God’s Word on GluttonySample

Eating too much?

I meandered around the church office asking my coworkers, “On a scale of 0 to 100, how much of a glutton are you?” (Yes, I actually do things like this.) There were instant grimaces, thoughtful pauses, and clarifying questions such as, “What exactly is gluttony?”

Gluttony is a taboo topic that many Christians avoid, but it’s one that deserves our attention. It isn’t essentially about our size, shape, or weight but rather about how the quantity of our food affects the quality of our faith.

The words glutton and gluttony appear seven times in Scripture, which I would like to share with you in a series of devotions. To begin, here’s the word’s first appearance, where some out-of-ideas parents bring their prodigal son to the elders of Israel: “They [the parents] shall say to the elders, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard’” (Deuteronomy 21:20). Notice how an excess of food (glutton) is combined with an excess of alcohol (drunkard), a combo that shows up in a majority of the seven Bible references to gluttony.

Why is too much food such an issue? I’ll explain more in our upcoming devotions, but here’s the heart of it: When you eat too much, you love too little. Overindulgence in food means you will, due to a lack of energy, underserve your neighbor in love.

Let’s ponder our personal relationships with food and ask God to balance our portion size so we can maximize our love.