Spiritual Food

[0:00] Matthew 4 verse 4. Of course the context here is of our Saviour at the time of tempting in the wilderness.

[0:19] ! As the devil comes to him and tempts him to command stones to be made bread, he says, But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

[0:42] The word of God is spiritual food. It's spiritual food for us. It's essential for our spiritual life. The nourishment and nutrients that we need are found here for us to grow spiritually, for us to be alive and to grow to maturity.

[0:59] We need to feed our spirit on the word of God. And John chapter 6, our Saviour talks along the same theme of feeding, of being fed.

[1:10] John 6 verse 35. We heard earlier, I am the vine. He also says, I am the bread. John 6 verse 35. He says there, And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life. He that cometh to me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.

[1:34] Isn't that an encouragement to us? That we can have that sustenance that Christ is. We can feed on him. Do you know the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you know him?

[1:45] He is the one who brings that healing of the great disease of sickness of our sin. As the Bible says that the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. It's sick with sin.

[2:00] And Christ is the one who comes and brings soul healing as we trust him. Healing to our soul. And the word of God is precious to us today.

[2:11] And I want to encourage each one to take it and read it and apply it. Feed on it. Psalm 119. The psalmist says of the word, he compares it to being like honey.

[2:23] He says, How sweet are thy words unto my taste. Yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth. Sweeter than honey. Sweeter than the honey cone, it says elsewhere.

[2:36] The word of God. It's precious. It's beautiful. And it's scrumptious. You'll get a good feed from the word of God. And from trusting Christ as that bread of life.

[2:48] One day a man was witnessing to another man. And they were walking through the man's orchard. He was a grower of pears. And the lost man said, You say that the Bible is the word of God, but you cannot prove that it is.

[3:05] And the fellow talked to the man as they walked through the orchard. And he said, What fine looking pears. It's a pity that they are of such poor quality. And not fit to eat.

[3:17] And the farmer said, Oh no, they are excellent pears. Here, try one or two and see if they aren't the sweetest pears that you've ever eaten. And after eating a couple, the man said, I admit, they're certainly wonderful pears.

[3:34] Now will you deal with the Bible in the same manner? As the word says in Psalm 34, Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man that trusteth in him.

[3:47] And people today, I'm not taking it for granted that everyone here seated is a Christian here today. Maybe you've heard the message. You've heard many sermons or studies and teachings and thought about these things.

[4:02] Yet it's not yours personally yet. Taste and see that the Lord is good. Taste him today. Partake of him today. Partake of Jesus. Taste of the blessed word of God, who is Christ, the word.

[4:15] He is the one we can take of and partake of. And there's healing, soul healing in the word of God. There's healing for that soul sickness. He is the one who can give you complete healing from that sickness of sin.

[4:31] There's no other doctor who can heal you of that dread disease, that dread affliction, as we talked about at the youth group again, of that horrible virus that afflicts mankind.

[4:41] And has since Adam. Everyone has got it. Is a victim of it. Yet Christ comes and can release us from that dread disease and completely heal us from that sickness of our soul.

[4:57] And there's healing in the word of God. Another thing in the word of God, there's health for you. There's health in the word of God. You know, it's been said, we know that experts have determined certain minimum daily requirements.

[5:12] You know, you get your Weet-Bix out and it tells you how much of the recommended daily intake of all the various vitamins and nutrients that we need, or whatever food that you eat of, cereals and so on.

[5:24] It says on there the recommended daily intake and how much of that product will supply the recommended daily requirements of specific nutrients and vitamins that our body needs. What about your soul?

[5:36] Amen. What about your soul? What your soul needs? Every believer. Every believer has spiritual needs for your health, for you to grow, as was talked about, of growing, of being nourished, of being joined to the vine, of growing, of abiding, of living, of having a spiritual life flowing through our veins.

