Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Going Hungry


Rather than hungering and thirsting for righteousness, I hunger and thirst for sin.  So I'm thinking what I need is to starve or at least go on a diet.

I’ve never completely made the connection between Adam’s temptation in the Garden and the idea of being hungry. 

It all sort of came together tonight as I was finishing up Lois Lowry’s The Giver series.  In the series she addresses a range of human characteristics like memory, pain, history, addiction and evil.  Over all it’s sort of a light-hearted romp. 

But [spoiler alert] she brings in the real goods at the end of the series in The Son.  It’s about a boy who chooses to go hungry rather than give in to his desires and in-so-doing defeats evil. 

It reminds me of Jesus in the desert.  Here he’s tempted with a number of things and chief among those is food.  He had to be starving.  And then it reminds me of Israel and Manna.  Man this just keeps going!

But it makes me wonder.  How can we rid ourselves of sin?  I know I’m sick of it.  I need to starve it.  And it is possible to cling to Jesus and go hungry. 

If I choose to feast on him and what he provides part of me dies.  But what does that even mean?  Sin selfishness is always in front of me.  I have to choose what I simply do not want.  And I have to face that I do not want God, but I desperately need him.

I know I don’t want God and I’m a Christian.  Sure there’s a deeper part of me, the blue-haired blonde-eyed Jesus (j/k), part that wants him, but my actions betray me.  Stupid actions.

I sound a little defeatist I know.  But only in Jesus can I have any victory over sin.  Only in having my very appetites changed.  Only in going hungry.

To ask that he enable me to hunger and thirst for righteousness is a good place to start I guess.  Plus I don’t like dieting.