Here’s some must reading for you as you think about eating: the cover story of Christianity Today — A Feast Fit For A King. I’ve written recently on changes in my thinking and life about diet and food. This latest article in Christianity Today highlights a balance between the health food movement and how we should think about food. The author Leslie Leyland Fields, has a couple of great quotes that I loved:
As Christians, under obligation to the God who created our bodies, and as Americans, who continue to lead the industrialized world in obesity rates, we should foster a healthier diet. As believers urged by the Apostle Paul to “take captive every thought to the obedience of Christ,” we should be more thoughtful about food production and our treatment of God’s creatures and his earth.
And, then, a little later,
As Prostesants, our food practices have relied far too heavily on a single New Testament passage, I believe, Peter’s vision of a sheet full of formerly unclean animals let down from heaven. God’s command to “rise, kill and eat” (the supreme-meat-lover’s favorite biblical scene), in my opinion, has been used to justify a kind of gustatory free-for-all.
How shall we use our freedom in Christ? Freedom is never given for license or for self-indulgence. If our freedom ends in mindless consumption, abuse of the earth, exploitation of God’s gifts, and mistreatment of our bodies, then we have allowed our appetites to enslave us again.
Or even one other section:
Why have we ignored food for so long? Why are we not attending more seriously to Paul’s injunction to literally “eat or drink…for the glory of God”? Beyond a quick word of thanks before meals, have we seriously considered how our eating and drinking either reveals or suppresses the glory of God?
Wherever you may come down on the issues, one thing is certain: we exist for the glory of God. Let’s seek to honor Him, then, even in the seemingly mundane details of what we eat and drink.