More Thoughts on Gluttony: What the Bible Says Part 2 [Podcast Transcript]

Title: More Thoughts on Gluttony: What the Bible Says Part 2

Podcast Date: June 27, 2023

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Description 

The June 16th episode on gluttony caught many listeners by surprise, so today Heather revisits this topic to go even deeper into what the Bible says about gluttony. Heather delves into the topic of gluttony again and provides listeners with tools to think critically about what it means according to Scripture, not bloggers or internet pundits.

Today Heather discusses how the Church has historically used manmade created lists of virtues and vices but how it's crucial to interpret them in light of God's word. She also questions how our interpretations of scripture have been influenced by diet culture and encourages listeners to have conversations with their spiritual leaders about this topic, with their Bibles open.

Here are some of the resources referenced in today's show:

Listen to part one on Gluttony here: 

https://www.improvebodyimage.com/blog/what-is-gluttony 

John Cassian's 8 Vices: https://www.wenorthodox.com/forum/on-spiritual-life/on-the-eight-vices-st-john-cassian-c-ad-360-c-435

Some interesting thoughts on Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian from a Catholic priest: https://desertfathers.blogspot.com/2014/02/mysticism-evagrius-ponticus-and-john.html

Deuteronomy 21:18

Proverbs 23

Proverbs 24:13

1 Timothy 3

Colossians 2

Today's episode is sponsored by Classical Conversations. Learn more at: www.classicalconversations.com/comparedtowho

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Outline

00:00 Introduction: Reading Diet Culture Into Scripture

04:43 The 7 Deadly Sins: Extrabiblical Truths We’ve Adopted

12:10 The Rebellious Son in Deuteronomy 21:20

17:14 Proverbs 23, Revisited

23:41 “Drunkards And Gluttons Become Poor…”

27:55 Is Healthiness Equal to Holiness?

33:39 Following Christ And Paul’s Warning Against Asceticism

Introduction: Reading Diet Culture Into Scripture

[00:00:02]:

Hey, friend. here. I'm glad you're listening to the compared to who show today. We're gonna go back to a topic we spoke about just a week or so ago. We're gonna go back to gluttony because I've heard from a lot of you. They're still struggling, and it's so hard. Y'all, if you put this word into Google, you get so much information that, in my opinion, conflates diet culture advice with the gospel, with God's word.

[00:00:39]:

And so, again, I hope you've gotten out your Bible. I hope you did that word search for gluttony. I hope you researched some of what we talked about last time if you didn't get out your bible. But today, I'm gonna go even deeper because I don't feel like I went far enough last time. And as I've looked up some of the things you're telling me you're seeing, I wanna be able to kind of give you the tools to think critically for yourself about this issue and determine what you believe gluttony really means according to God's word, not according to some blogger, not even according to me, but according to scripture. So I pray that the holy spirit will enlighten you on this journey, but that we will read God's word in context, looking for truth. They're not seeing God's word through the lens of diet culture. That's where we're going today, and I can't wait to hear what you think of this one.

[00:03:14]:

This is tough stuff, but I believe it's so important for us to understand just how much our reading of scripture, even our pastors and women's ministry leaders, how much we've all been influenced by diet culture, and understand that diet culture is a relatively new phenomenon. It's been around maybe a hundred years. People didn't have scales in their home until, like, 1913 is when that kind of first became a thing to own, to monitor your weight at home. So a lot of this is a new spin on things, but what diet culture has been able to take advantage of is an old spin on things. It's been able to take advantage of this view of God's word, of the Christian life that was heavily influenced by these ascetic monks. Now last time we spoke about Evagrius of Ponticus, and I told you that he was later ruled a heretic. But the one I didn't mention was John Cassian. He's also known as John the Acidic or John Cassian of Rome, and he was a Christian monk and theologian around the same time as Avagrius, AD 360 to, like, 435.

The 7 Deadly Sins: Extrabiblical Truths We’ve Adopted

[00:04:43]:

And he's best known for bringing ideas and practices of early Christians to the medieval west. And so Cassian wrote a lot of things. His sources were the same as that of Evagrius of Ponticus, but his ideas are kind of what led to the shaping of the 7 deadly sins and this whole concept of virtue and vice. So I decided to actually look up Cassian's summary of the 8 vices. And number 1 is actually a dissertation, if you will, on control of the stomach. Okay. So listen to this: 

“Point 1, there is not a single rule for fasting because we are different in many ways, but there is a single goal to avoid overeating and the filling of our bellies.

