Eat Well!
Notes
Transcript
Growing
Growing
A friend of mine has a daughter and he did what so many other parents do to measure their kids’ growth.
A pencil mark on the door frame annually on her birthday measured her growth.
They talk about children growing up, becoming adults, she’d probably end up the same size as her mother and look a lot like her.
The little girl had a puzzled look on her face and here dad asked her what she was thinking about. She asked her dad this question:
Why do adults stop growing?
In her mind she’s thinking up.
The reality is out.
She had no idea how profound that question really is.
Children are supposed to grow. We expect that.
If they don’t, there is something wrong.
A few months ago, before the COVID pandemic and lock down, Sara and her SIL traveled to Dakar, Senegal to visit Mercy Ships.
Mercy Ship is a surgery ship and it was docked in Dakar to serve the ppl of West Africa for a year.
They treat ppl who need surgery and only accept those patients they can see all the way thru their rehab.
It doesn’t matter what kind of surgery, orthopedic, dental, whatever, all surgeries and only they can finish with.
A very high percentage of their surgeries are on patients w/ issues due to being malnourished.
Cleft pallets. Pregnant mothers who are malnourished.
Compromised immune systems lead to problems.
They can’t fight off simple diseases and infections that are nothing to us.
A young girl who had a minor leg injury that got infected.
In her body’s response the normal bacteria in her mouth attacked the skin on her face. It ate away her lips, cheeks, and nose.
Sara saw her after the surgery to rebuild her nose.
Cataracts in children and adults.
Sara was there when an older man had the bandage removed from his eye. Sara saw the joy in this man when he could see clearly for the first time in years.
Bone density issues. Rickets.
Children’s bones are soft and weak. Often times they are deformed. They look like they waddle when they walk.
Combine that w/ the brain issues of malnourishment that results in poor coordination. They fall a lot and break bones that then don’e heal properly.
Tribal life is hard. Physically demanding in farming and ranching.
Emotionally taxing and stressful. Civil war. Muslims versus Christians tearing the region apart.
Mentally it’s draining trying to support and protect families and communities.
All the heavy lifting requires tremendous strength that in many cased they don’t have.
Add malnourishment to this environment and it lowers life-expectancy dramatically.
Children are supposed to grow. Children w/ healthy diets will grow.
Adults w/ healthy diets should not grow, up or out.
The problem for many of us is we don’t have healthy diets.
We may end up over-nourished and malnourished all at the same time.
I’m not just talking about food here.
We don’t have healthy spiritual diets, emotional diets, or mental diets.
The heavy lifting in life breaks us down.
Especially coming out of this virus crisis.
PPL are struggling emotionally, relationships are strained and we’re not feeling all that good about ourselves.
Mentally, we’ve filled our heads w/ junk.
Physically, in our boredom we grazed thru the refrigerator repeatedly.
Spiritually, we couldn’t go to church, BS, dinner w/ friends.
Life is hard anyway. There are seasons we go thru that break us down.
But especially over the past couple of months it’s been a season when all of us have been broken down.
And, now, we are watching on TV the breakdown of our society.
What’s the relationship?
You’ve heard the phrase, “Hurt ppl, hurt ppl.”
It’s also true Broken ppl break things.
Healthy ppl heal things.
Malnourished ppl break things down.
Well-nourished ppl build things up.
This is where Peter goes in the first few verses of ch.2.
We have got to make sure we are well-nourished on a healthy spiritual diet ore else we will tear down and break up the ppl and relationships around us.
We have got to eat well! Spiritually.
He’s writing to Christians who were stressed and struggling. They had lost a lot. Life was breaking them down.
There were some bad habits they were falling back into that they needed to stop.
He’s wrote to help them stop breaking things down and start building things up.
First he dealt w/ old habits that were coming back to them that were hurting themselves and the ppl around them.
Stop Breaking Things.
Stop Breaking Things.
Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.
Rid yourselves. It’s a choice. It may not be easy, but it is possible and necessary.
Same phrase as removing old clothes, or an old uniform.
If we ever play baseball again, and if the Dodgers trade a player to the D-Backs, the player needs to help build up his new team.
If they take the field and 8 of them are wearing D-Backs uniforms but the former Dodger puts on his old Dodger uniform that just doesn’t work.
And, if he lets the ball drop and makes bad throws he’s not acting like a D-Back.
