Now, we are sure that Christ pleases God, that he is holy and so on. Inasmuch, then, as Christ pleases God and we are in him, we also please God and are holy.
Although sin still remains in us, and although we daily fall and offend, grace is more abundant and stronger than sin. The mercy and truth of the Lord reign over us forever. Therefore, sin cannot make us afraid or make us doubt God’s mercy in us. For Christ, that most mighty giant, has abolished the law, condemned sin, and vanquished death and all evils.
So long as he is at the right hand of God making intercession for us, we cannot doubt God’s grace and favor toward us.
Isn’t this beautiful? And none of it has a bit to do with my performance–how “good” I am, how well I do the “church girl” gig. It is all about Christ’s “performance” on the cross and God’s kindness in attributing to me (because he wants to) all of Christ’s righteousness. A great exchange–my “junk” for His beauty!
No matter what I do, how much I mess up, over-schedule, over-stress, under-achieve…God looks upon me with pleasure. Wow.
If I really believed this, I wonder how it might impact me?
If you have ever wanted to join a Thin Within group, but can’t find a live one in your area, please consider joining us for our study. Whether you are brand new to Thin Within or have experience with the program, this new group will offer something for you!
I will be leading the members through a 12-week course using the Rebuilding God’s Temple workbook series. If you have never gone through workbook #1, you can join us using that workbook. If you have gone through that material before, you can use workbook #2. You can also join us using workbook #3 or #4 if you are a veteran who has been through the other workbooks!
The lessons in each of the workbooks follow the same set of themes at the same time. So, whether you are in WB #1 or #2, or #3, or #4, we will all focus on “Hope” for our lesson 1 and “Grace” for lesson 4, and “Boundaries” for lesson 9 (for example). All the workbooks have the same themes in the same order, but present the material a little differently so even veterans won’t get bored!
We will be meeting in a chat room hosted by Thin Within on Wednesday afternoons/evenings, 4:30-5:30 Pacific Time, 6:30-7:30 Central Time, and 7:30-8:30 Eastern time beginning THIS Wednesday, September 14th with an “Introductory” meeting. You need not have any lesson completed to attend and you can come just to ask questions if you like!
Our first meeting on September 14th will offer an opportunity for a Q and A. After September 14th, we will individually begin Lesson #1, which we will complete prior to our discussion together in our chat on September 21st.
If you want to order a workbook, please call Thin Within at 877-729-8932 between 9am and 5pm Eastern time and let them know which workbook you want. If you haven’t been through the material before, I highly recommend workbook #1 which comes with the temple toolkit. The materials for workbook #1 cost $45. If you have been through the material before, feel free to get one of the others–the cost for the other workbooks, I believe is $25.
Each week, you will have assignments to complete (daily attention to the material is ideal) and on Wednesday, we will meet together to discuss the themes of the material, to share joys, and challenges as we surrender our eating and our hearts to the Lord!
The location of our chat is http://www.thinwithin.org/chat . Once you get to the chat module, you will just type in a screen name you want (anything is fine, but first names are preferable). NOTHING ELSE IS NEEDED…do not “tick” a box or a radio button! Then click on LOGIN. Once there, double-click on “Community Room” in the upper right side of the window. That should be all there is to it!
Come this Wednesday and check us out! There is no cost to be in this class and you don’t even need to register. 🙂 I am Heidi Bylsma and I have worked with Arthur and Judy Halliday for about ten years, putting their terrific ideas into written form. I have also lost 100 pounds and a boat load of spiritual baggage using this approach. If you want to be on my email list to receive transcripts, announcements, and other supplemental materials for this class, be sure you email me at twheidi at comcast dot net and let me know you want to be included.
This is a GREAT time of year to be connected with a class of folks. As the holidays approach, you CAN get through the holidays without the typical 8 pounds of weight gained! You can enjoy all the holiday foods that seem to come around only once a year, but do so in moderation and in a way that honors the Lord with your body and your eating! HONEST! Come join our class to discover how! 🙂
Below is a video from LAST summer that describes the workbook kit #1. If you haven’t ever done Thin Within before, you will want to get a copy of this workbook. Our study will be open to people using any of the Thin Within workbooks, so no worries if you are ready to move on to #2, 3, or 4. We would love to have you! (I will be using #2 myself!).
