What Did You Eat Today?



What did you have to eat yesterday? What about the
day before? What is on the menu for tomorrow? For 
the Christian, the food that sustains us does not 
come from the local grocery store but from the Bible.
"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after 
righteousness: for they shall be filled (Matthew 5:6)." 
Throughout the pages of the Bible, God makes it clear 
that His word is our true nourishment. Our spirit 
(or soul), that is eternal, lives not on what we have
for dinner or breakfast, but what we glean from the
word of God every day. 

Our Saviour, Jesus Christ, was a man in the physical 
sense as well as the divine Son of God. We know this
because of verses like Luke 4:2 which tells us that
the Lord, after not eating for forty days, was hungry.
At one point in His ministry, Jesus sat by a well
while His disciples went into the city to buy food 
to eat. When they met up with Jesus later, they urged
Him to eat (John 4:31). Jesus replied "I have meat to
eat that ye know not of (vs. 32)". The disciples did 
not understand what He meant by that so He made it 
clear "My meat is to do the will of him that sent me,
and to finish his work (vs. 34)". Jesus also tells 
His disciples that they should not work for that food
that perishes but for that which is eternal (John 6:27).
This eternal "food" would come from Jesus Himself. 
In Matthew 4:4 we are told what that "eternal" food 
is "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every 
word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God". The 
words that our Lord has spoken to us are what will 
sustain our soul through eternity. If we were so poor
as to not have enough food to eat, we would still 
live forever on the heavenly food that God has provided
through His Son. As we grow more mature in our faith,
we need a different type of food than what brought us 
to Christ in the beginning. The basic elements of the 
gospel, how that Christ lived, died, and was raised to 
life again, will always be the foundation of our faith. 
However, the older we get in Christ, the more food we 
need to grow and maintain our faith. In fact, the apostle
Paul makes it quite clear that if we do not mature 
beyond the basic understanding of the gospel, we are 
lacking in our duty to God (Hebrews 5:10-14).

It is also quite possible that the unfaithful will be
nourished with something completely different than the
word of God. For instance, in Proverbs 4:17 we are told
the wicked will "eat the bread of wickedness, and drink
the wine of violence". Also, in Proverbs 1:31, the wicked
are said to eat the fruit of their own way. The saying 
that goes "You are what you eat" is especially true for 
those that deny God. So the question for today is what 
kind of food are you eating? Are you eating that food 
that will sustain your soul eternally in heaven or that
rotten food that will keep your soul in hell?


In Christ, Steve Preston




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