These behaviors he lists are inconsistent w/ Christian behavior. Take the old uniform off.
Then he lists 5 attitudes or behaviors that break up the new team you are playing for.
They tear down lives and healthy relationships.
Malice. A desire to see other ppl get hurt. Whether they do it themselves or want someone else to do it they don’t care.
PPL who practice malice are hurt and broken down and they want everyone around them to join them and fall lower.
Deceit. Deliberate dishonesty. They know the truth but the communicate something else.
Somebody is being deceitful about COVID death rates and avoidance. What’s the truth? There is so much direct contradictory information we don’t know for sure what to do.
It unsettles us. Destabilizes our foundation making us vulnerable.
Hypocrisy. Hypocrites was a Greek actor. It’s where the 2-masks came to symbolize the theater.
He played a role. It was not who he really was. When he put the mask on he acted one way. When he took the mask off he acted another.
Whey you are acting as if something is true even though you know it isn’t is hypocritical. Inconsistent.
We don’t know how to react b/c we don’t know who you really are. It is impossible to have a close relationship w/ a hypocrite. Consistently good, consistently bad, whatever.
At least we will know who you are and how to react to you.
Envy. Resentful discontentment. Cannot be happy with anyone else’s success.
Tear them down the perceived level of the envious one.
There is always something wrong w/ what they have or how they got it. If anyone should have it, I should. And, I don’t. They shouldn’t. Take theirs away.
Slander. Lie about someone for the sole purpose to hurt them.
These behaviors break up relationships and tear ppl down.
They are the behaviors of malnourished ppl. Weak. Unable to stand up to the pressures of life. Rather than change themselves they’d rather see those around them change and be hurt.
In Romans 7 Paul talked about a personal struggle of his.
He sacrificed a lot to become a Christian. He was happy to do it, but it cost him and it hurt him.
He gave up wealth, authority, status, and a comfortable lifestyle. Jesus gave up more for him, he knew that, but on a fleshly level he missed it.
He saw all of his old Pharisee buddies and the houses they still lived in, the camels they rode, the parties they attended, and their connections to important ppl. He missed it.
In fact, he coveted what they had. Wished he had it and they didn’t.
The law very clearly says do not covet. That’s commandment #10. Don’t wish you had your neighbor’s stuff and he didn’t.
He knew he shouldn’t covet so he concentrated on not coveting.
Don’t covet....
At the end of the day all he did was covet.
Then, in Romans 8 he described how he grew and learned a different, more effective way to stop coveting. Rather than focus on what not to do, focus on what to do.
focus on the tings of the Spirit. Do what God wants him to do.
He found at the end of the day he no longer coveted.
That’s growth. He grew by focusing on the positive and on the pure words o fGod.
That’s where Peter goes next. How do we beat the bad habits that tear ppl down and then habitually build ppl up?
How do we change and grow?
How do we stop breaking things and start building things?
Build Things
Build Things
Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.
There is a sharp contrast here. Get rid of the things in the previous verse. Now, crave something else.
If you are going to remove something from your life, you need to replace it otherwise those old things will return.
Like a newborn baby, crave milk.
How does a baby communicate it has a craving? Does he squelch the crave? Or, scream for mom?
In the middle of the night thinks to himself mom had a rough day I think I’ll let her sleep.
NO WAY.
He screams like he’s dying.
Like that. crave pure spiritual mile.
Crave, means develop an appetite for. IOW, we’re not born w/ a taste for this. We have to develop it.
I had never had a casserole until I got college.
Raised by a single mom who was exhausted when she came home from work. All she had the time and energy for was basic meat and potatoes.
All the meat went into the electric skillet.
Every vegetable we had came out of a can and into a pot of boiling water.
I was one of those kids who separated everything on his plate. Nothing could touch. Not even the juices.
And, certainly nothing mixed together.
Who in their right mind would mix vegetables, some chicken or beef, maybe a pie crust or biscuit mix?
And then I had fresh chicken pot pie and shepherd’s pie.
It was delicious.
May have been my second birthday after we were married and I came home from seminary and Sara was cooking my birthday dinner. She was excited.
One of the things she was preparing was she was cooking up some spinach.
“I thought you got things you liked for your birthday.”
I didn’t care that Popeye ate it and got strong, I didn’t like it.
Remember, every vegetable I ate as a kid came out of a can and was boiled. Slimy, smelly, and nasty.