Or “Junk” Food — A MYTH? – Part 4 Are you a dieter, hoping to find a blog that will offer you support and encouragement? I must apologize. I want to support YOU, but I don’t have the resources to support your diet. I would love to talk you OUT of being on a diet. I would love to talk you into being FREE for the rest of your life. Not free to be overweight, but free to lose the obsession with food and dieting AND free to find your natural God-given size, all the while growing in a closer relationship to the God who created you!
I would be so blessed if you would let me talk you into ditching your diet–forever!
I bet you know how to diet with the best of them. If you are like I was in 1999, you have lost weight a bunch of times. The trick is, we just can’t keep the “performance” up. It wasn’t until I began to believe that my list of “good foods” and “bad foods” was NOT helping me and that I had to try a different approach that I was finally able to lose the weight for good. I lost the *thinking* that had kept me on the pendulum swing, too!
Many of us are fearful about throwing away fat-gram counters, diet books, the special foods, measuring cups and food scales. Having a meal where we don’t have a death grip on our food content FREAKS US OUT! We are terrified of what the scale will say in the morning, even if we have “been good!”
I just don’t believe that God intended us to live this way…in fear. Fear is not of the Lord!
He wants us to experience the provision, presence, and power of His Spirit in our lives. As we walk in dependence on Him, asking Him about our body’s need and what fuel He has provided to meet that need, we come to see Him as He is…a GREAT provider! He never intended food to TORMENT us!
This is part 4 of a series of posts about how “Junk Food” is a myth. My view is there is no such thing as JUNK food. In fact, I don’t believe some foods are fattening. Over-eating IS! 🙂 You can over-eat and get fat on ANY food.
If you are afraid that if you start eating burgers or fries or whatever else, you will expand to double your current size, let me share with you how this works. 🙂 Before I stopped focusing on the nutrition content…back when I was having to step out in faith and start eating according to my physical hunger and physical satisfaction cues without counting points, calories or whatever else, I kept a loose mental note of nutrition facts relative to my eating. I did this as a sort of “insurance” policy and also to see if this thing was really likely to “work.”
Here is what I found: If I am physically hungry and slooooowly eat a more calorie-dense food, and really listen to my body as it signals physical satisfaction…well, it doesn’t take much of a calorie-dense food to satisfy my hunger. This translates into fewer calories than some might think. The thing is, many of us assume that if we order a burger and fries, we will eat the entire thing! But we don’t need to do that. We can eat only what our body needs and it knows that it isn’t hungry after just a few bites. It may not take many bites of a calorie-rich food, but those bites are deeply satisfying! I don’t end up frustrated and ready to indulge at the first discipline failure.
Dieters know that fat has more calories per gram than carbohydrates or protein. So it stands to reason that things with more fat are likely to sustain me a bit longer and it is likely to take less of it to get me to a place of physical satisfaction. LESS of it. That makes a huge difference! If I eat LESS of a regular hamburger…say 1/4th of it, isn’t that better than eating TWICE as much of a fake-burger? When I eat the entire fake-burger even though I am not hungry, is that really healthier? Overeating diet foods or eating smaller portions of regular foods…which keeps me healthier mentally and spiritually? Well, for me, it has been smaller portions of regular foods. In the past, eating the diet foods, just resulted in me giving in later out of frustration and eating BOTH…the “diet” food AND bingeing on the “bad foods.”
With the dieting mentality, food was my god…either because I was over-eating it, consuming massive quantities out of the sheer compulsion to do so … OR I was obsessing about counting this or that, weighing this or that and being sure I had special foods with me when going out with friends. That is a “god” there, too! I wasn’t free of my idol just because I had switched from over-eating to counting everything. With both mentalities, my focus was FOOD FOOD FOOD! Not to mention the worry of losing or gaining and weighing. It drove me nuts!
