Eating Ourselves to Death

The days are coming when I will send a famine on the land – not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. Amos 8:11

I’ve been eating right lately, not gorging myself before bed, which means waking up hungry. It was in such a state, that I recently had a bunch of grapes for breakfast. Because I’d been eating right, and because I was starving, those grapes were the best grapes I had ever eaten. Because I hadn’t been filling myself with junk, the healthy choice tasted fantastic. When however, I stuff myself with junk food, grapes just don’t do it for me. When I eat whatever I want, I don’t hunger for fruit. I crave pizza, chips, and chocolate.

This principle seems to apply to the rest of my life as well. When I live right, taking time daily to turn my mind towards God, I find intense joy, purpose, and meaning in that relationship. When however, I satisfy myself with the things of earth, I lose my appetite for the spiritual.

This is the condition of the Israelites in the book of Amos, who became victims of their own success. In their prosperity, they just didn’t feel that they needed God and thus, they turned from him, indulging in their appetites for wealth, stuff, sex, food, foreign gods, and pleasure. In following their appetites above all, they became deaf to God’s voice.

Finding pleasure in God’s world is not necessarily wrong. God means for us to enjoy life properly. When we gorge ourselves with the stuff of the world though, satisfying our needs with the creation, instead of the creator, we blunt our appetite for God. In our success and prosperity, we become blind to our ever-present need for him, eating ourselves to our own spiritual death.

We always need God. We just don’t always feel it. If we want to know true life and joy, we must remain dependent on God. We must choose to daily pursue him above all, even in times of success. We can fill ourselves with God, leading to life, or we can fill ourselves with junk, leading to misery. We cannot do both.