FOOD FOR SPIRITUAL GROWTH – Part 1

“Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.”  (Hebrews 5:13-14 NIV)

It seems to me that there are four main things which must have a place in any full and healthy religious life: and that a remembrance of this will help us to make our own inner lives balanced and sane. We require, first, the means of gaining and holding a right attitude. Secondly, right spiritual food -- real nourishing food with a bite in it, not desiccated and predigested piety. “I am the food of the full grown,” said the voice of God to St. Augustine: “Grown and feed on Me.” Thirdly, we need an education which shall help growth; training our spiritual powers to an ever greater expansion and efficiency. Fourthly, we have or ought to have some definite spiritual work, and must see that we fit ourselves to do it. 

-- Evelyn Underhill in “The House of the Soul and Concerning the Inner Life”

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SPIRITUAL JUNK FOOD

“These people are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm -- shepherds who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted -- twice dead.”  (Jude 12 NIV)

Godless men had slipped into the church, misleading the [congregation], seducing them to believe they could continue to sin and never receive God’s correction. Jude called these false teachers “shepherds who feed only themselves.”

Can you imagine a shepherd sitting on a barren hill, hungry animals all around him, enjoying his lunch? The baas and bleating would be almost deafening. He’d have to care for them.

Unlike sheep, people who fall in with wrong teaching rarely recognize the emptiness of what they’re taking in. Instead, they keep following, filling their hearts with useless calories of spiritual junk food, never understanding that they’re barely being fed after all.

Don’t follow these teachers. They’re here today, gone tomorrow. Nothing they do can last, because they aren’t founded on the bedrock of God’s Word.

-- Toni Sortor and Pamela McQuade in “God’s Word for Surviving the Real World”


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