The fathers also found a day's fast to be more beneficial and a greater help toward purity than one extending over a period of 3, 4, even 7 days. Food is to be taken insofar as it supports our life, but not to the extent of enslaving us to the impulses of desire. 

To eat moderately and reasonably is to keep the body in health, not to deprive it of holiness. A clear rule for self control handed down by the father is this, stop eating while still hungry and do not continue until you are satisfied. By itself, abstinence from food does not contribute to perfect purity of soul unless the other virtues are active as well. No one whose stomach is full can fight mentally against the demon of unchastity.”

 And then number 2 is about the demon of unchastity. Number 3 is on avarice, and idolatry.

[00:06:32]:

Number 4 is on anger. Number 5 is on dejection. 6 on listlessness, 7 on self esteem, kind of an interesting one. 

“The vice of self esteem is difficult to fight against because it has many forms and appears in all our activities. Every task, every activity gives this malicious demon a chance for battle. Do not do anything with a view to be praised by other people, but seek God's reward only, always rejecting the thoughts of self praise that enter your heart and always regarding yourself as nothing before God.”

8, on pride. “The demon of pride is the most sinister demon, fiercer than all others.”

[00:07:11]:

I mean, like, there's some truth in this. There's some good stuff in this. And yet, friends, the whole thing on control of the stomach, it's all extra biblical. None of these rules that he laid out are actually in the word of God. But, boy, nowadays, it's just familiar. Right? It sounds like, oh, good. It's just like any other influencers, like suggestions on how to, like, eat while they get skinny. Right? It's, like, so easily translatable to what we hear and live by today.

[00:07:55]:

But understand that this whole, obviously, dichotomy of virtue and vice was really for the purpose of holiness. You wanted to live a life of virtue and you wanted to kill the vices so that you could be sanctified, so you could be holy. And holiness is something that we should strive for. Absolutely. God asked us to be holy, to be working towards holiness. His sanctification process is to make us more holy. But is holiness really about making sure you stop eating before you are all the way full so that you can fight the demon of unchastity? I just don't see that in scripture. So here's what we're gonna do.

[00:08:55]:

We're gonna go to the word, and we're gonna look at the places where the word gluttony is mentioned, and we're gonna talk about each of those instances. And we're gonna examine this. I believe that anything that presents itself as biblical truth has to be examined against the actual Bible, against the word of God. And what I see here is a man, potentially 2 men, Evagrius and John Cassian, who wrote their own list of rules. These are rules of morality, rules on how to live a good Christian life that are extra biblical. I'm not really sure how that makes them different than the Pharisees who wrote their own list of extra things you had to do, in their own law, but that's what it feels like this is. This is extra law. And the Bible actually has something to say about that too in the book of Colossians.

[00:10:00]:

So that's where we're gonna go today. We're gonna look at the word. Hey. If you have a Bible, grab it. So let's take just a few minutes and look at the actual Bible verses on Gluttony and just go through them one by one. And I wanna start off by letting you know that you cannot just put bible verses about gluttony into Google and expect it to be helpful because that's what I did. And bible study tools, a site that's really helped me a lot with other things, bible study tools listed like 20 some verses, but the word gluttony is not in most of these verses.

[00:10:55]:

Right? It's verses that are interpreted to be about food and to match a certain definition of gluttony that Bible study tools is operating from. So I wanna actually look at the passages where the Bible does talk about gluttony, specifically as gluttony. Now I love the blue letter Bible app. It is a concordance app that will help you study scripture. And so I put the word glutton. The word gluttony was not in the ESV translation, but I put the word glutton in, and it came up with 4 different occurrences of this word in the ESV translation. When I put the word gluttonous in, it adds one more. Now, just because some of you I know are like NIV people, let me tell you what we have in NIV.

[00:11:47]:

Glutton in the NIV comes up 3 times and gluttonous in the NIV does not come up at all. And let me try gluttony. Gluttony comes up one time, and that's the Proverbs verse. So that's pretty consistent. Here, I'll look at King James version. Gluttony is not there. Glutton is twice. Gluttonous is twice.

The Rebellious Son in Deuteronomy 21:20

[00:12:10]:

Okay? So you can grab this app, pick your version, and you can look this up so you can, you know, see what I'm saying. So the first passage where the word glutton is mentioned, and I've gone back to the ESV, is Deuteronomy 21:20. And the verse reads, “and they shall say to the elders of his city, this our son is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey our voice. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Okay? So we need to before we just be like, oh, he eats too much food and he drinks too much, We need to go see what the whole of Deuteronomy 21 is about. And Deuteronomy 21 is a book in the passage, a chapter in the Bible that is giving the Israelites more law. It's telling the Israelites what they need to do in certain situations.