My wife grew up in a house where they had fresh vegetables all the time. I didn’t know anything about them.
And you know she’s a good cook. I ought to give her the benefit of the doubt.
She has regularly, from time to time, cooked spinach. Being the good husband I would eat it.
At first, take a big bite, swallow it whole w/ a bug gulp of water.
But, do you know what has happened over time?
I have developed an appetite for spinach. I like it now.
Pickled beets I can’t do. I’ll eat them roasted. Pickled, no way.
Reminds me too, some of our friends we cannot get to eat black-eyed peas.
We do them every New Years Day. Tradition Sara brought from her family raised in the south.
Some just can’t. Especially in N. Dakota.
When we were preparing for our New Years Day open house we looked all over the grocery store for the Black-eyed peas.
We finally found them in the foreign food section w/ the salsa, pasta, and spaghetti sauce.
Crave. You’ve taken some old clothes off. Put some new ones on. Develop an appetite for what feeds your new way of life.
Pure spiritual milk.
When it comes from God it is already pure. It does not have t/b purified. There is nothing impure, contradictory, malicious, deceitful, hypocritical, envious, or slanderous in God’s word.
Develop an appetite for the food that will transform you, change you for the better, mature you.
It’s not enough to just know what it says.
Let it into your life, deep, and it will help you cut away the unhealthy parts of your life.
For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
Use it. Let it influence you choices and it will help you make better choices that build you up and the ppl around you.
We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! 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.
Use it as a mirror to fix what’s out of place.
Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.
Using God’s word produces healthy growth. It transforms in ways that bring improvements and contentments.
Anticipate changes. They may hurt a little.
So does going to the doctor. He may hurt you if he has to, to help you.
Grow into your salvation. You’ve got a full-sized salvation body that needs to fill out.
Children who are malnourished are undersized. Frail. Weak. Unable to stand up to the pressures in life.
As a boy, my mom would buy me jeans a size or 2 too big so I could grow into them. Thinking they’d last longer. Wear a belt. Cuff the legs.
The problem was, by the time they fit I would have already worn holes in the knees. Remember, wearing jeans w/ iron-on patches? Who does that anymore?
We’ve been given a saved body to grow into. The bones will grow. The muscles will develop.
Discover what is available to the well-nourished soul.
Peace, joy, patience, kindness, love, self-control, etc.
The ppl Peter wrote to had a taste of what was possible. Then, they had to run.
They were stressed. They has lost a lot. Wondering if God was real, still loved them if He was, and if He had reneged on His promises.
If they didn’t take responsibility for their spiritual development it would stop.
They would be malnourished, underdeveloped, weak, unable to stand strong under the stresses of the storm they were in.
They’d be broken down and beat up.
Broke ppl break things.
It is our responsibility to develop an appetite for the spinach, black-eyed peas, and maybe even the pickled beets that will nourish our souls.
That is the word of God.
In a society that is broken, where all the momentum seems to be on the side of those who are breaking things.
We can change the direction everything is going.
If we let God change us, transform us. If we will commit to feeding on the things that nourish our souls we will grow up.
We’re not perfect. Never will be. But, we can do better.
Wherever each one of us is right now, we can all do better.
We can turn the tide and stop breaking thins up and tearing things down.
But, it takes well-nourished, spiritually, healthy ppl to be able stand against the tide move things in a different direction.
Eat well!
Applications
Applications
Get rid of it
Get rid of it
What old uniform do you need to take off?
You’re playing for a new team now.
Malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander, gossip, anger, a grudge, fear, doubt, conflict, sexual immorality, jealousy, drugs, alcohol, ...
What do you need to stop doing?
W/ God’s help, and replacing it w/ something positive, you can beat it.
Growth
Growth
Where do you need to grow?
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, self-control...
These are fruit. You don’t go straight to fruit.
Cultivate the soil and tree and fruit will develop.
Are you in God’s word enough?
Rather, is God’s word in you enough?
Let it in deep and it will transform you.
You’ve heard the phrase, “Hurt ppl, hurt ppl.”
It’s also true Broken ppl break things.
Healthy ppl heal things.
Malnourished ppl break things down.
Well-nourished ppl build things up.
This is where Peter goes in the first few verses of ch.2.
We have got to make sure we are well-nourished on a healthy spiritual diet ore else we will tear down and break up the ppl and relationships around us.
We have got to eat well! Spiritually.