Gluttony
1 Cor. 6:12-20
Introduction
Many of you will have heard of the called ‘Dieting under Stress’ diet. It goes something like this:
Breakfast: half a grapefruit, 1 slice dry whole wheat toast, 8 oz skim milk
Lunch: 4 oz lean boiled chicken, 1 cup steamed spinach, 1 cup herbal tea, 1 cookie
Snack: rest of cookies in packet, 2 pints Rocky Road ice cream, 1 jar hot fudge sauce, nuts, cherries, whipped cream
Dinner: 2 loaves garlic bread with cheese, large pizza, 2 liter of coke, 3 Mars Bars
Evening snack: an entire frozen cheesecake eaten directly from the freezer.
I suppose most of us can relate to gluttony in some way. Hunger cravings, desires, longings, appetite—wanting to feed your face. Maybe not quite to the excess of that little diet but in some way or another, we all know what it means to crave something. But are you a glutton? Do you have a problem with gluttony? My guess is most of you would think not. Sure, I like the odd chocolate fix but I’m not a glutton. Or even if you’re not really sure what a glutton is, you might still be reasonably confident it’s not you. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that you were probably surprised to see it even on the list. ‘Gluttony a deadly sin? In the top seven??’ I’ll go a step further and say, that if asked, ‘which of these seven sins do you think you struggle with most?” almost no-one will say gluttony.
Gluttony, it’s a word that conjures up certain images isn’t it? We have a pretty stereotyped idea of what a glutton looks like, of how to spot the person with a problem with gluttony. So, you know you’re a glutton when: you go to the zoo and you realize that kids are throwing you peanuts; you go to the beach and six people ask you to move because you’re blocking the sun and a kid asks to borrow the life preserver round your waist but you’re not wearing one; or you fall asleep on the beach and wake up to realize people are splashing water on you, dragging you to the water’s edge. Then there’s when an invitation to an exercise class says “wear loose clothing” and you think to yourself: “well if I had any loose clothing, I won’t have to go to an exercise class.”
Tonight I want to preach on Gluttony and give you a Scriptural picture of what it is and how we need to make sure it is not a part of our lives, as followers of Christ.
I. The Problem
• Eating too much? Being overweight? Is that all gluttony is?
o If it is – well most of you could breathe easy.
o If gluttony’s something you can just measure with the scales, then many could say, ‘gluttony’s not a problem for me’.
o But we’re going to see that, even if you don’t have a problem with eating, you may still have a problem with gluttony.
o In fact, the Bible says every person here today is a glutton.
o When you see what the Bible says this sin of gluttony’s all about, you might realize that you need to move it up your list of seven even to the top, alongside the other four we’ve looked at so far!
• You see, you can look at gluttony just in the narrow sense – and then it’d just be about feeding your face.
o And the Bible sure has plenty of warnings about that (Proverbs 23:20).
o That’s the narrower sense of what gluttony is: the craving of an empty stomach.
• But the Bible’s also got a whole lot to say about a broader sense of what gluttony is.
o Broader than just consuming too much food and drink.
o And one place you see this in detail is the Book of Ecclesiastes.
• Ecclesiastes is all about the bigger definition of gluttony: not just empty stomachs – but empty souls.
o Ecclesiastes 3:10 talks about God setting eternity in our hearts, that God has made us with a sense of longing, a yearning for fulfillment, a hunger for satisfaction, a kind of a spiritual vacuum: empty souls.
• The theologian Augustine called it a ‘God shaped hole’.
o And the point of course is, God’s the one who put it there, so only God can fill it.
o It’s the gospel: God made us, made us for relationship with him, so we have an in-built wiring to need God, we’ll never be satisfied outside of him.
• But the problem is that we rebelled against God.
o We’ve rejected God’s rightful place in our lives.
o Since Adam and Eve, we’ve taken our God-shaped hole and tried to fill it with all the wrong things.
o Instead of craving relationship with God, we’ve craved independence from him – and tried to satisfy our spiritual hunger with our own desires.
o Instead of being hungry for God’s Word and God’s ways, we’ve become hungry for just about anything else.
