Your diet is “supplemented” with an occasional breadcrumb and a splash of water, but the majority of what you consume is pre-chewed mush.
Now imagine going into battle or running a race with that diet plan. Would you even make it to the battle front or the start line?
Not only are you malnourished, you are completely defenseless and unprepared. As a soldier, you stand void of armor, weapons and even proper provisions. As an athlete your muscles are atrophied and your lung capacity—your endurance—resembles that of a lifelong chain smoker who worked in the coal mines. You are about to face your enemy, to start the race of a lifetime and you are fatally unprepared.
By now perhaps you’re thinking, “I would never allow myself to fall into such a pitiful state.” You may even throw out examples of how this imagined scenario does not describe you. “I eat healthy, I try to stick to a clean diet of whole foods, which I buy, cook and chew myself. I’m active most days and have an entire self-care regimen to prove it. Just look at my Amazon list.”
Physically, this may be true of you. And even if it’s not, you still don’t come close to the scenario we considered above. You may not be in the best health, but you are nowhere close to that.
For some of you, that may indeed be true—the imagined person is not you. But unfortunately for most, it is sadly the case.
No matter how able-bodied and healthy you are, your diet consists of irregular meals of pre-chewed food. You are the average Christian. Even more unfortunately, an increasing number of Americans do not even reach this standard; or considered from a different angle, your diet consists of pre-chewed, artificial food provided by the world, i.e. media, politicians and culture. You eat on a far more regular basis and may even appear physically healthy, but you are actually malnourished in a different sense. Therefore, you often feel unsatisfied even after consuming an over-abundance of the world’s “delicacies.”
Many Americans are becoming increasingly more concerned with our actual food, especially as trust in food and drug conglomerates and their “experts” continues to decline. However, far fewer people are aware of their true source of nourishment. We are more physically attuned but are blind and deprived spiritually.
In our hyper-active, a.k.a. busy and distracted culture, we have settled for pre-chewed spiritual food or bypassed it altogether. Our current Bible reading intake (or lack thereof) gives a whole new outlook on intermittent fasting and starvation.
We are more physically attuned but are blind and deprived spiritually.
Consider how many professing Christians regularly read (or listen to) the Bible themselves, without the accompaniment of devotionals, commentaries, studies, sermons, panels and podcasts. They may be full of a word, but that’s because they are overfed on another's interpretation of the Word, not the pure Word itself. Their main courses, side dishes and snacks come from someone else’s kitchen, while the occasional dessert on Sunday comes straight from the Source.
Does this mean supplementals like devotionals and sermons are bad? Absolutely not! (Or as the apostle Paul would often write, “By no means!”) It is necessary to hear others’ thoughts and learn from others, especially from those with different experiences and interpretations than our own. The problem arises when all we hear and read are others’ interpretations, especially because we tend to gravitate and stick to people with whom we agree or like.
God has given us the Body of Christ, the Church, for many good reasons, including its source of education, correction and understanding. But He did not establish it to replace His Word and our direct interaction with it.
Just as humans are physically made to eventually chew whole foods, so we are spiritually. God intends no one to remain a baby forever, only able to digest milk. And of course He did not create humans to live off pre-chewed food. Imagine feeding your spouse, adult child or aging parent food you first had to chew. None of us would dare eat it, and that’s if a loved one chewed it first, let alone a stranger. Yet that is how many Christians eat the Word of God.
Psalm 34:8 says, “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!” Taste for yourself that the Lord is good! Partake of your daily bread yourself. Read it, meditate upon it, pray it, ask the Lord to speak to you through it.
A diet of only regurgitated interpretation is for spiritual babes, as the writer of Hebrews talks about in his letter. He writes,
“For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (5:12-14, emphasis added).
Or Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. In this passage focused on divisions within the church, Paul wrote, “I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh” (3:2-3a).
Taste for yourself that the Lord is good! Partake of your daily bread yourself. Read it, meditate upon it, pray it, ask the Lord to speak to you through it.
What’s particularly interesting about this passage is that Paul goes on to call out the Corinthian believers for the division they were causing because of disputes over which teacher they followed, Paul or Apollos. Both men were only servants, just as our teachers today are servants of God. Were they (Paul and Apollos) appointed and used by God to build up the Church, just as many of our teachers have been appointed and are being used by God for good? Yes, but they are still mere humans. They are flawed and learning just like the rest of us. However gifted and intelligent they may be, they can only tell us about the Light. Not to mention, they are never to be the final authority on anything; everything they say must be tested against the Scriptures. This is what the apostle John spoke of in his first letter when he wrote, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world” (4:1).
What John means is to take what someone says and hold it to the Light of the Word. If a person’s words contradict, dilute, distort, omit or add to the Word of God, we are to remain on the side of Scripture. God’s Word is the final authority on all things, including God Himself, for it is the very breath of God (see 2 Timothy 3:16-17).
And to think, because of Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf, we have complete access to this Word. Do not neglect this privilege! Many disciples throughout the world long to have one verse of God’s Word available to them in their language, and we in America are saturated with it. We have physical, digital and audio versions. An assortment of translations, along with their corresponding study and reference editions. We even have different arrangements, like the chronological and parallel editions, or ones with wider margins for note-taking and illustrations. Then there are the large-print and red letter options. The list goes on.
Just as all are without excuse in their claim to be unaware of God’s existence (see Romans 1:20), American Christians are without excuse regarding our lack of Bible intake, especially in such a learned culture. Despite many of us being able to read and write in the lingua franca, we do not deploy that privilege to read the Word of God ourselves. And of course this speaks nothing on our freedoms to do so, a true privilege many of our siblings in Christ do not possess.
We have an enemy who knows the Word of God and its power, so he is doing whatever he can to keep people away from eating it for themselves. Like he tempted Eve with the forbidden fruit taken from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (see Genesis 3:1-7), he tempts us with the fruit of busyness, the fruit of this world and sometimes even the pre-chewed fruit of teachers, preachers and authors.
Paul commanded Timothy, and now commands us, to be ones who can rightly handle the Word of truth (see 2 Timothy 2:15). To be those who can and do chew their own food. Why? There are many, but two reasons Paul gives us in this letter is,
It equips us for every good work (see 3:16-17) and
It strengthens us against the schemes of the false teachers, who will only increase as the Day of the Lord draws near (see 4:1-4).
In other words, it equips us for the race and is our weapon in the battle against the evil one (see Ephesians 6:17). If Jesus Himself wielded the Word of God to thwart Satan’s temptations in their confrontation in the wilderness (see Matthew 4:1-11), we would be wise to follow suit in our daily fight against the same foe.
The Bible gives numerous other blessings we reap when we regularly consume and chew the Word, more than we can cover in this post. Discover them for yourself and soon you will find yourself in awe of the One who breathed them into being.
If Jesus Himself wielded the Word of God to thwart Satan's temptations in their confrontation in the wilderness (see Matthew 4:1-11), we would be wise to follow suit in our daily fight against the same for.
Taste and see for yourself that the Lord is good! Put down the pre-chewed food and start eating it for yourself. Do it often and regularly, and you will soon find yourself in the beautiful space of satisfaction but always longing for more. Think on what you hear and allow the Holy Spirit to give you understanding (see 2 Timothy 2:7).
Pick up your daily bread and be prepared for the Lord to change, comfort, encourage, strengthen and embolden you. There is no greater food than the Word of God.
References:
English Standard Version Bible. (2001). Crossway Bibles.
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