[5:56] And the word of God has got wonderful nutrients, wonderful nourishment that we can partake of. And I read, I'll draw on the board here, if you want to follow me there, I want to draw on the board five things, five things that we should partake of daily as a spiritual Christian.

[6:18] And this is an acronym that can help you to remember these five things that every Christian should have. D-A-I-L-Y.

[6:33] Daily. Daily. Things to do daily. Number one is devote time for the Word. Devote time for the Word.

[6:44] A is always pray. I is introduce Christ to others.

[6:59] I introduce Christ to others. L. Live in the fellowship of other Christians. Live in fellowship with your brothers and sisters in Christ.

[7:13] And Y is yield your life to Christ's control. It's a good little acronym, isn't it, to think about. Daily. Devote yourself to the Word of God.

[7:25] Have devoted time for the Word of God. A. Always pray. I. Introduce Christ to others daily. L.

[7:36] Live in fellowship with other Christians. And Y. Yield yourself to Christ's control. These are all things that we can all think about. Do I do these things daily? Of course, there's times we don't.

[7:48] There's times I don't, certainly. And yet we can all be encouraged. Think about the Word, prayer, fellowship, witness, and yielding to God's control. You can't eat enough food in one day to last for the rest of the week.

[8:02] Now, some Christians, they just think, well, if I come to church on Sunday and hear the Word, and, you know, I'll pick my Bible up again next Sunday. Don't do that.

[8:13] It's not good for your spiritual health. For your spiritual health, daily. Daily. Take the Word. Feed on God's Word. As often as you get the chance to. So maintain your spiritual health.

[8:25] Read your Bible every day if you can. Feed on God's Word daily. It'll help you. There's many helpful study sources that can guide you and support you in that. Our Daily Bread, by and large, it's a good guide, a good prompter, and there's interesting material and other sources that we can use to support our daily habit of praying, of reading the Word, and growing and maturing spiritually.

[8:51] God wants you to grow. He wants you to grow. Ephesians 4 talks about not being any longer children, but growing up into Christ. 2 Thessalonians talks about the Thessalonians.

[9:03] Paul urged them to grow exceedingly in their faith. And Paul prayed for the Philippians in Philippians 1, verse 9, that they would abound in their love more and more.

[9:16] God wants us to be a growing Christian, not to be stagnant. And talked about the branches that might be not flourishing, not fruitful. God doesn't want you to be like that.

[9:27] And He does prune us, as we know. He does test us and move in our lives and takes things from us, which He needs to, so that we can be fresh.

[9:39] And I know we've got an expert here in pruning. My dad, I know I've mentioned this before, how when my wife and I moved into our first house, a housing trust, semi-detached house in Elizabeth Park, the first house that we had as a married couple, and there was a huge apricot tree in the front garden.

[10:01] And my dad came out. If he'd have had a chainsaw, he'd have brought one. But he came out and he mangled that tree. He just cut it right down to the bare bones.

[10:11] And yet the next season, it was a beautiful, flourishing apricot tree. And it was more fruitful than it had been. It wasn't straggling anymore. It was beautiful. And that's what God does to us, doesn't He?

[10:22] He prunes us down sometimes so we can grow. Sometimes we've got to be tested and challenged so we can grow through these things and to become complete in Christ. And as a child, we won't grow without proper food.

[10:35] We know the government of our day sometimes takes children away from families who have not been fed properly for their own good. And people, we need to be fed properly.

[10:46] We need to be feeding on the Word of God spiritually. And it says, To grow in grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, 2 Peter 3. Notice there, knowledge. How do we get knowledge of Jesus Christ?

[10:58] Through the Word. We want to take it in, grow to know Him more, to know to love Him more, to grow in that grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. And God's Word, it's essential for your daily requirements.

[11:12] It's got the recommended daily intake of the Word of God, that nutrient, that vitamin, that nourishment that we need, that spiritual growing that we need to grow by the Word of God.

[11:26] In 1 Peter 2, it says, As newborn babes desire the sincere milk of the Word, that you may grow thereby. Now that word sincere, it means pure, genuine, unadulterated.