• We’ve become gluttons.
o Hungry people, but hungry for all the wrong things.
o Trying to fill the place that only God should occupy, but filling our souls instead – with rubbish.
• Here’s the real problem of gluttony.
o It’s not just that we crave junk food for the stomach.
o It’s that we crave junk food for the soul.
o Solomon describes how he filled his soul with junk food in Eccl 2:10, “All that my eyes desired I did not refuse them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure, for my heart was pleased because of all my labor and this was reward for all my labor.”
o Let me paraphrase that for you; he said, “I went for it, I let my hunger go wild, I stuffed myself but I was chasing the wrong stuff, chasing thin air. I was trying to fill my empty soul with junk food.”
• It’s a story repeated through the centuries.
o Stories like Boris Becker, the great tennis player, who, when he was at the very top of the tennis world was also on the brink of suicide. He said, ‘I’d won Wimbledon twice before, once as the youngest player, I was rich, I had all the material possessions I needed. But it’s the old song of movie and pop stars who commit suicide: they have everything, and yet they are so unhappy. I had no inner peace I was a puppet on a string’.
• That’s the real problem of gluttony.
o Not just empty stomachs, but empty souls.
o Taking the craving that should be for God and his Word, and replacing it with cravings for other things: for physical things, worldly things, fleshly things.
• So, what are you really hungry for?
o Your craving might be food or drink, or your craving might be for other things.
o Your craving might be for clothing, cars, sex, jewelry, holidays, your Playstation or X Box, work, sports, popularity, a relationship, or the approval of others.
o What is it you’re hungry for?
o What are you craving?
• Fact is, if it’s not first and foremost the God who made you, and to feed on his Word more than anything else, then you’re a glutton.
o Gluttony’s not just measured with scales.
o It can be measured in all sorts of other ways—with your credit card, what you love to spend money on most; the clock, what you love to spend your time doing most and, above all, with your heart, what you’re ’really longing for.
o And when you apply those measures, what you find is sin.
o Our selfishness, our self-centeredness, our stubbornness.
o Rather than returning completely to God to be filled by him and ruled by him we continue in many ways to rebel against him.
o This is what the Bible calls the sinful heart.
• Amos 6 shows a classic case of gluttony which comes at a critical stage of the Old Testament story.
o Here Israel’s sin has grown so great that God has decided to send them into exile.
o Just like he removed Adam and Eve from the garden, he’s going to remove Israel from the Promised Land.
o And for what sin? Amos 6:4-6 gives the answer: “You lie on beds inlaid with ivory, and lounge on your couches. You dine on choice lambs, and fattened calves. You strum away on your harps like David, and improvise on musical instruments. You drink wine by the bowlful, and use the finest lotions, but you do not grieve over the ruin of Joseph. Therefore you will be among the first to go into exile; your feasting and lounging will end.”
• Here’s the sin that causes God to drive them into exile: their feasting and lounging, their comfort and complacency, their preoccupation with fleshly desires.
o But it’s not just what they are chasing (their furnishings, the food and wine, the music the lotions), it’s what they’re not chasing – “but you do not grieve over the ruin of Joseph” (v 6).
o You care for your comfort but not my plans or purposes.
o You’re letting all those things take my place, says God.
o Your driving passion isn’t to see God honored, but to serve yourself and feed your desires.
o You’re not hungry for God’s Word and it’s priorities, you don’t crave God being center stage in your life.
o It’s not just what you are hungry for, but what you’re not.
o And so God sends them into exile because he hates their hypocrisy.
