My mother would tell me this as a child to try to get me to eat good, healthy foods while my child-self kept reaching for the pizza, cokes, and candy. I always had visions in my mind of turning into a giant chicken if I ate too much of it at that age. As a kid, I just wanted what made my stomach feel full, and what pleased my senses of taste and smell. Now that I am older, I understand what she meant and have become keenly aware of what goes into my body, even if I don’t heed the warnings from the knowledge.
Spiritually, the principal is still the same. While we are all aware of the physical food and drink enjoyed daily, Jesus reminds us, as He tells Satan in Matthew 4:4, that, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes form the mouth of God.”
Just like our body, our spirit must be nourished with food. The woman at the well learned this as Jesus tells her in John 4:10, 14, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water. … whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The physical world does not work that way, so Jesus is referring to a spiritual food: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for that all be satisfied” (Matthew 5:6)
So, if we have spiritual food, what kind of food are we consuming to our spirit? Jude says in verses 18-21, “[The apostles] said to you, ‘in the last time there will be scoffers, following their own ungodly passions.’ It is these who cause division, worldly people devoid of the Spirit. But you, beloved building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.”
Jude describes what our spirit consumes and the result of that. If we consume the spiritual food of division, worldliness, and a turning away from the Spirit of God, they become what they consume. They follow their own ungodly passions, and they scoff at those who are following God. An old English proverb says “misery loves company.” Such is the case of those who do not embrace the goodness and mercy of God. Their scoffing stems from their own misery in seeking goodness in a fallen world. Like the bully in the schoolyard, he seeks those whom he can feel superior to and prey on to try and fill a void of emptiness in his heart from an absent father, a mother who doesn’t care, a teaching that evil is acceptable, or other malfunction due to an illness of his spirit. He lashes out. Proverbs 16:29 says, “A man of violence entices his neighbor and leads him in a way that is not good.”
The man who consumes the good, spiritual food of building themselves (the words are plural because Jude is speaking to the collective church who are building each other up), building up faith in God, praying, and keeping himself in the love of God, will be spiritually healthy — able to do good works and have the hope of heaven.
The world will try to pull us away with enticements that lure the weak like children to candy. When we don’t understand what that spiritual food does to us, we might enjoy what fills our belly and pleases our senses. But the body is not the end of us. One day it will disappear, returning to the dust from which it was created (Ecclesiastes 3:20), and it will not matter how good it felt, or how happy its carnal existence was. One day our spirit will be exposed. Will it be emaciated, having never been fed, or possibly broken? Or will be we able to stand strong having nourished that spiritual self, ready to meet our God?
Lance Byers