Our Appetite

Oh yes, we have an appetite all right. After all, we must eat to live, right? But we develop an appetite for foods that will ruin our health, we develop appetites for activities that will wreck our balance and suspend any activity that could be considered spiritual. We are not only talking about our trips to the fridge, but to the internet porn site, and the shopping mall, the TV. How mockingly appropriate is the term “download” like a massive amount of stuff, pouring into an already burdened carrier. It strains and groans under the new burden of stuff, unwieldy and difficult now to climb a hill, so difficult to maneuver because of the shear mass of………..all the available things we crave.
Our American world is so chocked full of stuff for us to crave that most of us bear multiple versions of excess appetite. Then it comes time to seek a living God, to come before Him to partake of his wisdom, and who are we? What do we bring? He wants us with nothing and we show up so laden with the excess of our consumption that we do not know how to even seek his presence.
Fasting is not very fashionable. But it may be one of the only ways to even recognize what habits we have constructed for ourselves, and how severely they get in between us and a relationship to a living God who’s life is the light of men. Like Pavlov’s dog we respond to the bell on cue, we salivate on command just like Madison Avenue wants us to. Ah, so well trained, is it nicotine, alcohol, sweets, or sex? Do we know how it started and what should be considered normal? And worst of all, when we come before Him, can we be apart from our craving long enough to enter in? How often should we enter in? There are few natural curbs for appetites in our modern culture, we may have to create our own.
What is in Your worship?
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