[11:40] We want the pure and perfect Word of God. We want to dig deep and be nourished by the Word, that it be pure and precious to our soul, that these truths and teachings will help us, as it says elsewhere, about the meat of the Word of God.

[11:55] You don't go and give a little baby meat, but as older people, we need meat to be strong to strength. We're talking on the way up. That meat makes us strong, builds up those spiritual, builds up those physical muscles.

[12:09] And likewise to the meat of the Word of God, builds up our spiritual muscles. So learn to dig deep, seek out resources and guides and study materials so that you can build yourself up in the faith, in the Word of God, and walk with the Saviour more closely.

[12:26] Every believer needs the Word of God to be healthy spiritually, to absorb it, to overcome the wicked one. As it says in 1 John 2, it says that, Ye are strong, and the Word of God abideth in you.

[12:38] We want the Word to abide in us. Now it's been said that scientists tell us that a bird can go nine days without food. It's amazing, isn't it? A man, 12 days.

[12:50] Well, we know 40 days a man can go without food. A dog, 20 days. A turtle, 500 days. A snake, 800 days.

[13:02] A fish, 1,000 days without food. Some insects, 1,200 days without food. It's amazing, isn't it? But as believers, we can't really go one day without the spiritual nourishment of God's Word.

[13:14] We need the Word to be stronger, even if it's just a few verses, or a few pages. As God helps you to, try to invest your time in the Word of God.

[13:26] There's no greater thing that we can do for our spiritual health than to take the Word. As it says in Matthew 6, Give us this day, our daily bread. You could apply that spiritually to the nourishment of God's Word, that we can be fed by it.

[13:39] Have we got that strengthening of that food? Or have we got a substandard diet? Now, some people have a fast food diet when it comes to spiritual things.

[13:52] I saw a little video clip on the internet, in fact, of a man comparing how, and he was talking into the camera and driving on the way to a Hungry Jack's type place, you know, a fast food place, and so he was really looking forward to that hamburger with all that, you know, that great big loaf and all that juicy meat and all that fat and all of that, you know, everything dripping out of it and flowing out of it.

[14:20] And he got to the cashier and he got that, and he talked into the camera and he said, Is this really good for me? Is this really good for my physical health?

[14:30] Having this sort of stuff, you know, regularly, and obviously, from time to time, we can get by, but having that as our daily food, wouldn't you get sick?

[14:41] Wouldn't you get sick of that fast food diet if that was all you ate? And people today, what about your spiritual diet? Do we sometimes have the fast food where we just want to come to church and then that's it for the rest of the week?

[14:54] We don't really get that fiending day by day as we delve into the Word of God in personal Bible study or in other Bible study times when there's opportunity to learn to grow.

[15:06] Don't have that spiritual junk food mentality or also the idea that someone else is going to dish up the food for you. Delve into the food of the Word of God for yourself.

[15:17] Dig deep into it. And if you're not, I'd like to support you in developing personal Bible study habits and finding some useful commentaries and other materials that can help you to grow.

[15:28] So we've talked about the healing of the Word of God. There's healing in the Word of God for that dread disease of sin, of your soul sickness.

[15:38] You need the healing of the Word of God, the one who is the bread of life and who is the Word, the Word, our Saviour. You need that health. As a Christian, you need to become healthy and develop healthy habits of that healthy feeding on the Word of God.

[15:54] And thirdly, we need a wholeness that comes from the Word of God. There's a wholeness that comes as we're not thinking on like having a junk food kind of mentality and like a piecemeal kind of approach, but having a hunger and a thirsting and a desiring for the Word of God.

[16:13] And so we avoid that spiritual malnutrition or anorexia of not having enough or eating the wrong kind of food. Now sometimes you can have, I suppose you could compare it to sometimes some of the TV preachers or some of the new fad kind of materials that come out, you know, faddy kind of things that people read or follow and trends in church scene that people take up the latest gimmick or carry on that comes through and they go off and follow this, whatever it might be, this fad of the time.

