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Manna Issue 20
#1
Manna Issue 20

Psalm 139: 7 "Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. 9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, 10 even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. 11 If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me," 12 even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. 13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, 16 your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. 17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! 18 Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you."



The LORD knows the thoughts of man. I know that you are receiving comfort in your spirit as you read these passages. I do every time I look at these verses. Where can we go that God is not with us? What can we do that He is not right by our side? What thoughts can we have that He does not know them? Whatever part of the day we devote to God, He has already devoted the entire day to us. So our topic today is what are we hiding from when we try to conceal our particular eating disorder from Him? Does He not know what a struggle we that are overweight are going through? Does He not see when we sneak a food item in our mouth that we know is not necessary to our nutritional needs? Can we continue to hide from our God the real reason we are gaining weight and not losing it, or not staying at a perfectly healthy and stable weight? That body frame that He made in secret is never hidden from Him, and neither is our frame of mind.



I had a wonderful question posed to me this week which was this: Are you comfortable being totally honest and open with God? Today as we seek recovery from eating issues that have held us in bondage, we will look at the greater question involved such as this one: Is it God that we are hiding from as we attempt to bury ourselves in the comfort of food, rather than the comfort of the Bread of Life who sustains us in all things? Are we hiding behind food rather than coming to God as we should? Tough topic, but we need a real thinker today as we attempt to be freed from the confines of the flesh that have made us dieters. We need to totally learn how to speak to God about what is eating us that is making us overeat. I am one who has been stuck in second gear in a great many matters of my life. And it is the restlessness and overeating that I do out of boredom and dissatisfaction that enables me to know now that it is God calling me to conquer an area of my life that I am trying to hide from Him. Wallowing in the comfort of food was pretty cleverly disguised for quite awhile. How about you? Are you stuck in second gear and going nowhere in your dieting effort? Perhaps we need to look under the skin as I did! Is that what might be causing you to run and hide yourself in a plate of food, rather than just eating appropriate portions when the body signals hunger for nourishment? We don't want to hide in excess food, and we don't want to numb our feelings with starvation to over compensate. That means when we have a problem, we need to take it to someone. That Someone as we know Him is Christ the Lord. The only one who is able to see what we cannot see. The only one that is able to lead us away from the path of slow destruction that we are on and point us to the right path again of health and well being. Look at all the quick fix diets we have tried to use to repair our bodies.



I run a poll which asks people what was the worst diet they were ever on. The top five highest answers from a choice of thirty were: Fasting, Slim Fast, Cabbage Soup Diets, Diet Pills, and Other. I am assuming that the Other includes some of our crazier ones like chocolate lovers, cookie diet and ice cream diet to name a few. Can you imagine what extremes we go to try to loose weight and actually none of these are bona fide diets? We are hiding when we try to escape through a quick fix diet. Those are remedies good for a few pounds of weight loss at its best, but they are not a lifestyle change that God would lead us to in giving us freedom, inside and out. Can you honestly envision Jesus asking you to endure cabbage soup day in and day out until you can no longer even stand the smell of it? Or Slim Fast which I don't have to remind you is not even food. And the others, are they something that is even food or nutrition to sustain weight? What we are saying to God is, "Surely the darkness will hide me." We are not looking for the truth and thoughts of God that can deliver us from a vicious cycle. If you really think long and hard about it the reasons are because this is a diet, not a remedy.



We as Christians know that Christ Jesus holds a remedy for us. In fact He holds a victory for us if we spend the time to search it out and tap into it. Proverbs 23 is a verse that I long ago memorized. Verse 7 "For as he (a person) thinks in his heart, so is he." Low self esteem for much of my life drove me to the realization that I needed to raise my self worth level to what God thinks of me and not what I thought of me or others thought of me for that matter. No one is born with a low self-image. Feelings of ineptitude are learned from comparisons and circumstances that usually have nothing to do with reality. God is Reality. We need to look to Him for the truth that will set us free. The journey to have confidence in my life came through a period of time learning, realizing and believing in how much God loved me. It was all about discovering who He saw me as being, what I was capable of, and going after that vision. So we apply it also to our dieting attempts. We say, "I don't think I can", and God says, "I know that you can. I see it."



We are going to look at a story so that we can raise ourselves above the level of trying to conceal from God just what it is that would enable Him to free us from false starts and stops us our journey to find relief from our food bondages. It is called, Song of the Bird "A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eagle hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life, the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet in the air. Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbor. He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth -- we're chickens." So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was." -Anthony DeMello



The Lord knows our thoughts. God will not force you to think any differently if you don't want to quit scratching the earth for worms and insects when you could soar free and unhindered in the heavenlies. "How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!" He is thinking thoughts of you finding the truth as to why or what caused your weight gain, how to deal with it, how to extend effort to overcome it, and how to be free from a troubling and unhealthy period of your life. We need to know that we can be totally open and honest with God and we need to be comfortable doing that. God will never fail or forsake us. No matter what we tell Him, He already knows and desires to remove the chicken mentality from us and grant us the eagle mentality instead. Last Monday's Manna issue we talked about ridding ourselves of the "I can't" mentality and replacing it with the "I can" mentality. It certainly goes with this week’s food sermon also.



Some of us by long standing habits are chickens before God's Presence. We cluck and cackle to Him but never say anything meaningful or what He desires from us. What God wants from us is found in Psalm 51:6 "Surely you desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place." If we can be honest with God as to why we have a food addiction, then He will give us the wisdom to overcome it. Or we can still attempt to rid our problems with some of the all time worse diet plans there are. And we know that we may lose a few pounds with them at the start, only to gain back 2 or 3 times that amount at the end. And in the meantime we are still scratching the earth for worms and insects. I would encourage you to begin a food journal this week. This is how I originally started off. Writing down what time I ate, what it was that I ate, and my mood when I ate. Why did I eat? What was my mood? Often it was bored or lonely, insulted, but not hungry. More often than not I just felt tired and discovered that food was a sedative that put me to sleep. Wasn't that then a problem to take to the Lord to see what was lacking in my life? Perhaps for you it may be frustrated, angry, sad, stressed, or perhaps it might be actually hungry. But by keeping a journal faithfully for at least a few weeks, when you look back over it you might well see a pattern in your eating habits and the amount you are actually consuming, and perhaps you will be able, if there appears to be a problem pattern, take your thoughts to God for some clarification and wisdom from Him.



Remember, God knows your thoughts---He is waiting for you to bring them before Him. It is certainly worth a try, isn't it? To look deep inside with God's help and see if you could possibly be an eagle on the inside struggling to get out from the confines of being a chicken. You are fearfully and wonderfully made and God desires to bring you into that full realization. It is worth the moments we spend with Him to see His view of us which is accurate, rather than the distorted imagine our body size may be sending off signals to us as. Are you thinking, "It sounds like work to me?" It might be but we are reminded to labor for the works that will not perish. This is an investment of time, done in prayer and seeking God that will pay off in the permanent deliverance that we desire. Keep in mind, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, that He came to make us whole. Perhaps the weight gain caught our attention that something could be lacking, but God does have a route of escape for us if we will dig a little deeper. May you have a blessed week, not just on the scale, but in finding the truth that shall set you free. Lord God, help me to be up front and honest with You. In being truthful in my inner self, I know that I will find the results that I have prayed for. Bless my efforts that I take toward my freedom, and enable me through the power of Christ Jesus. With your right hand hold me fast. Amen ©2001-2007 www.gracetoday.com

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