When we embrace the freedom to which the Lord calls, we are free to be grateful and thankful with a humble heart and to enjoy any food. We begin to care more and more about how our bodies feel and begin to gravitate toward foods that we know intuitively make us feel better–more energetic and less bloated (for instance).
The “forbidden” foods no longer have a hold on us because they are not forbidden! We can have any food any time we are hungry and suddenly when I know I can have Chocolate Turtle Empanadas at On the Border any time I want, I don’t need to have them all the time! When I order them, I don’t need to overeat…I can slowly enjoy a few bites and discover that I am physically satisfied…not to mention emotionally *gratified* that I got to enjoy something so wonderful! Spiritually, I am praising GOD for the incredible tastes and textures in the food as well–AND that he has made my body so efficiently that it doesn’t take much food to sustain my energy!
I can keep this approach up for the rest of my life. That is why I don’t gain back the weight! This is a lifestyle change. And I continue to eat with gratitude and joy just as the Scriptures seem to indicate I should! I am not taking on a form of legalism as if it is godliness. Instead, I am learning to depend on the Lord as I seek His leading in the moment.
It just plainly takes less calorie-dense food to satisfy me than it does something that I don’t want in the first place just because it has fewer calories!
What do you think? Are you willing to give it a try?
All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things.
– Psalm 104:27-28
ALL creatures. Humans included!
ALL creatures look to God for what?
…To give them their food at the proper ________ . What goes in that blank?
Time…
God gives food to all creatures at the proper time.
This struck me recently. This verse doesn’t say “All creatures look to you to give them the proper food. “Proper” modifies time. “Proper” does *not* modify food.
Why is this significant?
Because in this verse we are told that God opens his hand and we experience:
Satisfaction Good Things
When?
At the proper time. This is a concept upon which Thin Within principles are established. God has a time for us to enjoy food!
The point, however, is His goodness, His provision, and HIS timing! It isn’t about “fixing” the food (to make it “better”) or eating the “proper” food. It is about HIS provision of good, satisfying things and my waiting on His timing.
So when is His timing to provide food? Is it when I *want* food because of taste? Or is it only when I am NOT over my “allotment” of _____ (calories, points, blocks, grams, etc.) for the day?
Calorie/point/gram allotments are superficial standards set by humans. These aren’t the standard.
If we look to the wonder of nature (which is the context of this verse), the proper time to receive the good things that God gives to satisfy is when there is a needfor fuel–when creatures are hungry. I don’t know of an instance where wild animals have gotten obese, eating food when they aren’t in need of fuel and storing extra fuel as fat on their bodies (unless their environment required it for survival and warmth like Polar Bears, etc.).
God is more interested in the timing of our eating than the what of our eating. We can eat the most nutritionally dense, calorie-light food in the world, but if it isn’t the right time–HIS time–it may be out of His will.
Food was intended to nourish our bodies…to fuel our bodies. When we eat to fuel our bodies, we can delight in amazing textures, sensations, and whatever He provides for us! As we do this with gratitude and a thankful heart, coming from a place of humility, we glorify him as 1 Corinthians 10:13 says, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it to the glory of God the Father.”
Is my heart grateful? Thankful? Or resentful and frustrated? I might want to evaluate if I am caught thinking that I can’t have this entrée or that dessert. Am I trapped in the mentality of good food/bad foods? Maybe he wants to break me free so that I can experience the satisfaction he promises in Psalm 104 and elsewhere.
It was pretty quiet Monday in response to my post…and yesterday was a “ghost town” here on the blog except for one commenter (thanks, Sandra!). Maybe faithful readers feel I have discredited myself.
I guess all I really know is what I have experienced. For most of my adult years, I focused on the nutrition content of my food and felt “good” or “bad” about myself based on my eating choices. There was a nasty pendulum swing that occurred when I was on that path. Truthfully, all those years I struggled with my weight and hyper-focus on my body even while obsessing about nutrition content in my foods. In fact, most of those years I was significantly overweight and not healthy at all.