[00:13:07]:

And so the beginning of chapter 21 is atonement for an unsolved murder, and this is, like, what to do if you find someone dead and you don't know who did it. Then there's marrying a captive woman, like, the rules around, like, what happens if you marry one of these women that you met when your people conquered someone. And then there's the right of the firstborn. And then starting with verse 18, this part of the passage is called a rebellious son. And so verse 21 is part of a paragraph about what to do if you have a rebellious son. I'm gonna start reading from verse 18. “If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, His father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, this son of ours is stubborn and rebellious.

[00:14:05]:

He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard. Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.” Okay. Now aside from the fact that the Israelites probably didn't have a ton of extra food lying around. In fact, I would oh, I would need to research this.

[00:14:30]:

I should have researched this ahead of time. But, if they were still wandering around the desert, remember, they would have to be living on manna at that time. I think this is after that. But remember, they didn't have an abundance of food. The problem presented in this paragraph is not that this rebellious son is eating too much or eating too much honey as the proverbs would say. He's not eating too many sweets. He's not overeating beyond his caloric needs for the day. No.

[00:15:11]:

The kid is rebellious. Think about in the new testament, think about the prodigal son. He's greedy. He wants to go squander his wealth, squander his body away, really. But glutton in this context is not about eating too much. In fact, what should probably raise the most red flags around this paragraph is the fact that a son who is rebellious is taken before the elders to determine whether or not he should be stoned for his rebellion against his parents. Like, that is the crux of this thing that's a big ouch. Like, what has he done that has qualified as blasphemy that, you know, has really, intentionally disobeyed the law of God, and that is the fact that he didn't obey his parents.

[00:16:09]:

He's stubborn and rebellious. One of the commentaries I looked up said, you know, absolutely, the Bible is not endorsing that rebellious children be killed. And someone even said that perhaps the existence of the law was enough to keep children from being rebellious because we don't have any actual scriptural references of someone, like, getting this punishment, under this law. But this is old testament law intended for the old testament society of ancient Israel. Right? And guess what? Jesus came to free us from the law. So we could go through a ton of Old Testament laws and be like, well, why don't we do that? Why don't we do that? Well, Jesus came to free us from the law and the curse of the law. Right? And so that's why using Deuteronomy 21 as your biblical framework for gluttony, not so good. Okay.

Proverbs 23, Revisited

[00:17:14]:

Then let's go to Proverbs. And I talked about Proverbs a little bit, in the last episode, but I wanna set a better framework than I did last time. So Proverbs is one of the wisdom books. And if you have ever watched the Bible project videos that explain the Bible and give you great context, I would highly suggest you look up the Bible Project video on the Proverbs. I am doing the Bible Projects read through the year, read through the Bible in a year plan. And so I happened to just watch the one on Proverbs the other day. It was great timing, And they reminded me in that that Proverbs as a wisdom book is not a book of law. So Solomon wrote these proverbs for his son as kinda like good advice.

[00:18:04]:

Like, hey, if you do these things, it will be helpful for your life. Life might be a little easier if you can follow these principles, but it's not law. And then beyond that, it's not a quid pro quo. These are proverbs, not promises. So I think of the very famous proverb, train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it. That is not a promise that if you do a great job raising your child in the Lord and the things of the Lord, he will never stray. But it is a proverb, it is wise. You should do that.

[00:18:45]:

You should raise and instruct your children with the fear of the Lord, of course, but there's no promise. So thinking about that contextually, when we go back to the verse in Proverbs 23, and here's where I get really frustrated, my friends. So my friend, Erin Todd, from Intuitive Eating For Christian Women, sent me a meditation Christian meditation podcast episode that she listens to, and it was all about Proverbs 23. And a lot of the meditation was great, but it took this passage, and it made it about making good choices at the grocery store. Like, they wove in how you should buy from the food around the outside instead of the middle. And if it comes in a package, it's not good for your body and all of these things that are not in this Proverbs passage. So in Proverbs 23, king Solomon is giving his son advice for when he dines with a ruler. So let me read this proverb for you again.

