To Eat or Not to Eat

Today's program comes from the following episodes:

"Food Is an Object Lesson"

"Spiritual Food"

"The Object of Our Obsession"

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Dannah Gresh: The way we think about food says a lot about the condition of our hearts. Asheritah Ciuciu knew that food had become an idol in her life. 

Asheritah Ciuciu: When my security blanket is taken away from me, when I can’t run to the pantry, then where do I go? At first, it’s tempting to fill that void with something else. “I’m just going to take my mind off the cake, and I’m just going to watch a TV show, or I’m going to go work out.” But Christ said, “No. Come to Me. ”

Dannah: Can you relate? Today, let’s sit down and think about what our views of food reveal about the condition of our hearts. 

Welcome to Revive Our Hearts Weekend, I’m Dannah Gresh.

Thanksgiving. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about this holiday? Is it thankfulness or gratitude or football, for you sports fans? My guess is that food is pretty high on the list of what you are thinking about when I say Thanksgiving.

For us at the Gresh household, it’s always turkey! I don't understand these people who do prime rib or steaks. No, it's turkey. Someone in my family will be making the green bean casserole.  Lexi has to have it. Someone has to make pineapple stuffing. Have you ever had that? Yum, so good!

Well, before you go hunting for that recipe online—trust me, you’ll thank me!—let’s talk about our relationship with food.

You know Erin Davis, right? She’s my good friend, the cohost of Revive Our Hearts videocast Grounded, and the author of a brand new book, Fasting and Feasting—a book that I've actually decided to be reading this year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Well, in a recent interview on our daily program and podcast Revive Our Hearts, I asked Erin just how she saw food and faith connecting.

Erin Davis: Well, I actually think they intersect every day, multiple times a day. Food is something we must encounter, ingest, deal with every single day. So anything that’s part of our everyday lives we need to take to Scripture and say, “Okay, God, what do You really say about this? How do You want us to apply what You say about this?”

I think there are lots and lots of lessons. If you just were to go through your Bible, as I have, looking for food themes, you’ll find them in every chapter of the Bible. It really is a prevalent theme in Scripture and a prevalent theme in our lives.

I don’t think there’s just one answer about how they intersect, but I do think God intentionally uses food to teach us lessons. He wants to teach us lessons about who He is, what His character is like. I think we just miss Him a lot because we think it’s just a cheeseburger, but I think He could be so much more than that.

Dannah: There are so many things that are popping through my head as you say that. Like, “Jesus is the bread of life.” Right? “The Word of God is like honey to my lips.” Right? There’s just an endless number of what I guess would be object lessons for us to learn about faith through our food.

Erin: Yes. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” “Beware the yeast of the Pharisees.”

Dannah: There you go.

Erin: There’s lots of vineyard language. I mean, so many times in Scripture food . . . I believe this is because food is something we all have lots of experience with. Food is something that God can use as an object lesson to teach us something more significant.

Dannah: So, take us to an object lesson in the Scripture about food. Teach us what we need to know.

Erin: I think an easy place to go when we are wrestling with the practicalities of life is the whole book of Psalms. Psalms is so honest. It’s about things that we really experience, and food is in Psalms pretty frequently.

I’m going to take us specifically to Psalm 34. Go ahead and get there in your Bible yourself. Psalm 34. I’m going to read us verses 8–10. This is David writing, and he said:

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! [There’s an exclamation point in my Bible.] Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him. Fear the Lord, you His saints. For those who fear Him have no lack. The young lions suffer want and hunger, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.

So here we have David wanting to communicate to whomever he was writing to. And then by the power of the Holy Spirit, he has communicated through time to us that when we want to focus on the fact that our God is good, we should taste it and see it.

Now, he could have chosen any other sense. He could have said, “Oh hear that God is good.” You can hear that God is good in the rustling of leaves or in a thunderstorm.

He could have said, “See that God is good.” That’s really obvious, I think. You step outside and you see that the sun rises every day, it sets every night. The stars come out. “Ah, God is good.”

But he says, “Taste and see that God is good.”

He goes on to talk about lions and hunger and the fact that we don’t have lack. He’s using food language. We’re satisfied in God.

