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Feb 21, 2016

Fulfilled and Free 3: Food

Fulfilled and Free 3: Food

Passage: Daniel 1:1-21

Speaker: Rev. Vivian McCarthy, Pastor

Series: Fulfilled and Free

Keywords: christ's power, food, freedom

The Book of Daniel begins with a story of how Daniel and his 3 friends used God's gift of food to strengthen their bodies, minds and spirits as they were forced to serve their Babylonian captors. While food is a gift, it (and a number of other things or substances in our lives) may also hold power over us.

[A whiteboard video of today's scripture focus is attached to this sermon.  You might find it helpful to understand part of the message.]

So, you know that I usually compose the bulletin, write the midweek and write each week’s message on Monday – right?  By the time I get to the week of any given message topic, I have worked with the worship teams and planned ahead so that I have usually got a really good idea of where a message is going and I can get all of that done on Monday. 

Not this week.

I read.  I learned how to do the whiteboard videos.  I answered emails and answered the phone.  I called people.  I did a lot of other stuff.  You guessed it – I procrastinated.  All week I was plagued by the question I wrote in my worship planner last October for today:  just exactly what IS the message for this week?

Given what I shared last week, perhaps you can understand my inner conflict about this week’s topic.  In any event, we are going to explore two what I will call opposite sides of God’s gift of food.

First off, food is a gift.  I find it fascinating that the Book of Daniel, with all of its stories of danger and overcoming by Daniel and his 3 buddies starts off with a story about food.  Don’t you?  It’s as though healthy food is the foundation of Daniel’s strength – the resource that makes him and his buddies stronger, healthier, even smarter than the other prime specimens recruited by the Babylonian HR department.

In a situation where Daniel and his buddies were picked to take positions of power and authority in Babylon, with the captors of their own people, they first and foremost chose to keep their eyes on God and God’s purposes and they knew that they needed to be healthy and in their best shape physically, emotionally and spiritually in order to live that out in a terrible, ugly, soul-stealing, stressful, sad, difficult situation.  Daniel’s people are the ones who wrote the Psalm that says:  Our captors demand that we sing our beautiful songs!  How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?  We have hung up our instruments.  It was so bad that the people of Judah put their instruments away – they silenced the music of their souls.  Somehow, this young man knew that he needed to keep his eyes focused on God to get through it and to serve in such a way as to bring honor to God and to his people. 

Daniel may have lived long before the Apostle Paul, but he would be nodding his head when he read Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians and got to our memory verse for this week:  Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?  For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.   

Note:  If you can only memorize part of this scripture, memorize the underlined part.

Daniel clearly saw that the gift of food – delicious, abundant, nourishing foods of many kinds that are part of God’s good creation – is one of God’s gifts that can bless us with health and strength.

So why is it that so many of us struggle with food?  In fact, why do we crave food or anything that, when used to excess, produces illness or addiction?  Why is it that we get stuck in cycles where we feel ashamed of ourselves and our bodies – ashamed of the  choices we make? 

Lysa TerKeurst, in her book Made to Crave, says that we all have cravings and those cravings are, at their root, a deep craving to be closer to God but we often rely on something easily within reach – something enticing or tantalizing – to satisfy our craving.  We substitute cookies or chips or a drink or a pill to make us feel better, rather than focusing on the One who wants more than anything a deep relationship that can nourish our souls.  The author does not pretend that it is a simple thing to truly rely on God instead of chocolate cake.  It takes practice and intention.  She begins by saying that we need to find our “want to.”  She writes:

When Jesus says, “Follow me,” it’s not an invitation to drag our divided heart alongside us as we attempt to follow hard after God.  When Jesus wants us to follow Him – really follow Him – it’s serious business.  Here’s how Jesus describes it:  “If [you] would come after me, [you] must deny [yourself] and take up [your] cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).

With Jesus, if we want to gain, we must give up.

If we want to be filled, we must deny ourselves.

If we want to truly get close to God, we’ll have to distance ourselves from other things.

If we want to conquer our cravings, we’ll have to redirect them to God.

God made us capable of craving so we’d have an unquenchable desire for more of God, and God alone.  Nothing changes until we make the choice to redirect our misguided cravings to the only one capable of satisfying them. 

Getting healthy…is about recalibrating our souls so that we want to change – spiritually, physically, and mentally.[1]

As I mentioned last week, we are in the season of Lent when the church has historically spent time considering our need for repentance and reconciliation.  Do you remember how the ROCK speaker defined the word “repent?”  Yes – Doing a 180 – turning around.  What if our repentance was our “want to” in allowing Jesus Christ to satisfy our cravings?  What if we turn from our cravings for the immediate gratification of whatever we usually grab to time with God – prayer, meditation, scripture, worship? 

When I worked at Spring Grove as part of my clinical training, I met a woman whom I will call Agnes.  She was deeply, horribly depressed.  She had been a patient at Spring Grove for years and was usually suicidal.  She never smiled.  Rarely could she even dredge up the tiniest positive memory or tell of someone who loved her.  Those were very hard visits.  She told me that she never had positive thoughts – that her negative thoughts constantly besieged her and made her unutterably sad.

One day, probably out of desperation, I asked if there was anything at all that could take her mind off of her negative thoughts.  She said no.  That night, I was praying for Agnes when a scripture verse came to mind:

35 Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  (Romans 8:35, 36-39)

She told me that she thought that scriptural promise might help her to focus her mind and agreed to post it where it would be the last thing she saw and night and the first thing she saw when she woke in the morning.  She promised to read it and focus on it every day.  The next time I saw her, she said the scripture sometimes helped her.  I wish I could tell you what happened after that, but I have no idea.  As is often the case, my training ended and I could no longer see Agnes. 

Beloved, no matter what it is that stands between you and your best life – no matter what keeps you from being fulfilled and free as one of God’s beloved children, focus your mind and your heart on following Christ’s way – fix your mind on the promise that nothing in all creation can separate you – and live the marvelous life that Christ offers.

[1] Lysa TerKeurst, Made to Crave.  Copyright © 2010 by Lysa TerKeurst.  Published by Zondervan.  Pg. 16.