Food Is an Object Lesson

Erin Davis: We’re really influenced by these cultural messages about food rhythms.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: This is author and podcast host and content director of Revive Our Hearts, Erin Davis. She observes that regular times of both fasting and feasting are common in the Bible.

Erin: There are time rhythms in Scripture. There are rest rhythms in Scripture. And there are food rhythms in Scripture. When we pay attention to those, it transforms how we see food.

Nancy: Today my cohost, Dannah Gresh, talks with Erin about how we can conform our thinking about food to the Word of God.

This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast for September 27, 2022. I’m Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Nancy: If you’re like me, it can sometimes feel like you have a love/hate relationship with food. Well, today’s program will help us relax a little and enjoy the beauty of something good that God has made for us without worshiping the creation instead of the Creator.

Not long ago, Dannah sat down to discuss this subject with Erin. It’s the subject of Erin’s latest book, a 40-day devotional on feasting and fasting. Later in this program, I’ll let you know how you can get a copy. Now, here’s Dannah.

Dannah Gresh: Welcome on this crisp fall day, friend. Today I baked up one of my famous apple pies with crumb topping, and I hope you’re going to join me. I’m going to be joined by my Grounded cohost, Erin Davis. She’s stopping by and bringing her Aunt Rhonda’s famous pie recipe.

Erin Davis, what is in the filling?

Erin: Oh, I wish that we were actually together eating pie. That does sound like the perfect thing.

Dannah: Oh, come on, use your imagination.

Erin: Okay, I’m imagining it. I’m smelling your apple pie. If Aunt Rhonda was joining us, which would be an absolute treat, she would bring peach pie. I’ve been eating the woman’s peach pie for four decades. It gets better with time. It’s so good.

Dannah: It’s such a good thing.

I was reading that pie recipe, too, and I feel like we have to give out the pie hack that your Aunt Rhonda taught you.

Erin: What is the pie hack?

Dannah: Rolling out the pie crust between two sheets of wax paper?

Erin: Oh. Everybody doesn’t know about that?

Dannah: You have changed my life!

Erin: Yes. That’s how she trained me, really. Since I was a little girl, I’ve been making that pie crust with Aunt Rhonda, and she always does it that way. I didn’t know everybody didn’t do it that way.

Dannah: I didn’t do it that way, but I do put vinegar in my crust, which makes it super flaky. So, if you don’t know about that hack, check it out online.

So, we’re talking about pie today, but not really. What we’re talking about is food. I wonder, what did you eat today? And more importantly, perhaps, why did you eat it? That’s a really important question.

Erin, as you’ve talked with women, what do you think is the biggest struggle you hear from them when it comes to food?

Erin: Well, I’ve got to tell a story. I was teaching once, I think I was in your state, Dannah, in Pennsylvania. It was a big group of women. Picture it. I asked them to write down their greatest area of sin struggle and then send those to me. I was expecting lots of things, but I got what I didn’t expect.

Because, by far and away, the top two things women listed as their greatest area of sin struggle–I want to emphasize that—is self-control in the area of food and lack of organization in their homes.

Now, I can identify with the struggle. It is a struggle. Both of those are an area of struggle for me. I also had all these alarms blaring in my head, in my heart. Like, I’m not sure these are even areas of sin. And they were just, literally, weeping over the fact that they didn’t have self-control in the area of food.

Now, is self-control important? It certainly is, so I don’t want to over simplify it. But I also was, like, “Hey, we need to apply what the Bible actually says to the area of food” because these women are in chains. They were really struggling with all of that.

Dannah: Okay, so you’re going to help us with that today, right?

Erin: I hope so.

Dannah: You’re going to help us look through the topic of food—how we approach it, why we eat it, when we eat it—through the lens of biblical truth. How do food and faith intersect?

Erin: Well, I actually think they intersect every day, multiple times a day. Food is something we must encounter, ingest, deal with every single day. So anything that’s part of our everyday lives we need to take to Scripture and say, “Okay, God, what do You really say about this? How do You want us to apply what You say about this?”

I think there are lots and lots of lessons. If you just were to go through your Bible, as I have, looking for food themes, you’ll find them in every chapter of the Bible. It really is a prevalent theme in Scripture and a prevalent theme in our lives.