My freedom from extra weight has gone hand-in-glove with letting go of my tendencies to weigh and measure my food (weigh and measure ME), to obsess about nutrition labels, to graph and chart calories in and calories expended with exercise.
Another possible indication that fixating on the content of the food may not be the answer is that for the past 20 years and more, we have, as a country, added more “diet foods” (reduced calorie, reduced fat, reduced sugar, etc.) and more “vitamin enriched” foods to our assortment of choices. Nevertheless, our country battles obesity and obesity-related health issues like never before! This problem is actually *increasing* even as our variety of diets, diet centers, and diet foods has increased! Certainly, if adjusting the content of our foods was the answer, this wouldn’t be the case.
Foods are often referred to as “treats,” “junk,” “healthy,” and so on. (Funny how the “treats” seem to overlap the “junk” lists for those who have these lists!) It IS tempting to develop lists that help me feel good about myself when I eat or don’t eat accordingly. But, is this wisdom?
Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world,
why, as though you still belonged to the world,
do you submit to its rules:
“Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”?
These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use,
are based on merely human commands and teachings.
Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom,
with their self-imposed worship,
their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body,
but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.
Colossians 2:20-23
The context of this passage isn’t “junk food” or “healthy food,” but the principles are very similar to the ones that exist when we make our good/bad food lists! Maybe we should pause and think–or, even, pray! Is the Lord really the author of our good/bad food lists? Do my lists really deal with my heart?
In Acts 10, the Lord speaks to Peter about his own “good food/bad food” lists and commands Peter not to call unclean anything the Lord has made clean. Again, maybe there is a principle there.
Because I am a child of God, given a trust — this physical body — I want to be responsible in the way I eat. I am commanded in 1 Corinthians 10:31 to do all I do to the glory of God including my eating and drinking. But eating according to artificially created lists isn’t the answer!
What if we allowed ourselves the same freedom that God invites us to enjoy? What if we were to enjoy all things in moderation and take Him at His Word, balancing our freedom with an eye toward understanding what 1 Corinthians 6:12 says:
“Everything is permissible for me”—
but not everything is beneficial.
“Everything is permissible for me”—
but I will not be mastered by anything.
Maybe the point is, I really am to enjoy in moderation all things that He has given me and keep an eye especially on what is beneficial. I have great freedom in Christ! I don’t *need* to make lists! Certainly, I don’t want any food or flavor to master me as the last part of this passage says. In fact, maybe this wonderful freedom, when exercised with a dependence on the Lord’s leading in the moment, may lead me not to enjoy freedom TO eat, but freedom from HAVING TO eat a certain food in that moment!
The Lord may lead me to eat this ice cream or that salad or this enchilada or that shish-kabob. He may also lead me to fast my hunger for reasons I may sense or not. Maybe, I am called not to live according to lists–no matter how godly they may seem, but according to His Spirit in the moment.
When I look in Scripture, there are so many accounts where food has a role. I believe that He cares about this issue a great deal. In the earliest chapters of Genesis, Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden lured to eat outside of God’s boundaries. Esau gives up his birthright for the sake of some stew. In the New Testament even communion uses the symbols of bread and wine.
In the closing pages of God’s Word in the book of Revelation, are we promised a marriage dance of the Lamb? A marriage ceremony? No…a marriage SUPPER of the Lamb! God has seen fit that food and eating is important. I don’t believe He placed a broad spectrum of flavors and textures on this earth to torment us, but to bless us within godly parameters. Those parameters are simply…moderation. Eating when I am hungry, stopping when I am no longer hungry, doing so prayerfully, with gratitude and praise…who needs good food/bad food lists, points, or specially packaged foods? 🙂
I am encouraged in Proverbs 3:5,6 to trust in the LORD with all my heart and not depend on my own understanding. In ALL my ways (even in my eating?) I am to acknowledge Him and He will make my paths straight. I need to prayerfully consider what He wants from me in this and not lean on what seems to make sense based on what modern science says.
