First Baptist Church: Sermon

by Pastor Glenn Layne

August 4, 2002
This Week's Message:

Fifth Message in the Series The Seven Deadly Sins

Henry VIII and "just a bit of toast"
Gluttony: Feeding the Hunger Within

I don't know about you, but when I think of the word "gluttony", I imagine a medieval feast with King Henry VIII with a huge leg of lamb in one hand and a handful of mashed potatoes in the other. A glutton is someone who just stuffs his mouth, right? A glutton weighs 387 pounds and is rising, right? And a glutton has a belly so big that even in a driving rain, his feet don't get wet!

But the more you probe at this issue of gluttony, the subtler it becomes. Maybe the most interesting thing I've ever read about gluttony was written years ago by CS Lewis in the great novel The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape the demon, writing to his nephew, a junior tempter named Wormwood, reveals an interesting thing about gluttony. Gluttony, he says, does not just involve consuming mass quantities of food-it means a particular attachment to food. He uses the example of the mother of the man Wormwood is in charge of tempting. Each morning she has toast and tea for breakfast. Now that doesn't sound like gluttony, does it? But wait. The toast must be light toasted, just golden, not brown; the slice must be just so thick-not thicker or thinner. It must be lightly buttered on only one side. Everything must be just so. Screwtape points out that this woman, all 120 pounds of her, is every much a glutton as someone who has a dozen eggs and a half pound of bacon for breakfast each morning. In a sense, she is addicted to this particular experience of food. She lives by her senses-delicate, refined, respectable senses, but her senses-not faith, not even principle-nonetheless.

Proverbs 23:19-21

This is a passage that speaks to some of the general themes you'll find in Scripture about gluttony.

19Listen, my son, and be wise, and keep your heart on the right path.
20Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat,
21for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags.

Here we're told to be wise and stick to the "right path", the right way to live.
One aspect of the "right path" has to do with not indulging the senses so much that the senses become dulled. For example, everyone loves a beautiful sunset, but if you spend all you time looking at the sun, it overloads your eyes and you lose some or even all of your sight (remember those warnings whenever there's an eclipse?) That overload principle is true of any that is good in itself: food, drink, even too much TV and playing computer games.
You see, we often fall for the two-donut theory. The two-donut theory works like this: if one donut is good, well, then two donuts must be twice as good. (I say this as someone who's had at least two donuts too many!) The reality is that one donut was good, but two just stuffed me full. Two times good is not double the good; it's too much.
The proverb goes on to say that the outcome of this kind of overload is poverty. That poverty is because you've run through your money, and because that dulling of the senses makes you a poor worker. Here, we're talking about dollars in the pocket kind of poverty, but I think we'll see that gluttony leads to more kinds of poverty than one.

Some Surprises about Gluttony

As you examine Biblical teaching on gluttony, you are in for some surprises.

1. In the Bible, gluttony is most often tied to drunkenness (Romans 13:13-14)

13Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery [that is, a total lack of restraint of all pleasures of the body-from sex to food to drink], not in dissension and jealousy. 14Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature.

There are no less than six passages that link gluttony with drunkenness. That's why I say that sensory overload is a big issue when it comes to the issue of gluttony.

2. It is seen as both an outcome of wealth, and as a road to poverty (Amos 6:4, Proverbs 23:21)

The prophet Amos is among the Biblical writers who sees gluttony as one of the sick outcomes of selfish accumulation of wealth. Here's how he describes it:

4You lie on beds inlaid with ivory and lounge on your couches.
You dine on choice lambs and fattened calves.

Only the best! Amos lived in an era of material wealth and spiritual poverty-kind of like the 1990s! The upper crust of Israel (you know what the upper crust is, don't you-a bunch of crumbs held together by their dough?) was becoming Enron-happy. More, more, more! Like that family that ran Adelphia-building their own private golf course, taking the private jet to Africa and all the while bilking the investors out of billions.

Sometimes gluttony is simply the pursuit of the so-called best-like dining at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant each night just because you can.

But ironically, gluttony is also related to poverty:

Proverbs 23:21

…for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags.

As long as the glutton's belly is full, he is content-and utterly without ambition. Filled with food and drink, he drowses away his life. I think of a young man I knew in New Hampshire. He had capabilities, but spent his life in a marijuana haze. In his mid-20s, he had all the maturity of a 14-year-old. He was intelligent enough to achieve, but was happy as a bagger at the supermarket. In retrospect, I can see now that he was kind of a glutton.

3. It comes from the mistake of living according to the demands of the senses

I really do believe that at the heart of gluttony is the surrender of the soul to the demands of the senses. Sometimes this is actually dressed up as a philosophy. The ancient Greeks had the Epicureans, who saw the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain as the supreme pursuit in life. A modern philosopher, Michael Foucault, says much the same thing in his version of post-modernism. You and me, we can just call it Feel-Goodism! But a lot of people who never even think of philosophy or philosophical terms have adopted sense-pleasing as their supreme virtue and Feel-Goodism as their life philosophy.

It's all anticipated for us in God's word. In the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon asks the question, "What sense could we make of life if we took God out of the equation?" It makes for bleak reading. Here are two samples relevant for us today.

Ecclesiastes 2:24 8:15

24A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work.

Ecclesiastes 8:15

15So I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days of the life God has given him under the sun.