I read that and I think, Food is an object lesson given to me by God—just like creation is an object lesson given to me by God. And what does He want me to learn? Well, among other things, He wants me to learn that He is good.

That’s been really transformative in my relationship with food personally, because if it’s good, I don’t have to feel ashamed every time I put something in my mouth. Now, it’s not a blank check to eat whatever I want or eat whenever I want. Self-control gets in the mix. But I do think you can look at Scripture and look at your own experience and think, Food is something God has given me to experience His goodness. That’s exciting to me.

Dannah: Let’s break that word “goodness” down, because I think of two things. One, I think, Yum. Pleasant. Pleasure. Enjoyable.

But I also think, Nourishing. Useful. Strengthening. Like it has that connotation to it, too. When you think of Jesus saying, “Jesus is the Bread of Life.” That’s a sense of “He is sustaining to us.” Just as we cannot live without nourishment to our bodies, we cannot live without the nourishment of Jesus Christ in our Spirit—not truly live. We cannot truly live without that goodness in the midst of our being, in the marrow of our being.

Erin: Right. Just as you could survive for a limited time without food, you can survive for a limited amount of time without knowing Jesus, without feasting on His Word. I mean, that’s another place where food is used. Scripture says, “I took Your Word, and I ate it.” Well, that’s a weird thing to say. Did somebody wad up pieces of their Bible and eat it as food? No. It’s just the idea that I feast on the Word, and it fuels me. It sustains me. It nourishes me.

So, I don’t think we have to set the pleasure part aside. Food is pleasurable. I mean, if you and I were having a pie party right now (I can’t think of anything more enjoyable), but it does go beyond that. It’s one of the ways that God sustains us.

I actually think we have that need meter inside of us. Your body will tell you when you are hungry. And if you ignore that need meter very long, that’s when the tiger starts to really growl. Well, that is alerting you to your need for food.

But it’s also alerting you to the fact that God has met your need for food every other time you’ve been hungry. And God will meet your need for food again. He will nourish you. He will sustain you.

So it is a constant, daily—more than daily—reminder that God is attentive to you. He cares for you. He will nourish and sustain you. Those are good lessons to learn over and over again.

Dannah: When you say that about our need meter for food rises, and it’s telling us, “You need to eat,” if we let that go on too long, I don’t know about you, but I end up eating the wrong thing.

Erin: Yes.

Dannah: Instead of reaching for the nourishing thing—the salad—I’ll reach for the pizza and the burger. I wonder, does that teach us something about how we nourish our spirits?

Erin: Absolutely.

I had an interesting conversation with my doctor not too long ago. I made an appointment with her, which is hard for me to do. I tend to get white-coat syndrome. I made an appointment with her. She came in with her little rolling cart with her computer, and she said, “What’s going on, Erin?”

I said, “I just don’t ever feel good. I’m tired all the time. I’m not sick-sick. I don’t think you’re going to diagnose me with anything today. But I’m relatively young, I’m relatively healthy, but I just don’t feel good.”

And she began to talk to me about food. She said, “The deal is: the more junk you eat, the more junk you want. That’s just the way it works. And the more nourishing, sustaining food you eat, the more of that you’re going to crave.”

And immediately, I was, like, “Oh man.” All truth is God’s truth. There are so many good spiritual parallels here.

The more I read my Bible, the more I want to read my Bible. I never want to read my Bible less by reading it more. It works the opposite.

The more I’m in good fellowship with God’s people, the more I want to be in good fellowship with God’s people.

The more I worship Him and obey Him. It’s the same with all the disciplines of following Jesus. The more we do it, the more we want to do it.

It’s another lesson that food can remind us of . . . if we’ll listen. It’s just taking that leap from something practical, mundane, pedestrian, that we think we all do every day. I really think God has a lot to teach us from it.

Dannah: I really do believe God uses everything He has created to teach us about Him, including food! That was Erin Davis. And we have a link to our entire conversation about food and fasting on our website ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend. 

Have you ever stopped to think about the wonder of food? It’s a basic need. We can’t survive without it, but it also gives us comfort. Oh, and it’s even enjoyable. 