This sounds like a living, breathing, constant walk with the Holy Spirit. This sounds like being prayerful. Maybe this is an extension of a Spirit-filled, Spirit-dependent life.
Judgments are made about foods all the time in our society. This food is “Junk Food” and that food is “Healthy Food.” While I realize that some foods tend to be “nutritionally dense” and some foods are lighter in vitamins and minerals while denser in “energy” they provide, I don’t tend to think of foods as “junk” or “healthy” any more. When I did, it never made me thin *or* healthy! As unbelievable as it may sound, I lost 100 pounds (and have kept it off for 4 years give or take) while eating french fries, pizza, ice cream, etc., etc., all those things that people usually put on the “Junk Food” list and say make you fat.
Sometimes, depending on what people eat based on those judgments, they then feel “good” or “bad” about themselves. I have been there, so I know how that works! 🙂 It is interesting we don’t think of *why* we eat, but only the *what*. Maybe the *why* is important! (Actually, I KNOW it is!)
Some people even seem to think they can be closer to the Lord by eating certain foods and abstaining from certain others. (Again, focusing on the *what*, rather than the *why*.)
For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking,
but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
– Romans 14: 17
Food shows up in the Bible often. Even so, we would be hard pressed to prove biblically that God is pleased or displeased with us based on the nutrition content — the what — of our food. In fact, often throughout the Word of God, people were commanded to enjoy rich foods and beverages!
Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks,
and send some to those who have nothing prepared.
This day is holy to our Lord.
Do not grieve,
for the joy of the LORD is your strength.”
-Nehemiah 8:10
It wasn’t the nutritional content of the foods that the people were told to evaluate before eating or drinking. They were encouraged to eat CHOICE food and drink SWEET drinks. This was a *taste* test!
A clerk at the UPS store the other day made cheerful small-talk with me. He asked me where I was going to eat lunch. When I said McDonald’s he quizzically said “You don’t look like the sort of person who would eat at McDonald’s. You are so fit!” I guess fit people can only be fit if they do NOT eat at McDonald’s. Truthfully, I eat at McDonald’s frequently, but my cholesterol isn’t high and my weight is healthy. I eat smaller portions when I am hungry and that makes all the difference!
The difference isn’t *what* I eat as much as it is *how much* and *when*. If I eat whenI am hungry and stop whenI am not (which takes care of the “how much”), I have freedom to eat whatever I choose. My walk with God is unencumbered by a constant lust for foods that are “forbidden.” I heed God’s leading without giving in to greed and gluttony–two sins clearly highlighted in the Scriptures–by eating in moderation!
In an ideal world, of course, this doesn’t mean I act irresponsibly…I understand that my body is a stewardship, a trust. I want to make choices for fueling my body that make me feel and operate at my best, but I can do this prayerfully without obsessing about nutrition contents of the foods. I also want to move my body in a way that helps it get and stay healthy and fit.
The truth is, God has richly provided all things for our enjoyment (1 Timothy 6:17). But because we struggle with the concept of moderation and enjoying these blessings within godly boundaries, we think we need to eliminate them completely! I wonder if, by doing this, we don’t deny ourselves an aspect of growth in our walks with Christ. To learn moderation, we need to depend on Him and His Spirit–especially with things that have mastered us previously. By creating our “Do” or “Do NOT Do” lists (EAT or DON’T EAT), is it possible we turn to a form of legalism that circumvents the very freedom that God desires for us? What if we could enjoy ANY food, in moderation, WHEN hungry, to fuel our body? Wouldn’t it be a delightful experience not to obsess about food any longer?
Matthew 6:31 speaks to me about this very thing when it says: So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’
How about you? Do you tend to think of food as JUNK or as HEALTHY? Do you worry about what you will eat or drink or what size you will wear? What if you could enjoy ANY food in moderation? What then? How might this affect your life, your walk with Christ, your dependence on Him?