"Under the sun" thinking and living is living without God ("under the sun" is the key phrase in understanding Ecclesiastes). If there is no God, then just have a kegger and all the pizza you can eat. That's as good as it gets.

Two other passages speak of this world-without-God kind of thinking:

Isaiah 22:13

13But see, there is joy and revelry, slaughtering of cattle and killing of sheep, eating of meat and drinking of wine! "Let us eat and drink," you say, "for tomorrow we die!"

Paul almost quotes Isaiah in 1 Corinthians 15:32:

If the dead are not raised, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."

If the whole God story-and Paul is thinking particularly of the account of Jesus' resurrection-is not true, then all we have before us is a dark grave. It's like the old beer commercial: "You only go around once-better grab all the gusto you can get." Eat, drink, play games, and soon we die!

4. It is parallel to lust in that it arises from a God-given drive gone out of control

Let's build on this a little further. It should be obvious that gluttony-this business of living by and for and under the control of the senses-is very close to what we looked at a few weeks ago-the deadly sin of lust.

Both arise from a God-given drive: for food to live and for sexual intimacy. The drives themselves are not sins or vices; it's the surrender of the soul to living by these untamed drives that makes them wrong-that turn them into deadly sins.

The real issue is that these God-given drives have to be put in their place. They can't be allowed outside their God-established "banks," as described it a few weeks ago when we talking about lust.

The church at Corinth-from a culture steeped in Feel-Goodism-was slow to get this idea. Paul quotes them and corrects them:

1 Corinthians 6:12

12"Everything is permissible for me" [that was the slogan of the freedom loving Corinthians]--but [Paul retorts] not everything is beneficial [that is, not everything is good for me]. "Everything is permissible for me"--but [again, Paul replies] I will not be mastered by anything.

Want meat? Lotsa meat? Tons of ice cream? Bags of peanuts? Is there ant law of God against it? Only in this way: everything is permitted, but not all things are good for you. Everything is permitted, but as Paul says, the follower of Jesus must maintain this: "I will not be mastered by anything."

Whether it's food or drink or baseball or Nintendo, "I will not be mastered by anything"-other than THE Master, the Lord Jesus.

In another place, Paul writes about some false teachers on the fringe of the church in Philippi. He says, in Philippians 3:19,

Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things.

Under cloak of religion, these false teachers were addicts to the belly's demands-they were treating their stomach like an all-powerful god, whose demands must be satisfied-in the process, turning their appetite into an idol.

Jude 1:19 says something very similar, also about some false teachers:
These are the men who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit.

The glutton's rudder in life is just too small. You will be blown into rocky shoals-I guarantee it-if you body's cravings are how you direct your life.

That leads to the question we've been asking week by week:

What is Gluttony's Opposite?

1. Pride and Humility
2. Covetousness and Simplicity
3. Lust and Chastity
4. Envy and Love
5. Gluttony and Self-control
6. Anger and Gentleness
7. Sloth and Faithfulness

It should be obvious that the challenge of gluttony is the challenge to put the body in its place-that our body should not be in a position to shape the soul and bend the spirit, but that instead the body becomes the servant of the disciplined heart, the heart filled with the Holy Spirit of God.

Self-control is part of the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22). This is not some stoic version of self-control, but self-control that is made possible by the indwelling Holy Spirit.

Satisfying the Real Hunger Within

But I want to go further. And the more I meditate on the meaning of gluttony, the more I am convinced that that we need a new definition, a deeper definition of gluttony:

A new definition for gluttony: to want food more than to want God.

The glutton drags down himself, a creature created in the image of God, and makes that unique creation a slave of animalistic impulses. We were made to sing with the angels, not to imitate the apes.

There is a hunger, a different kind of hunger, with us all. For some that hunger is like a roaring flame; for others just a few dim embers. But we were made to hunger for God.

Matthew 5:6: the blessing of being a God-glutton

In Matthew 5:6, Jesus says, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled." Jesus wants us all to be God-gluttons. We see that even in the Lord's Supper, where we symbolically consume the body and blood of Jesus. And taste and see that the Lord is good! Like no double-double, like no filet mignon, like no mahi-mahi, scallops or shrimp, He satisfies each and every time.

Psalm 42:1-2: the hunger and thirst of the deer

Psalm 42 asks us to imagine a deer in the parched land of Israel. The deer has been grazing, nibbling on some grass here and there, but in the process has wandered from its familiar water source. So it seeks out water, running now, its tongue hanging from its mouth. Then it seems the water; perhaps the En Gedi waterfall not far from the Dead Sea. The parched and thirsty deer runs now to the source, runs until he can hear the sound of the water and then splashes into the pool and drinks the cool clear water.

David writes:

1As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, O God.
2My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?

Cultivating a Hunger for God

We too are like David, like that deer. Only God can satisfy, but too often we have been content to drink from stagnant ponds. We grown so used to the taste of algae that we don't know what we're missing. We need to cultivate a hunger for God-for His reality and His satisfying ways. We can gain-or regain-the right kind of hunger. Let me suggest, briefly, three ways:

The Word: read the word! Be people of God's word, and soak in its waters of refreshing, eat its meat of truth.
Worship: come seeking God: "My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?"
Fasting: there are times to make God and God alone you sustenance. God will meet you in a special way when you feast on Him alone. Fasting tames the senses; it establishes the reign of the Spirit over the human soul; it intensifies prayer; it honors God.

As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?