Food itself is a miracle, but it’s a gift that points us back to the goodness of God. Here’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, sharing a memory from her childhood. Listen in, lean in, and be encouraged to think about God as our good and faithful provider. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: But as we were growing up, there was this table grace that our parents taught us that we would sing from time to time. I’m not going to sing it for you. I couldn’t find it on the Internet. I couldn’t even find the words. But I remember it quite well. Here are the words:

“We thank Thee, Lord, for this our food, God is love, God is love.” (And let me say, by the way, at times we had guests at our house, that’s when my dad would ask for a command performance—our family to sing this grace. It’s actually kind of long, and we were always really embarrassed to do it, but it still sticks with me.)

We thank Thee, Lord, for this our food,
God is love, God is love.
But most of all, for Jesus’ blood,
God is love, God is love.
These mercies bless and grant that we
May live and feast and reign with Thee,
God is love, God is love.

Well I thought of that table grace which I haven’t sung for, I don’t know, forty-five years or more, fifty years maybe, as I was meditating on Psalm 136, and particularly the verse we’re looking at today that has to do with God’s provision of food.

Remember the first verse of Psalm 136, we started on this a week and a half ago:

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,
   for his steadfast love endures forever.

The steadfast love, remember, is the hesed—the covenant-keeping, faithful, loyal love of God for His people.

And then we’ve come to verse 25 in our journey through this psalm:

Give thanks to the Lord he who gives food to all flesh,
   for his steadfast love endures forever.

We spent the last session looking at that verse about God’s provision of food, but I want to pick back up on that and just add a few additional thoughts before we close this series today.

Psalm 145:15–16 tells us, 

The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season.
   You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing.

We talked about how the most basic needs we have are met by a faithful, covenant-keeping God, how our food is a gift from Him, our other basic creature needs, the things He provides for our comfort, for our flourishing, for our enjoyment, these are gifts from a good God.

Acts chapter 14, verse 17, says it this way, reflecting on Israel’s history, “He did good (remember we said the Lord is good? He is good and He does good. The Lord did good) by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.”

Isn’t that a sweet verse? God is just involved in that whole process of sending the rain that brings the fruitful seasons—and somehow the rain gets to the ground, gets to the crops, and the next thing we know it’s on our dinner table.

Now, people who grow up in farming or agrarian cultures, knew it didn’t just happen that way. But where we live in our cities and our suburban areas today, we don’t really see the farm process. We just see it come to our tables. But God is not only involved in sending the rain and causing the crops to grow, but He’s also the one who gets the food to us and then satisfies our hearts with food and gladness.

This is a personal God. This is a powerful God who is intimately and intricately involved in the details of our lives.

I think of Psalm 37 where the psalmist says in verse 25, “I have been young, and now I am old,y et I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread.”

Now, we could do a whole other session or series—and maybe we will someday—on: Why then is there hunger in this world? And why are there people whose needs aren’t met? Why are there famines? Why are there droughts? Why are there whole areas of the world where people are chronically underfed? But what I do know is the Scripture says that those who trust in the Lord, He will meet their needs.

And yet we see that in times in Israel’s history, God did withhold food from them.

Deuteronomy 8, verse 3 comes to mind where the Scripture says, “He caused you to hunger—(He caused you to hunger.)—that He might let you know that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

So there are purposes of God that are bigger than the immediate needs that we have, and God knows what He is doing. I think that’s what we come away with, and knowing that as we lift our eyes up to Him, as we look to Him, He has promised He will meet our needs. He feeds not just our bodies, but He feeds our souls, our hearts with His steadfast love.

Psalm 36 gives us a picture of that, beginning at verse 7: “How precious is your steadfast love, O God! (Your hesed, Your covenant-keeping love.) The children of mankind feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.”

I don’t think that’s talking about just physical food and drink. I think it’s talking about God meeting the deepest needs of our souls, the longings of our hearts with Himself. And, again, He’s not a stingy God. He gives an abundance of His house. He gives us to drink, to feast at His table and to drink from the river of His delights. This is a generous, grace-filled God.

So we say, “Give thanks to the Lord he who gives food to all flesh, for his steadfast love endures forever.”