[16:46] God doesn't want us to be like that. He wants us to be strong, to be strongly founded in the Word of God and let that be our source and strength. And when we're grounded in the Word of God, we won't be so easily swept away with every wind of doctrine like the Bible says.

[17:02] We won't be tossed to and fro and sent off track by the latest and greatest things that might come along. In Titus 2.1 it says, Paul urges Titus, he says, but speak the things that become sound doctrine.

[17:20] Speak the things which become sound doctrine. Now it's interesting, this word sound doctrine, sound doctrine, particularly the word sound, sound. Now the word sound is elsewhere translated of people being made well.

[17:33] It's got the sense of wholeness, of healthiness, of health. And it's the Greek word from which we get our English word, hygiene, or hygienic. So it relates to health.

[17:45] It relates to that it was wholesome or practices or conditions that are conducive to good health. And so when it says sound doctrine, it means healthy doctrine, that which is wholesome for the hearer.

[17:58] And sound doctrine gives spiritual health to the inner man. God wants you to be healthy spiritually. God wants you to eat and partake of that which is healthy and wholesome teaching.

[18:10] It's good for you. It's going to help you to grow. On the contrast to that, you could think of false doctrine. False doctrine, or that which is not sound, not healthy, it's not wholesome, that will produce spiritual disease.

[18:23] It'll produce spiritual danger. What are the things that are becoming, that are fitting for sound doctrine? You could think of really right living, of godly conduct.

[18:37] Look for those things, search for those things, and it says, speak those things that become sound doctrine. And sometimes you might come and hear a preacher or get some teaching and, whoa, that's really come out of left field and that's really touched a nerve.

[18:56] You know, sometimes when you hear someone speaking or you're exhorting or being exhorted by another believer, you might hear something, oh, I don't really want to hear that.

[19:07] That's a bit too personal. That's my sacred cow you're talking about. Whatever it is, you know, someone preaches against sin and it's something that you're toying with.

[19:17] If it's an area that as a Christian you're not being faithful in and you're challenged in that area, that's necessary. That's the pruning happening, isn't it?

[19:28] When God points things out to us that we need attention to. And the preacher's job, it's been said, is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. If you're comfortable today, I want you to be afflicted.

[19:41] I want you to be stirred and provoked and stirred up, challenged today. As I need to be, as we all need to be, as we to provoke one another to love and to good works.

[19:52] Sound doctrine. Think about it. Is our teaching sound? Is it healthy? Is it doing us good? Is it helping us to grow? You can think of, along the food line again, just to illustrate, that sometimes food can be all full of additives and all kinds of extras that they put in.

[20:11] You know, you have a look at the ingredients in there and you think, oh, all of these chemicals I'm eating, you know, that's in the food that I'm partaking of. And yet, you know, down at the nurseries where there's organic produce that they're very careful about what it's sprayed with and what they feed the plants with.

[20:31] And there's a whole movement today about organic food, isn't there? About people wary of additives and about chemicals and preservatives in the food. What about the word that we're partaking of?

[20:43] Is it pure? Is it unadulterated? Or has it got man's thinking all through it? You can think of, for example, as much as paraphrases might have some interest for us, you've got to be careful because it's like a man's kind of rewritten it all and put all of their own thinking and thoughts into it.

[21:04] And we need to be careful that what we're partaking of is pure, it's unadulterated, there's no additives, it's the pure, sincere milk of the word. And so we want that organic food, that unadulterated, pure word, that spiritual food that we can eat of.

[21:25] It's been said, there's a preacher said this, Warren Wiersbe said this, it's unfortunate today that we not only have unsound, unhealthy doctrine in teaching and preaching, but also in music.

[21:40] Far too many songs not only teach no doctrine, but many even teach false doctrines. A singer has no more right to sing a lie than a teacher has to teach a lie.