[00:20:00]:

Proverbs 23. “When you sit to dine with a ruler, know well what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you're given to gluttony. Do not crave his delicacies for that food is deceptive.” Okay. Thing 1, this advice is specific to a situation when you sit to dine with a ruler. Right? This is not advice for your trip to the grocery store. This is not advice for Wednesday night dinner. This is when you sit to dine with a ruler, and this whole paragraph is a metaphor.

[00:20:39]:

The “put a knife to your throat if you're given a gluttony, do not crave his delicacies for that food is deceptive” is not talking about his cupcakes, and I can't even think of other delicacies, but it's not his baked goods that are deceptive. Like, I think about those funny baking shows where, like, you know, they make the jar of mayonnaise that's actually cake or, the shoe that's actually cake. No. It's not that kind of deceptive. It's that, as the rest of Proverbs 23 shows us, it's that wealth and power and appetites for these things can be harmful to you. So if you're with someone, a ruler in this case, and you are lusting after their power and wealth, just don't do it. Put a knife to your throat.

[00:21:34]:

Now, is this literal? No. It is a metaphor. And there's another great bible project video on metaphors that I would highly recommend you check out. But you have to understand that Proverbs, Psalms are filled with metaphors. Does King Solomon really want his son to slit his throat if he decides that he wants to be rich like the ruler he's dying with? No. It is a metaphor, a traumatic metaphor at that, and the food is also a metaphor. And to me, this feels like so I'm thinking of another metaphor that David uses in the Psalms, where he kind of, he describes his enemies and the people that wanna kill him as like an ocean, like an unruly sea that's, like, swelling up to swallow him. Right? And it would be like reading that passage and saying, yes, this passage is really helpful for knowing what to do with your enemies, how to pray for your enemies, like, what to do when you're afraid your enemies are going to surround you.

[00:22:48]:

And it's also good if you're a sailor. There's great nautical advice here. No. It's a metaphor. It's not for nautical advice. It's a word picture. The ocean, the sea is a word picture. And it is the same in Proverbs 23.

[00:23:05]:

This is a word picture of the king's delicacies. The food that is deceptive is not actually about the food. In fact, if you wanna be really nitpicky, just go over to Proverbs 24, the very next chapter. And in verse 13, we read, “eat honey, my son, for it is good. Honey from the comb is sweet to your taste. Know also that wisdom is like honey for you. If you find it, there is a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off.” A couple verses later in our bibles, King Solomon's like, yeah, eat up the honey.

“Drunkards And Gluttons Become Poor…”

[00:23:41]:

Now, later in Proverbs 23, Solomon revisits that word, the word gluttons. So in starting in verse 19, it says, “listen, my son, and be wise and set your heart on the right path. Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat. For drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags.” Now I need to point out that the message paraphrase written by Eugene Peterson, okay. He's a man. He's a mortal. He has never claimed that the message was an inspired word of God.

[00:24:17]:

It's just his paraphrase of the Bible to make the Bible easier to read, more palatable, more understandable for someone who may not be familiar with it. But it is not the divine inerrant inspired word of God. Eugene Peterson is just a man, and he's a man that lived here in the US. He died just about 5 years ago. So there's no way that this man was not influenced or affected somehow by the diet culture that has permeated everything in our culture. And so in the message paraphrase of Proverbs 23, Eugene says this, “oh, listen dear child, become wise. Point your life in the right direction. Don't drink too much wine and get drunk.

[00:25:06]:

Don't eat too much food and get fat. Drunks and gluttons will end up on skid row in a stupor and dressed in rags.” And it makes me sad that that's his interpretation of that verse. I looked through a dozen other translations. None of them talked about a change in body size. None of them used the word fat. None of them talked about a weight change. Everything was about poverty.

[00:25:36]:

If you chase drinking and eating, if you live to party, if you're spending all your money, again, back to the prodigal son, if you spend all your money on partying on lavish food and drink, you will become poor. You will not hold a job if you're drinking all the time and you're out partying all the time. You will not get promoted if you're doing that. If you live to party, it will have a repercussion on your life, and that's what the passage is saying. Now if you're not sure that it's influenced by modern day culture, I want you to take note in the message of the words Skid Row. Skid Row is a place in Los Angeles where the homeless live. Okay? So know that Skid Row was not and could not be in any original translations of scripture. This is Eugene's interpretation.

