Is overeating really sin? Is that one extra bite rebellion against the Lord?
I really struggled with those questions. It was one of the things in the Thin Within material that I had a hard time grasping. To be honest, over the years, when I would get to about Day 7 in the Thin Within book, I wouldn’t be able to push through any further. I really didn’t think I needed God’s forgiveness or grace when I took that one extra bite or overate. I would think, “Come on! It’s just food! It’s just one extra bite! What’s the big deal? Doesn’t God have other things to be concerned about? Why does this have to be so spiritual?”
And then my eyes were opened.
I had been praying about this and asking the Lord what His truth was about it in my life. Then one evening, I really wanted to make popcorn to eat during a movie my husband and I were going to watch. I knew I wasn’t hungry for the popcorn, but I just kept on thinking about it. Finally, I decided I was going to make popcorn. As I poured the freshly popped popcorn into a big wooden bowl, I heard the Holy Spirit gently ask me if I would not eat the popcorn since I wasn’t hungry. And like an annoying fly buzzing around, I flicked that request off. How could I resist now? Oh, the delicious scent of hot-buttered popcorn! And then, as I scooped some popcorn into my smaller bowl, the Holy Spirit asked me again if I would refrain from eating the popcorn. Flick! No thank you, I’m going to EAT this popcorn, thank you very much! So I sat down, began the movie, and about 2/3 of the way through my bowl of popcorn the Holy Spirit asked again, gently, if I would stop eating since I wasn’t hungry. Obediently, I put the bowl down and didn’t take one more bite.
He was so gentle. I was so rebellious. I lusted after that popcorn. I hardened my heart against the Holy Spirit’s guidance. I was like that Israelite demanding my way as I puttered around in the wilderness; just give me the leeks and onions! I didn’t want God’s manna or His provision. I wanted MY way in MY time! In essence, I wanted to go back to that slavery. Instead of deliverance and freedom, I wanted the easy way out.
Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts. Hebrews 4:7b
I don’t want to harden my heart. I want to love the Lord with all of my heart, mind and soul. I don’t want to hold anything back. I have to die to myself, to my fleshly, selfish desires in order to live for Him.
But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts. Romans 13:14
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.
Matthew 22:37
And it was at that moment I realized that I am not honoring the Lord when I take that extra bite knowing I don’t need it or when I overeat. I was placing food over Him.
This has been a hard truth to swallow. I would rather not digest it. I want to be in denial, but I clearly saw my rebellion that day when I hardened my heart. I chose to fall into temptation—to sin. Temptations will come, but I had a choice to make. I chose to follow my flesh instead of following after the Spirit. God provided a way out of the temptation, but I chose to take the other path.
When we are hungry, we eat. Food is fuel for our body. So what happens when we consistently go outside of God’s bounds of eating outside of hunger? We gain weight, we feel stuffed, we don’t like the way we look or feel, etc.
Why would we need food outside of hunger? What are we truly “hungry” for when we want to eat when we aren’t physically hungry?
I could replace that “hunger” with food, alcohol, sex, drugs, or any other substance or addiction, but it will never fulfill what I’m truly hungry for. As Heidi says, only God can fill that God-size hole that needs Him in our heart.
Maybe you are reading this and you might think that this doesn’t make sense for you. Maybe you feel that it’s legalistic to say one extra bite is sin. I would encourage you to ask the Lord about this in your own life. Ask Him to show you the truth about this for you. Maybe you aren’t at that place in your journey where it’s clear. Maybe the Lord is working on other areas right now.
Another thing I do is I check the motivation of my heart. Something I think about often is something that is asked in the book Intuitive Eating: would I deny a bride and groom their bites of wedding cake after the cake cutting if they weren’t truly hungry? It’s not their motive to indulge. There have been times after a meal at a friend’s house where I’m not really hungry anymore, but I will eat a little serving of dessert. I will check in with the Lord and there are times where He says that it’s ok, that my heart is in the right place. But I really think this is something personal between you and the Lord. This isn’t an excuse to eat whenever you feel like it. It’s not to justify eating another bite when you know God is saying it’s time to stop. You will know because the Holy Spirit will show you.
God is bringing me to a place of wanting to honor Him more and more with eating. I want to glorify Him in all that I do. My body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. I don’t want to follow after the flesh. I don’t want to lust after food. I don’t want to harden my heart. I want to follow the Spirit and grow closer to Him.
For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. Romans 8:5
For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age. Titus 2:11-12
If we do choose to purposely overeat, we can ask the Lord to forgive us.
“The surest way to return to the path of God’s provision is by repentance. As we observe, we identify the truth about our behavior and agree with God that a correction is in order. We then confess the truth we observe, and identify the faulty thinking and fleshly behaviors. He further places with us a desire to make the godly correction. This is repentance, and it results in returning to the path of God’s provision where we are filled with peace, joy, and rest” (Thin Within page 248-249).
