YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

Jesus said: "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves" (John 6: 54). This and comparable statements resulted in many of his followers departing from him. Jesus gave the key to the spiritual understanding of this statement in the same chapter when he stated: "the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life" (vs. 63).

Our spiritual health depends upon what we choose to hear, see, read or otherwise spiritually ingest. To illustrate, we all know the importance of faith. The bible clear tells us how faith is attained: "So faith cometh of hearing and hearing by the word of Christ (Rom. 10: 17).

It follows that to destroy faith we merely need to listen to the word of the devil, the father of all lies (Jn. 8: 44). There are a variety of subtle ways that this can occur -- we need to be aware of all of them.

"According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the average TV watcher sees 14,000 references to sex in the course of one year (and they are not uplifting references). The average child watches 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence by the end of elementary school." (Mona Charen; Copyright 1994, CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC., as reported in The Alabama Statesman).

Similar calculations will show that by the time teen-agers graduate high school they observe between 30,000 to 100,000 positive reinforcements supporting the recreational use of alcohol (commercials or use by celebrities), and practically no negative references.

With all of this garbage going into our spiritual mouths, the degradation of our social standard is not surprising. Christians need to recognize the danger of hearing (even if not listening to) the persuasions of the devil. It is essential that we counterbalance our inevitable exposure to the world with every opportunity to hear, read and see God's word lived out in the lives of our fellow Christians. Your spiritual life depends on it!