[00:26:34]:

And so it's not the actual word of God telling you if you eat too much, you'll get fat. It's Eugene Peterson. And I think he was a great man and he's, like, really by these messages of health and diet, and really contributed a lot through his work, but I think this is one spot, just one little verse where he missed it and didn’t see how he was influenced by these messages of purity and holiness connected to food that are not helpful for us. So while I was googling blog posts, articles that you might find when you try to do further research on this, I was really saddened and frustrated to see how many times this Proverbs 23 passage comes up as some sort of law around how to eat. Because, again, remember, the proverbs are not promises and the proverbs are not laws. They're just general instructions, guidance to life. And what Solomon was communicating was not anything related to how to keep a healthy body, which is what so many of the bloggers I've read said, or how to keep a certain weight. He wasn't talking about those things at all.

Is Healthiness Equal to Holiness?

[00:27:55]:

He was talking about how to stay out of the poor house. Now, I wanna bring up one more point here that my friend, Leslie Schilling, unpacked in a really helpful way for me in the book she has coming out, in August, which is called Feed Yourself. I mentioned it in this last episode on gluttony, but she talks about how dangerous and harmful it is when we hear and read things that tell us we have to eat a certain way to be healthy for a variety of reasons. But the one she points out is kind of related to racism and classism. Right? So I go to the grocery store, and I do have a choice. I can decide whether I want to shop from around the edges, the fresh food, or buy the packaged food. I am in a financial place in my life where I can make that decision. There's a good chance you may be too, but you may not be.

[00:28:54]:

And what about all those people who aren't? What about all those people who don't have any control or choice related to what they eat, period? If there's some sort of biblical standard for eating healthy that can be nuanced into not eating processed foods or not eating packaged food, and health becomes this sort of status of morality. I mean, aren't we kinda doing the same thing that John Cassian, the monk, did or that Evegrius of Pontius did? We're, like, adding these extra rules for how to be healthy, and what we're really saying is for how to be holy. Right? This is how to be holy in regards to food. You only eat unprocessed food. Like, friends, that's extra biblical. It's not in there, and it can't be a standard because if there was a standard of holiness like that, not everyone would be able to ascribe to it because not everyone has the means to do so. So to believe that we are superior, in regard to our health choices, our food choices, because we can shop around the outside aisles of the grocery store, is a sort of racism or classism that I don't believe God's for. I think he's against that.

[00:30:16]:

Another article I read that made me really sad, and this was on the Bible study tool site. It says the bible makes it clear that whatever we eat or drink, we do for God's glory. Yes. Agreed. Love that. But then we have to dissect it. And I think when we dissect it or she dissects it, I think she does so through the lens of diet culture. So she continues to say, does the Lord take delight in us eating ice cream? I'd like to think so.

[00:30:41]:

Okay. I agree with her. But then she says, does he smile on us if we overeat ice cream daily? Probably not. It's so messy. Is God condemning us for our food sins, for overeating ice cream daily? I don't know. I can't go that far. And she goes on to say, just like anything good can become an idol, food can be a special treat, but in excess becomes a stumbling block to us. And so what she's trying to advocate for is that food is an idol if you overeat it every day.

[00:31:23]:

Maybe. Maybe that's true. And if that convicts you, maybe. But, friend, again, back to my food idol podcast episode. Go listen to that one if you haven't already. Physiologically, if you have been depriving yourself of a certain food because you were on a diet or you thought that food was bad and you didn't wanna eat it, and you didn't wanna eat it, you didn't wanna eat it, but you wanted it, you wanted it, you wanted it, and you end up eating ice cream every single day for a week after you go off that diet, I don't think you're sinning. I think you're responding to your physiology. You're responding to the restriction.

[00:31:59]:

I think your body is saying, enough. I need this. I need this. I need this. And especially if you're recovering from an eating disorder, man, friend, I think overeating ice cream every day might be the healthiest thing for you. Is there such a thing as body neglect? Can we go too far? Can we make overeating a sin? Yeah. You can do that. You can take it to the extreme.

[00:32:25]:

But is that really what gluttony is about in the Bible? No. No. It's not. It's more about greed. It's more about lust. It's more about desire, an overwhelming desire for things that is, again, not physiological. If you wanna eat all the ice cream so that no one else in your house has any, and your heart behind it is, I want it all. I wanna make sure no one else gets any.

[00:32:54]:

Okay. Maybe that's gluttony. But if you're just enjoying it and doing it to the glory of God, oh, I don't think so. Now there are 2 more verses, to be fair, that talk about gluttony in the Bible. And, again, like I said last time, I think it's really important to note. And Kevin DeYoung, in the article I quoted last time, he notes this, Glutton, gluttony, gluttonous, these are not on the sins list in the New Testament. Okay? So we're free from the curse of the law, but the New Testament tells us about lots of different ways that we can sin, things that we’ll do harm to our relationships with other people and hurt God's heart because he doesn't want us to live in sin. But gluttony is not on this list.

