You are what you eat

Then he said to me, "Son of man, eat this scroll I am giving you and fill your stomach with it" (Ezekiel 3:3).

Now that the Christmas season is over, many people are hesitant to step on their scales. All the wonderful Christmas cookies and other fattening treats have resulted in some unwanted extra pounds. And so January is a time when many Americans start watching carefully what they eat.

Perhaps you’ve heard it said that ‘you are what you eat.’ That is certainly true—what you put in your mouth directly affects your metabolism and overall health. But this is also true of your mind—you are what you read and listen to. A reviewer once had this to say about a show that he’d just seen: "I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me." Everything we feast our eyes and ears on becomes a part of us.

We need to be selective as to what we fill our bellies with; this applies to our minds as well. I had some cousins who grew up in Wisconsin like I did. One day, their father took a job in West Virginia and they moved away. Just one year later, when they came back for a visit, every one of them now spoke with a thick Appalachian accent! Listening to the way other people talked changed how they communicated, and very quickly. Joseph Goebbels, propagandist for Adolf Hitler, observed that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will come to believe it. If you continually read publications that stray from the truth, eventually you will be persuaded to believe their lies. What we read and listen to can change what we think and how we act.

If you want your body to be healthy, you are careful about good nutrition. If you want your soul to be healthy, you must exercise similar care. Satan would love to fill you up with spiritual junk food—teachings that sound nice but offer nothing of substance. But you need a well-balanced meal for your soul to be properly nourished. You need to see that God expects perfection, and none of us come even remotely close to living according to the pattern He has laid out in the Bible. You need to hear that God sent His Son to be born as one of us, so that He could suffer the punishment and death that we all deserve from God for our failings. You need to realize that God sent His Son to be your friend, your teacher, your leader, and your source of lasting joy. You are what you fill yourself with, and the Bible says of Jesus, God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21).