And knowing that God has forgiven us as we repent, we can continue on our journey of honoring Him. There’s no need to beat ourselves up with the club of condemnation. You don’t have to eat with the attitude of, “Well, I messed up, I guess I will just eat whatever I want, whenever I want the rest of the day.” This isn’t a diet we’ve gotten off track with or have eaten up all of our daily calories, points, fat grams, carbohydrates, etc. This is observing that we’ve overeaten, repenting, and then continuing on the path of God’s provision. And then you just wait until you are hungry again to eat. I find this so refreshing!
There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. Romans 8:1
There are times I find myself being tempted to eat when I’m not hungry. I’m learning to ask God for help during those times. And He is always willing. We can call upon Him!
I will love You, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer; My God, my strength, in whom I will trust; My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised; So shall I be saved from my enemies. Psalm 18:1-2
How about you?
Where do you find your thoughts when you think about overeating or one extra bite as sin? I want to encourage you to ask the Lord what this looks like for you. Are you eating because you are trying to fulfill a hunger only God can fill? Do you find yourself lusting after food and eating with a rebellious attitude? Ask the Lord to show you: He will! And He won’t just stop there, He will show you how you can turn your eyes from lust to fixing your eyes upon Jesus!
Daniel has Asperger’s Syndrome, Daniel will be 16 in July of 2008.
Again and again, I must be willing to bring my heart authentically to the Lord. I realize that what is here in these more recent blog entries, may jar many people who have a certain view of me, of my journey, of how a Christian *should* think, feel, act…
But the truth is, God has shown me that, at the heart of my journey to be free from obsessions regarding food, eating, my body, there must be an authentic willingness to admit my feelings to Him. To bring to Him the thoughts with which I struggle. When I am mad at Him, disappointed in Him, when I feel this sense that He has done wrong against me (even though God can do no wrong). He already *knows* how I feel. Denying how I feel just keeps me in chains, in captivity. As I admit to Him what I feel, He can clean it up and out. He will root out the cancer of bitterness before it becomes that defilement that Hebrews speaks of.
To say “Christians don’t feel that way” is to deny truth. Satan is the Father of lies. I believe that by being honest and presenting these heartaches to the Lord and sharing them here with you, my healing takes place. God can handle it when I complain to Him, when I rail on Him. He is perfectly able to defend Himself to me, so please don’t email me about how God can do no wrong and how sinful and incorrect I am for having these thoughts. God has called me to bring these thoughts *to* Him and to allow Him to work. We have been here before and I imagine we will be here again. And my horse, Harley, has often been the vehicle God has used to show me that we have this issue percolating again (go figure). (Maybe that is why I am considering selling Harley, in fact…because it is TOO painful to have this in my face every few months!)
So the words I share here are shared with trepidation and hesitance. I don’t want to do anything to fuel another’s rebellion against God. Please don’t use my confessions to justify resisting the Lord. If He calls you to face into your own truthful perceptions and mis-perceptions about Him and His character as He is calling to me, please allow Him to do it. Pleaes respond to His call. Tell Him how you feel. He can take it. I believe what he will not abide is our pretense. We insult Him when we pretend all is well and piously say “God is good all the time, all the time God is good” when inwardly we are screaming “WHY???” and shaking our fists at Him. It is my conviction that God wants us to bring our heartaches, anger, disappointment and shaking fists to Him…He will meet us where we are. He brings a heart of love, of compassion, and, yes, of holiness. He will straighten what is crooked, fix what is broken, mend what is torn, heal what is hurting, rebuke what needs rebuking, too. It is true. But how can we grow if we deny we have these feelings? How can I grow if I deny that these thoughts have resurfaced?
Anyhow, I hope something in this lengthy disclosure can minister to your heart…or to the heart of a friend of yours that you know needs to hear…Christians–even those in leadership–even those who love the Lord, know His Word–those who have been in ministry for decades–even those who God uses to write books! (HA!)–even those Christians have challenges they must identify and bring to the Lord. Like the hemorrhaging woman, I am falling in the dust, clinging to the hem of Jesus’ garment…for only a taste of His power to remove this bleeding of my heart. He will do it.
Here are some thoughts, some from an email to a friend…edited…that I hope might encourage others. I am really in a season of processing this…again. I keep needing to return here. Go figure. I long for redemption…
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If I am not at peace with Daniel’s “stuff” be it real and permanent, real and temporary, or in my head or whatever else, then I frankly am not at peace with God being God. This is the crux of all of my eating issues and, frankly, all of life for me.
Daniel has what doctors call a “developmental disorder.” Even the label flies in the face of the character of God. 1 Corinthians 14:33 says: “For God is not a God of disorder but of peace.” So where does that leave us when God formed and created Daniel in the womb and he has what man, anyhow, calls a “disorder?” This makes no sense to me. (Obviously, one answer is that GOD does NOT call it a “disorder!” I cling to that hope right now as I edit my words here!)
God has made Daniel autistic…he is incapable of being aware and sensitive of others’ needs and emotions. He is, by nature, self-centered and can’t possibly understand the “otherness” of other people (which is one aspect of autism).