• Hypocrisy is what lies beneath gluttony.
o You claim to be filling your life with God when you’re really filling it with other things.
o They claimed to worship God but they really worshipped themselves.
o They were very religious people, and they conducted their ceremonies, presented their offerings but God says they are fakes because they “honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me”.
o Are we claiming to be God’s people but not living like it?
o Are we focused on his honor, or our comfort?
o I was sent a story recently, on just this question, a story that exposes our hypocrisy. The story imagines Satan addressing his demons, announcing his plan for producing hypocritical Christians. ‘We can’t stop them claiming to be Christians, we can’t stop them thinking they’re living as Christians, but we can stop them really living as Christians should.
Here’s how. We keep them busy in the nonessentials of life. Invent all sorts of schemes to occupy their minds. Get them busy in trivia. Tempt them to spend, spend, spend and borrow, borrow, borrow. Get them working six or seven days a week, twelve hours a day, so they can afford their empty lifestyles. Over-stimulate their minds so they don’t read the Bible. Jam their minds with junk so they don’t think of God. Invade their driving moments with billboards. Flood their letterboxes with junk mail and sweepstakes and promotions offering free products and false hopes. Give them Santa Claus to destroy the real meaning of Christmas, Easter bunny so they won’t talk about Jesus’ resurrection. Even in their recreation, let them be excessive. Have them return from their “leisure” exhausted. Keep them consuming. Keep them busy, busy, busy. And when they meet together, at church, and through the week, just busy them more – but with small talk and gossip, so they’re still just consuming each other. Crowd their lives, even with things not bad in themselves, but so those things become their passion, so they just drift away from a focus on God. This plan will work!’
• Has it worked in your life?
II. The Solution
• What’s the key for us to turn from hypocrisy?
• What’s the key to get us living according to God’s plan not Satan’s plan, to die to our gluttony and rise to self-control, to die to fleshly desires and live to spiritual, godly priorities?
• Philippians 3:18 provides the key, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.
• Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame.
• Their mind is on earthly things.
• But our citizenship is in heaven.
• And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.
• The cross of Christ is the key.
• It changes everything—your priorities, what you’re hungry for—because in the cross of Christ we see God’s judgment on our gluttony.
• Jesus died for our sins— our gluttony, our wrong priorities and our fleshly desires, how we’ve filled our God shaped hole with earthly shaped things— to bring us back to God, to things that matter, to bring us to new lives with God back at the center, to lives filled with God and his priorities.
• When we came to the cross, trusting in Jesus for forgiveness, let’s be clear what we were asking forgiveness for; then we’ll be clear what God wants us to turn away from.
• We said, “Please crucify the things I’ve filled my soul with so that I might be filled with you and your priorities.
• Make me different to the way I once lived.
• Make me different to the world around me.
• Paul says that to not live that way is to live like enemies of the cross of Christ.
• If your mind is on earthly things you’re not following Christ.
• Is gluttony a problem for you?
• Taking comfort in the wrong things.
• Too tired to read the Bible.
• Too distracted to pray with your wife.
• Do you feel hungry and empty.
• It’s not really for food but we make the nachos anyway.
• It’s not really for entertainment but we turn on the TV.
• And what’s the problem?
• It’s not just that we’re filling our stomachs and minds with junk.
• It’s a spiritual health problem filling our souls with junk.
• In your soul, as you take your spiritual problem to the fridge, as you worship at the shrine of the TV, Your living as an enemy of the cross.
• Not because those things are wrong in themselves but because your taking your problems to them instead of to God.
• And why is that living as an enemy of the cross of Christ?
• Because we’ve forgotten that Christ died for our worldliness.
• Here we are, this world’s causing our problems yet we’re turning to the things of this world for the solution.
• We’ve forgotten the hope that Christ has won for us.
• The real solution to the worries of today is what God’s got in store for us – in heaven.
• That when we feel dissatisfied with this life, we should respond by longing for heaven all the more and pursue heavenly priorities all the more not withdrawing from God and turning elsewhere.
Closing
Tonight, we need to turn to the one who has died and risen to give us eternal life – the real answer to our empty souls. We need to die to our gluttony and rise to self-control, filling our soul with the wonderful Savior and Lord. Let’s Pray.