Dannah: Amen. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth has been pointing out how God uses food to remind us that He is the One who sustains us. He is a good giver. As she said, He's a “generous, grace-filled God.”

Has all this talk about food made you hungry? Hmm . . . my stomach is growling. Maybe these conversations today will challenge you to think about your next meal differently. As we just heard from Nancy, food is about more than just meeting a need. But there are times we tend to have an unhealthy relationship with food. 

Asheritah Ciuciu would tell you that how we interact with food is really an external indicator of our heart issues. Asheritah knows this well. She battled with her perspective on food, and wrote about it in her book Full: Food, Jesus, and the Battle for Satisfaction. Asheritah explains more in this conversation Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth and I had with her. 

I asked Asheritah if she thought that food fixation we experience is just an underlying symptom of something much deeper happening in our hearts. Here’s her answer.

Asheritah: I think that really is the key—understanding—because God created us body, soul and spirit. I think sometimes we try to approach this food fixation issue just from the dieting approach, just the physical approach—“Eat this, not that,” and portion control. All of those can be wise principles.

But unless we address the spiritual and emotional issues that are also part of this food fixation, we can’t experience the victory that Jesus has come to give us. He tells us that the thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy, and he’s done that with food in so many of our lives. But Jesus says, “I have come that you might have life to the full.”

Nancy: So in dealing with that, if we don’t get to the heart issues, we’re going to become even more fixated on food in trying to fix the food fixation, and really, the food can become the enemy. The thing we’re trying to battle is food, which just gets even more fixated on the food. Right?

We had this conversation last night at the dinner table—the three of us had dinner together—and I found myself, after you guys left the house, at 10 o’clock at night I’m lying in bed reading your book, Full. I’m comfortably full, and I’m thinking about this leftover piece of chocolate peanut butter square we had for dessert. It was delicious.

Dannah: It was.

Nancy: We had just a satisfying portion of it. I had no need for this, but it’s now all I can think of. So I’m battling the peanut butter chocolate square and, still food fixated, but not getting to the underlying heart issue of: What do I look to for comfort? Where do I get my satisfaction? And I think that’s where you are so helpful, Asheritah, in this discussion.

Dannah: When did you get to the point where you realized that this is a spiritual issue? There must be an event or a story behind that.

Asheritah: Well, actually, after that caterpillar cake episode,

Dannah: I’ve got to stop the story right here and explain the caterpillar cake episode. Asheritah had “A Very Hungry Caterpillar” themed party for her daughter’s first birthday. The cake was, of course, a caterpillar-shaped cake. As she was cleaning up after the party Asheritah started with one bite of leftover cake, one bite became one piece, then one row, and soon finished off all the cake. It’s actually a pretty funny story. We’ll have a link to Nancy and my time with Asheritah on our website ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend. Now, back to Asheritah.

Asheritah: Well, actually, after that caterpillar cake episode,I went on this popular diet that restricted everything that’s addictive. I went through the classic withdrawal symptoms, and after the first week or so, I went through that “empowered” phase of “I don’t crave food anymore.” I felt like, “I can do this. This is great.”

But after about a month of that, the pendulum had swung to the other side, and I’d become so obsessed with eating the right things and the right portions and the right way, and my husband and my mom kind of sounded an alarm and said, “You’re going too far in this.”

It wasn’t until that point when I said, “Okay, Lord, then I don’t know what to do. If a diet isn’t going to fix it, I don’t want to go back to that place of enslavement. Where do I go? What do I do?”

I wish I could say that I hit my knees right there after the caterpillar cake, but it took me trying to fix it in my own strength and realizing I can’t, to finally say, “Okay. You’ve given us Your Word and Your Holy Spirit. Lord, would You guide me through this and show me what’s at the root of this issue in my life?”

Nancy: And what did He show you? And what did that process look like for you? I know it’s been a journey.

Asheritah: It has been. I would say that was in October that it happened, and then it was probably in February or March of the next year. I just kept praying, “Lord, I want more of You, and I need You to help me in this.”

He brought me to the Psalms. David says, “How sweet are Your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth.” And then in Psalm 63 he talks about, “You are my God. Earnestly I seek You. My soul longs for You. Because Your love is better than life, my lips will glorify You.” And I think this caught my attention: “I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods” (see v. 5).