If God would create my son this way, then how on earth can I trust God with other things in my life, let alone something that seems so relatively insignificant as my eating? Don’t get me wrong. I love Daniel dearly. But the fact is, life isn’t likely to ever be for him what it is for “normal” young men. No, I don’t know his future, I realize, but so many things are stacked against him. Why would God choose to do that to him–at birth? And why assign him a mother who has NO resources upon which to draw? (Yes, I know God enables and equips me–in theory–but how much better it would be, it seems, to call upon someone who is a nurturer by nature already, who was raised by a loving, compassionate mother, who had a decent example of living as a servant for others!)
It is hard for me, in light of these things, to believe God at His Word…”Open wide your mouth and I will fill it.” How can He nourish my soul, my heart, my neediness, when at the very heart of who I am, I feel as though He has kicked me in the teeth and my child, too? If I can’t trust God with my CHILDREN, the really important things in life…then where does that leave these other things? Like eating?
For me, accepting my child’s “truth”–my “truth”–is at the heart of all of this eating and body image stuff. Sounds crazy, but it is connected. It isn’t just about “emotional eating” when I get thinking about this. For me, it is much more involved and deep than that. And this is what I had to begin to deal with before the eating thing (and a host of other things) could be put into perspective back in November of 2006. And this is also why, when I have a meal eaten in rebellion, I know to stop and evaluate, “Who do I need to forgive?” Sometimes the answer is God.
It is still a process. Every now and then, God and I dialog this way about it, He brings the truth home to me (very lovingly and tenderly), and I work through it with Him, ultimately, surrendering my objections. Then, I am at peace again. I am able to recognize it now, when the objections emerge, and I dialog with Him about it–it makes a big difference.
I tried to avoid these heart challenges for a long time, not wanting to recognize I had an issue with God being God…and one way of avoiding it was to try to focus on anything else, including losing weight, of “giving the food thing to God.” Truthfully, that was avoidance via performance…I kept pointing at my attempts to do what God wanted with regard to food and my body and earnestly say “See? God? I am working on this…” and I think somehow I felt like it would “convince” God…that I was “ok”…but I reasoned that if God would give me a son who is “disordered” that it was a punishment (I know in my head this isn’t true) and that God would give Daniel a Mom like me…that, too, seems so wrong. Thus, my need to “forgive” God. I had the most dysfunctional upbringing that parenting even a “normal” child would be a challenge…I was running from facing into what I had to face into and daily still need to:
“God is God and I am not.”
He showed me that, for a season, all my attempts to lose weight and let go of out-of-control eating were just another way of avoiding His call to allow Him to help me with what was at the ROOT of my “issues.” My lack of faith, my rejection of God as God, my insistence that God “behave.” He isn’t a tame lion…he will blow the lid off of all my boxes.
When I returned to the Thin Within “approach” in Nov. 2006, God specifically said, “First, I want this taken care of…” It was challenging, but it turned things around. I still have to work to walk in humility with this (not doing so well right now, as you can see). I simply do not fathom his ways…and sometimes that ticks me off. 🙁
I keep hoping that God will use my story in some way…the uglier part of it…to reach out to someone else who feels disconnected from Him…maybe angry, numb, unbearably disappointed in God…and that maybe the ugliness of who I am and have been and how He is working with me faithfully on that…maybe it can bring hope. About more than weight loss. Weight loss really is so *unimportant* when it comes to this stuff…but about reconciliation, restoration…with Abba…
Lord, you alone know what your purposes are for pairing Daniel and me together. I still can’t pretend that I understand how, as you wove him together in my womb, you chose to weave him in such a way that he would have so many challenges. That *I* would have challenges in providing him what he needs. Lord, I fear *ruining* him…messing up his entire life…all because you paired me with him…it doesn’t seem fair that he wouldn’t have a wonderful loving nurturing mom who is able to believe the best, structure Daniel’s life for success. All my baggage, Lord…it stands in the way of opening my arms wide to your provision for this situation. Lord, help me to release what is familiar. It doesn’t serve your divine purposes. Lord I want to be who you want me to be for Daniel. Please help me to let go of my unmet needs, my expectations, my disappointments. Lord, I am disappointed in you. I confess this. I am disappointed that after all these years, I still haven’t experienced the infusion of the “Good Mom Gene.” Something that would enable me to be that loving, nurturing person that all kids need, let alone those who feel the world is out to get them. Lord, I bring this to you today. In honesty, I offer it here at the blog where I am really hanging myself out to be quite vulnerable, to be rebuked by people who are well-meaning, but feel my theology is wrong. Lord protect me. Help them to see any truth in their own lives…and heal us all, Lord. You can take all of who we are and redeem it all. I offer myself to you. Jesus died for my sin and my shame and I am covered with both today. I offer this to you as well. In the Name of my Savior, Shepherd, Lord and King, Amen.
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Daniel has what doctors call a “developmental disorder.” Even the label flies in the face of the character of God. 1 Corinthians 14:33 says: “For God is not a God of disorder but of peace.” So where does that leave us when God formed and created Daniel in the womb and he has what man, anyhow, calls a “disorder?” This makes no sense to me. (Obviously, one answer is that GOD does NOT call it a “disorder!” I cling to that hope right now as I edit my words here!)
