I have a confession to make. So, here goes. I love to eat. I do. There’s something very satisfying about a combination of high-quality ingredients prepared with excellence. It holds the same appeal and opportunity for delight that you’d experience in a sublime piece of music, played with excellence, or a work of art, appreciated for all of its nuance and expression. Food is good. Good food is even better.

And sometimes, even though my head knows better, I eat too much. I’ve heard enough of the statistics about nutrition, obesity, and health that I could even consciously know, in the moment, that taking another bite isn’t in my best interest. That I should probably eat only half of the over-sized portion the server puts in front of me and take the rest home. That I can still function with the mentality of my teenage years, when titles like “Bottomless Pit” and “Hollow Leg” were commonly applied to me.

But if I’m being honest, I know that’s not the case. Eating too much isn’t good for me. I can’t follow those patterns of excess that were common in my youth. I can’t rely on a high metabolism to zap every calorie I put into my mouth to smithereens. And if ever I forget, all I have to do is look back to my first year of college and what the infamous “Freshman 15” (or 25!) can do to a person. Too much food, without the exercise to balance it out, is unhealthy and unproductive.

The same is true for the Christian life. We need to eat good “food,” the Word of God, to sustain our hearts for the journey with Jesus. We need to have our physical bodies filled with the Spirit of Jesus and His promises as we take the Lord’s Supper, so He truly does dwell in us bodily. We need good, nutritious spiritual food. And gathering together to “eat” on the weekends, to gather as the church, to be filled with God’s goodness, is essential to solid community and the unity it needs to thrive. Eating during the week is also essential, spending time in the Word personally, listening for God’s voice between the rustling of the pages.

However (and this is the point), we are not called to be spiritually flabby. We eat to work. We feed our hearts to engage in the mission. We are filled with God’s goodness to have something to share. God puts food on the table not so that we can get fat, happy, and lazy. He bountifully provides for His family because He knows their work in His harvest fields is hard! We consume to produce. And what is a godly life to produce? Personally, it produces the fruit of God’s Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). And in relationship with others, it produces a community of disciple-makers and -shapers.

The benefits of this are two-fold. First, we are much less inclined to be so concerned about whether we like the “taste” of the food than how it will fuel the mission Jesus left us: making disciples. We become less caught up in the consumeristic attitudes of our culture, much less concerned with having things our way. Jesus didn’t promise His disciples long stays in 5-star hotels. He called them to follow Him…to the cross and beyond. The same is true for us. Our culture says to us, “Your will be done,” but we say to God, “Thy will be done.”

Second, our view of what happens when we gather to eat changes. We gather to eat. We eat to be healthy. We consume to produce. We engage God’s Word not only to be found standing with God…which is important (we’ll talk about that this coming month). But we engage God’s Word to be saturated with His presence and truth, so that our lives produce good works that others can notice and praise God (Matthew 5:16).

So…eat! Drink! Enjoy the company of God’s people! It’s a GOOD thing to do so. But also remember why you eat. It’s not just for you. It’s for the people around you, too. The people that share their lives with you in everyday life. And the miracle that Jesus is still doing, two millennia after His ascension, is feeding millions (not just 4,000 or 5,000) with His very self. With simple bread and wine. And He uses His body, you and me, joined together and enlivened by His Spirit, to deliver this food to those around us. So here’s to a healthy, growing, well-exercised body…and the Savior who feeds it! Cheers!

Adventure is out there! Pastor Aaron