Following Christ And Paul’s Warning Against Asceticism  

[00:33:39]:

So the last two passages, Matthew 11:19 is the passage where Jesus is accused of being a glutton, and then Luke 7:34 is just kind of a repeat of that passage. Right? The gospels repeat, and it's a repeat of Jesus being accused of being a glutton. And like we talked about last time, did Jesus overeat? Is that what the Pharisees were criticizing him for? Overeating? No. They were criticizing him for hanging out with the partiers because Jesus hung out with people who were not saved, and he showed them his grace, and he taught them the truth, and he loved them. 

So I promised you we would go back and talk about these extra rules. So these rules that have been in the church for a long time, the list of virtues and vices, the 7 deadly sins, these are concepts that have been around, like I said, from, like, AD 400. That's a long time. How have they worked their way into our modern day theology and our understanding of the Bible? Like, there's so many ways.

[00:34:48]:

But I think we have to go back to God's word to rightly interpret what to do with them. And if you look at Colossians 2:16-19, the apostle Paul is actually addressing people in Colossae who were ascribing to extra teachings. And they were building extra rules and laws around, like, what the Bible lays out. And Paul just hits them straight up. Actually, let's start with verse 8. Colossians 2:8, he says, “see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to elemental principles of the world, and not according to Christ.” In other words, whose rule are you living by? Whose definition of gluttony are you living by? John of Cassian or Jesus Christ? Now let's read on Colossians 2:16-19, and this is where it gets good. “Therefore, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.

[00:36:05]:

These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism.” Remember, asceticism was what John Cassian and Evagrius of Ponticus, what they ascribed to. Right? The ascetic life is a life of purity lived through body purity, and that included not eating certain things or not eating period. Let me start that verse again. “Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head.” And when Paul says the head there, what he really means is Christ. Not holding fast to Jesus as the ultimate authority.

[00:36:58]:

So one popular Christian author summarized it like this. The question is not simply do you eat or don't you eat? Do you drink or don't you drink? Do you sleep or don't you sleep? Do you deny yourself certain pleasures or don't you? That's not the main question. The main question is, is Christ being exalted or self being exalted? There's just one final thing I'm gonna mention on this topic of gluttony. In first Timothy 3, we have rules, qualifications for overseers and deacons. And so a lot of churches will use this passage to help them see who's qualified to lead the church. Right? Who should be the pastor of the church? They should meet all these qualifications. But even, like, your elders, depending on how your church is organized, elders or deacons, any overseers of the church should meet these qualifications. And I want you to note that if you read first Timothy 3, it does say the overseer should be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach.

[00:38:03]:

Says not given to drunkenness, not violent, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children respect and obey him. He must do so in a manner worthy of full respect. He must not be a recent convert, must not be conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. He must have good reputation, must be worthy of respect, not indulging in too much wine. Like, I'm just kind of paraphrasing this the whole way through, but there's no mention of gluttony or food in this passage at all. So if scripture isn't concerned about how pastors interact with food, and these are the leaders that we're supposed to follow, these are the shepherds that God has put in place to, like, lead us through our spiritual walk. If it's not in that passage, why are we reading it into all these other passages? That's my question for you.

[00:39:03]:

So, again, my exhortation for you is to get out your bible And, hey, have a good conversation with someone about this. Right? Maybe talk to your women's ministry leader. Maybe let her listen to this and see what she thinks. You know, I don't have all the answers, and I'm willing to be wrong. But as I've studied this, and as I've talked to people I respect and read, Christian leaders I respect on this topic, and I think, once again, we've been way too influenced by diet culture in our reading of scripture. And friends, that's gotta stop. And you know how that can stop? That can stop with you. That can stop with you sharing this, You helping get the word out.

[00:39:51]:

Help women get set free from the shame and bondage they felt growing up in church, thinking they had an extra bite of whatever they were eating, that it was gluttony. That's not what it's about at all. Gluttony is a posture of the heart. It's about greed. It's about inordinate desire. It's not about hunger. It's not about fullness. It's not about packaged or processed foods.

[00:40:18]:

It's time to make the shame around a false definition of gluttony go away, and I hope you'll be a part of it. Hey, thanks for listening today. I hope something has helped you stop comparing and start living.