[21:51] And you can think of that, I know it's a hot topic for Julie, at one place where the songs were full of falsehoods and quite untrue, and yet the people were singing those without any regards.

[22:08] The fact that they were singing a lie was not true. And people today, we need to be careful, obviously, what are we partaking of? The word, and what we're singing, what we're doing, what we're fellowshipping, that it's sound, that it's godly, that it's wholesome, it's healthy for us.

[22:23] And what does the word of God say in Psalm 1, verse 2, as far as the frequency of how we should partake of the word of God? This stood out to me when I was preparing.

[22:36] As we know, the word of God is talked about in Psalm 1, that blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, sitteth not in the seat of the scornful, etc. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth he meditate how often?

[22:52] Once a week. Oh, that's a different version. No, how often does he meditate? Day and night. That's an encouragement, isn't it?

[23:03] Maybe, I know, I need to develop more of that habit, a good habit, day and night. Maybe, morning and night. Take the word and get a little gem of truth.

[23:17] Get a little kernel, a little nugget of truth that will keep you through the day. And then, as you retire at night, oh, there's another little treasure that I can sleep on and meditate on as I go to bed.

[23:31] And desire the word. In Deuteronomy 8, verse 3, they gathered the manna daily. The special feeding from God, the special supply of the manna, they fed on it daily.

[23:43] Think about the Bereans too. In Acts 17, 11, they searched the scriptures. How often? Daily. Daily, daily they searched the scriptures. Daily, they're in the word, searching, testing, learning, growing, meditating in the word of God day and night.

[24:02] It's our food, it's our feeding. Take this little quiz now as we think about the opportunities we have for nourishment. For nourishment.

[24:13] I know Julie gets really cranky with me, she's not here to hear this. Julie gets really cranky with me, she cooks this lovely meal and I'm running late with whatever I'm doing and she puts it out and it's getting cold and you know, no other wives would get cranky at that would they?

[24:34] The hubby was late and the lovely food was there all prepared beautifully. prepared. That nourishment missed out on or neglected and are we missing out on the spiritual feasts that are prepared for us?

[24:50] How often do we miss the regular meals that are provided for our bellies? You wouldn't want to miss too many meals would you? Don't miss out on the opportunity to feed your soul. Take this test to check your spiritual nourishment.

[25:02] How much time did you spend this week watching TV? How much time watching sports or entertainment or reading the paper, magazines, etc.? How much time did you spend on your hobby or outside interests?

[25:17] They may not be immoral but is it necessary? How many hours did you spend studying the Bible? How many services of the church did you attend?

[25:28] How many did you miss that you could have attended? Which do you nourish best? Your spirit or your body? Are you feeding your mind on God's word or pleasures?

[25:41] We need Christians. We need to take the opportunities we can. We can't always attend every meeting but take the word at every chance you can. Take the word. Don't miss out on it.

[25:52] You could be missing out on a blessing. He wants you to meditate day and night. Daily. Searching the scriptures. Exercise yourself unto godliness.

[26:03] 1 Timothy 4.7 There's a day coming. Amos says that the day is coming that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread nor a thirst for water but of hearing the words of the Lord.

[26:16] There's a famine coming and it's coming. It's evident about us in many circles that don't get the word of God. There's not a challenge. There's not an exhorting. There's not a stirring.

[26:27] There's not a challenging to godly forgiveness. There's not an urging to spiritual life. There's not a clear gospel message soundly declared. There's not an exhorting and inviting for souls to respond to Christ, the great soul healer and burden bearer.

[26:46] There's not the message in many circles sadly. Where there may have once been, it's going, going, gone in many places and sadly the word is missing.

[27:00] Don't miss it. Feed on it and encourage your brothers and sisters to grow. So feed upon Christ to study the word and let Christ be that bread of life to you.

[27:14] The word to you. Do not miss any any of those Do not miss any any of those Do not miss any any of those