Potato Chip Christians
Potato
chips sit in my kitchen and call me to munch and crunch. Chocolate ice cream shouts my name from the
freezer, offering sweet delights. Sometimes
I yield to the siren call of these treats, munching my way into gluttony and
its resulting dullness. Carrying around
the “ghosts of munchies past” is a tiring and awkward, and then there are the
costs of lost productivity from the sugar-high stupor. These results should be reason enough to
avoid these toxic taste treats. Another
problem is revealed by closer inspection.
The
earliest memory any of us have in this area is our mothers chiding, “Don’t eat
that now; it’s too close to supper and you won’t be hungry if you eat that
now. Put it down, I said!”
The child’s
mind is puzzled by the absurdity of abandoning the luxuries of cookies, sodas
and chips in anticipation of those veggies, fruits, and proteins. Who needs nutrition anyway? And, doesn’t vitamin C stand for cookies?
What kid in her right mind would choose peas over ice cream? What kid would
pick corn instead of corn chips?
Another
group of folks, older and supposedly wiser, are known for the same unwise
behaviors in another realm. (Some of them also cling to the “Vitamin C for Cookies”
philosophy.)
These quasi-adult
Christians stuff their soul-faces with TV sodas, movie ice cream, cheap novel
chips, and magazine popcorn. They have
the strange idea that these imitation soul-foods are nutritious, helpful, and
healthy so they pack them in, hours at a time.
Fake foods
like this mask hunger by covering the hungry spot in their souls, just like the
kids covered the hungry spot in their physical stomachs with junk food. Spiritual junk food junkies gobble their way
to deficiencies of faith, strength, joy, and Word-food. They are spiritually dull, never experiencing
the vibrant, crisp reality of health in Christ.
Everything is blurry, limp, lukewarm, and tired in their faith and their
lives of faith.
Just like
the kids who weren’t hungry at supper time, these adult kids arrive at the
table of Sunday morning’s Bible preaching with no hunger, no desire for real
food, and they’re bored with it all, complaining that the preacher is too dull,
too long-winded, too funny/humorless/old/young/tall/short/fat/thin…and on and
on.
The real
problem is not the sermon, though some are certainly better than others. The real problem is the condition of the
hearers.
He who is full loathes honey, but to the hungry even what is
bitter tastes sweet. Prov. 27:7 NIV
No sermon tastes good to the soul
that is stuffed with spiritual junk food.
That soul will refuse the fine food and go away starved, and blind to
its own condition. Just as children
cannot appreciate the nutritional value in peas and carrots, these adults are
blinded to the spiritual food in scripture and preaching because they have
indulged in fake food for six days and arrive at the real supper table without
hunger.
The person who arrives at the
Sunday table with sharp hunger pangs will find food in even the bitterest of
sermons. Hunger creates an appetite that
will appreciate food, regardless of the seasoning, presentation, or recipes
involved in preparation. The hungry
human wants food, for his stomach, and for his soul.
Children have mothers to monitor
the junk food situation. Adults need to
govern their own spiritual junk food intake. A week filled with TV shows, soap
operas, sports events, magazines, cheap novels, endless phone calls, movies,
and music will produce a Sunday morning pew-sitter who feels no hunger at all
and, as a result is unable to eat at the table of food prepared for him.
Jesus himself said, “Blessed are
those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” KJV
A modern paraphrase of this verse,
Matthew 5:6, says, “You’re blessed when you've worked up a good appetite for
God. He's food and drink in the best meal you'll ever eat.” (The Message)
Most of us try to arrive hungry for
a good meal. We don’t fill up on junk
food of any kind because we want to savor each bite of the food prepared by a
kind hostess. We don’t eat cake,
cookies, ice cream, chips, popcorn, or sodas en route.
So why do we prepare for Sunday
morning’s meal by gobbling baskets of spiritual junk food? We arrive at the finest meal so dull and
lethargic from the junk that we are unable to eat from the table prepared for
us. And then we gripe that we are never
fed spiritually!
The blame rests squarely on us, the
spiritual junk food junkies. If we
arrived hungry, unaffected by the movies, magazines, sports, TV, and music, we
would find the Sunday Supper Table full of nutrition from God’s Word and we
would leave “fed with the finest of the wheat,” and satisfied with “honey out
of the rock.” (Psalm 81:16 KJV) 836
