Any personal trainer will tell you that you cannot out-train a bad diet. This means if you want to lose weight and get in shape, you have to change your eating habits. Many people violate this principle and try to do extra workouts or run extra miles each week only to be frustrated by their lack of progress.
This natural principle also carries over into our spiritual lives. Spiritually, you cannot out-train a bad diet. What does this mean? The spiritual training we do such as volunteering in church, going to prayer meetings, or endeavoring to treat people with kindness will not replace receiving proper nutrition from the word of God. I’m not saying we should not do the spiritual exercises I described above as they are important to our growth because if all we do is feed on God’s word and don’t do anything with it, we will get spiritually fat (more on that next week).
Before we focus on spiritual exercise, we need to understand the importance of spiritual nutrition. Without feeding on proper spiritual subsistence cannot do the the things God wants us to do. Imagine going to the gym without eating. You’d be exhausted within 15 minutes and you wouldn’t be able perform very well. Take a look at Psalms 37:
3 Trust in the Lord, and do good; Dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness.
David tells us to do good in this passage. Doing good speaks of our activities/exercise. Notice, however, this comes from a place of faith. The first part of the passage says trust in the Lord. Trust is another word for faith and according to Romans 10:17 faith comes by hearing the word of God. David then goes on and tells us to feed on God’s faithfulness while we are doing good in the land. We feed on God’s faithfulness by meditating His promises and testimonies of past victories He has given us. Revelation 10:9-11 takes this a bit further:
9 So I went to the angel and said to him, “Give me the little book.”
And he said to me, “Take and eat it; and it will make your stomach bitter, but it will be as sweet as honey in your mouth.”
10 Then I took the little book out of the angel’s hand and ate it, and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth. But when I had eaten it, my stomach became bitter. 11 And he said to me, “You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, tongues, and kings.”
In this passage, John eats the book the angel gave him. After he ate the book (symbolic of the word of God), John was able to prophecy to peoples, nations, tongues, and kings. John had to properly digest the word for himself before he could share it. We must also digest God’s word before we speak in out, prophesy, or walk in anything it tells us to do. Unfortunately, too many Christians live off the word God spoke to them years ago instead of getting fresh manna from God every day. This doesn’t work spiritually anymore than it would work in the natural. We need to eat regularly to grow.
As I close, I’d encourage you to feed on the word of God every day. This is a major key to growing spiritually and honestly if you don’t feed on His word, you won’t grow. As I said at the beginning, you cannot out-train a bad diet and you need proper nourishment to undertake the spiritual activities the Lord tells you to do.
I hope this article encouraged you. If you missed the first article in this series on “How To Grow Spiritually” you can check it out here. If you’d like to learn more about feeding on the word of God, check out this article.
