“Taste and see that the lord is good.” 1 Peter 2.
“Eat my flesh and drink my blood.” John 6.
“Man shall not live on bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Luke 4.
I have spent a lot of time defending the important point that the Bible is not Jesus. The human heart is an idol factory, and quickly makes an idol of the Bible itself. Extracting the human soul from idolatry of religion around even the holy scripture has been difficult to nuance. Most of us won’t see it until Christ is seen more uniquely as the Person of Christianity which he is.
What we are coming into now though is the reality that we are either going to eat, or we are going to die. Jesus refuses to give people the fullness of himself unless they will submit themselves to the very simple process of aligning their mind with the Word of God already written down. In a very real way I am not feeding myself unless the Scriptures are doing their part. And feeding yourself becomes the necessary element of self-sustainment during adversity. It is always easier to turn on messages, read authors, teachings, or talk to a friend. But without a doubt, all of those sources of helpful people ministry at one point became grounded in the Scriptures. We can baby ourselves through the ministries of others all we want, but there’s no feeding my self unless I can go to the Scriptures for it myself.
Eat or die really is the fact of the matter. It has been said that we are part of the church of the firstborn, not the church of the newborn. And moving forward in our spiritual life is indeed tied to the Scriptures. Of course, we can react and say people turn it into a religious task and all that. But after you strip that away, you’re still left with the very fact that we either consume the words of God, or, we remain vulnerably infantile.
The window of dividing the feeders from the fed is closing. Revelation 12 indicates that the mature bride will have one treatment from heaven, while her childlike offspring will have another treatment. God does not choose our level of maturity. If he did it would no longer be maturity. And so partly by our diet we choose our level of maturity. Everyone is as mature as they have sought to be. And the readers are the feeders, while the fed may very well end up spiritually dead.
Call it religious, call it self-discipline, call it whatever you want, but it’s time to get eating that which will give life for yourself. Fight through whatever you have to to drink that water, but nonetheless, it is time to drink. It is time to eat, it is time to grow.