And I paused, and I thought, Is that true of my life?

I had grown up in a Christian family. I’ve loved the Lord as far back as I can remember. I’d dedicated my life to ministry in high school. At this point I was blogging. I was writing about helping women find joy in Jesus. But that verse stopped me in my tracks to say, “Can I really say that I am as satisfied with Christ as I am with a brownie? That I would choose Him over my favorite food?”

And right there in the sunroom a few weeks later, I was reading through Isaiah, and Isaiah says, “Why do you go to what doesn’t satisfy? Come, come to Me,” the Lord says.

And in that moment, the Lord said, “Do you love Me more than sugar?”

And my initial reaction was, “Of course! I love You more than anything!” Right? Because that’s what I had been taught to say.

And the Spirit pressed on my heart, “Take a break from sugar. Fast from sugar for forty days.”

And I said, “Well, Lord, we don’t really need to do that. Like, I can just tell You how much I love You. I don’t have to prove it or anything.” I know that my salvation is not in my performance. Jesus paid it all. It’s all about Him. But He kept pressing this issue.

Nancy: Not because sugar is in and of itself sinful.

Asheritah: No.

Nancy: It’s a God-created thing. It can be a good thing in proper context and use.

Asheritah: Yes.

Nancy: But the abuse of it was revealing a disordered affection.

Asheritah: It had become an idol in my life. And, Nancy, I didn’t realize it until I didn’t have it. Corrie Ten Boom says, “You cannot know that Christ is all you need until Christ is all you have.”

So when my security blanket is taken away from me, when I can’t run to the pantry, then where do I go? At first, it’s tempting to fill that void with something else. “I’m just going to take my mind off the cake, and I’m just going to watch a TV show, or I’m going to go work out.” But Christ said, “No. Come to Me. Come to Me.”

So in that fasting experience, that’s when the Lord just really just began revealing layers upon layers of how this is a spiritual battle.

Dannah: What does the way you think about food say about your life? It’s an interesting question to think about, isn’t it? Maybe today you can take some time to consider that, to ask the Lord, "Is food revealing any deeper issues in my life?" just like Asheritah Ciuciu did. 

Food is what we eat to keep us energized and alive. But as we talked about today, there’s a lot more to it than that. 

It makes me thankful to know that we have a God who cares about us so much that He can use something like food to draw us to Himself. That’s why I’m taking this season of feasting to consider: what can food, and the way I approach it, teach me about God?

So, as you gather with friends at the table this season, let gratitude be your default. Choose, with me, to have grateful, thankful hearts, not only in this month of Thanksgiving, but all year long.

You can discover more about how to respond to God’s grace and goodness with our special “Gratitude That Sticks” bundle. It includes sticky notes. Do you know why? Maybe you remember in 2020 that Nancy used sticky notes on her wall as we were facing coronavirus and she and her husband Robert were facing cancer. Those sticky notes each day were a reminder that no matter how hard the day was, there was something she could be grateful for. So she wrote it down and stuck it to the wall. So we are going to send you some sticky notes too to remind you that gratitude is a choice. We're also going to send you Nancy’s book Choosing Gratitude. 

This bundle is available right now when you give any amount to support the ministry of Revive Our Hearts. You can donate by calling 1-800-569-5959, and make sure to ask for your Gratitude That Sticks bundle, or go to ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend and click on today’s episode. It’s called “To Eat or Not to Eat.”

Let's be honest about something: as you are making plans for your Thanksgiving celebration coming up, maybe it doesn’t feel like a celebration this year. The reality is that many women are walking through difficult journeys, even in the middle of a season that everyone else seems to be celebrating. I hope you’ll join us next week as we talk about going through trials and seasons of celebration.

Thanks for listening today. Thanks to our team: Phil, Blake, Rebekah, Justin, Michelle, Micayla, and a big thank you to Stacey Battenburg, our Resource and Print Production Manager. Whenever you order a book from us, it’s Stacey who makes sure we have it in stock just for you! For Revive Our Hearts Weekend, I’m Dannah Gresh.

Revive Our Hearts is calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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