I don’t think there’s just one answer about how they intersect, but I do think God intentionally uses food to teach us lessons. He wants to teach us lessons about who He is, what His character is like. I think we just miss Him a lot because we think He’s just like a cheeseburger, but I think He could be so much more than that.

Dannah: There are so many things that are popping through my head as you say that. Like, “Jesus is the bread of life.” Right? “The Word of God is like honey to my lips.” Right? There’s just an endless number of what I guess would be object lessons for us to learn about faith through our food.

Erin: Yes. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” “Beware the yeast of the Pharisees.”

Dannah: There you go.

Erin: There’s lots of vineyard language. I mean, so many times in Scripture food . . . I believe this is because food is something we all have lots of experience with. Food is something that God can use as an object lesson to teach us something more significant.

Dannah: You have described food as “a tiger in a box.” What does that mean?

Erin: That analogy actually comes from our shared friend, Laura Booz. She shared it with me fifteen years ago, and it has stuck with me all of this time. She described food as just that: a tiger in a box that you have to take out three times a day. You have to feed the tiger, and then you have to put that tiger back inside the box and somehow stay in control of it.

I think that metaphor could go in lots of different directions. Because food is something that we have to interact with so often, and because food is something we receive so many cultural messages about . . . I mean, just pay attention for the next twenty-four hours about how much is coming at you about food from every direction.

A lot of times, what happens is the tiger comes out of the box. We stop feeding our own hunger, and then our hunger starts to drive us in ways that feel a little bit out of control, like I imagine a tiger would be.

Dannah: I don’t know if my tiger has been in the box since COVID started.

Erin: Since lock down. There’s something there.

Dannah: I have habits, bad habits that I learned to comfort and soothe myself and deal with the boredom of being locked down that I still haven’t overcome. So that’s a powerful object lesson.

Erin: I think we all learned about our relationship with food through that pandemic. I hope we all learned a lot about ourselves, and one of them was all of the things you’re saying. We use food to medicate. Everybody was kind of hysterical because we were separated from our restaurants of choice. Well, why are we reacting that way? Not being able to go to a restaurant? I think there’s a lot of layers here that are worth investigating.

Dannah: Why did I go to Sam’s Club when they said, “You might not be going to a grocery store for a while?” And all of the things I bought: a vat of Milano cookies—not a package, a vat.

Erin: You were worried. You were worried that was . . .

Dannah: For the two weeks we were going to be in lock down, I was going to need those. How long has it been? I don’t know, but we’ve . . .

Erin: 2020, 2021, 2022, they’re all one continuous year. And there was eating . . . lots of eating.

Dannah: So, take us to an object lesson in the Scripture about food. Teach us what we need to know.

Erin: I think an easy place to go when we are wrestling with the practicalities of life is the whole book of Psalms. Psalms is so honest. It’s about things that we really experience, and food is in Psalms pretty frequently.

I’m going to take us specifically to Psalm 34. Go ahead and get there in your Bible yourself. Psalm 34. I’m going to read us verses 8–10. This is David writing, and he said:

“Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! [There’s an exclamation point in my Bible.] Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him. Fear the Lord, you His saints. For those who fear Him have no lack. The young lions suffer want and hunger, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.”

So here we have David wanting to communicate to whomever he was writing to. And then by the power of the Holy Spirit, he has communicated through time to us that when we want to focus on the fact that our God is good, we should taste it and see it.

Now, he could have chosen any other sense. He could have said, “Oh hear that God is good.” You can hear that God is good in the rustling of leaves or in a thunderstorm.

He could have said, “See that God is good.” That’s really obvious, I think. You step outside and you see that the sun rises every day, it sets every night. The stars come out. “Ah, God is good.”

But he says, “Taste and see that God is good.”

He goes on to talk about lions and hunger and the fact that we don’t have lack. He’s using food language. We’re satisfied in God.

I read that and I think, Food is an object lesson given to me by God—just like creation is an object lesson given to me by God. And what does He want me to learn? Well, among other things, He wants me to learn that He is good.

That’s been really transformative in my relationship with food personally, because if it’s good, I don’t have to feel ashamed every time I put something in my mouth. Now, it’s not a blank check to eat whatever I want or eat whenever I want. Self-control gets in the mix. But I do think you can look at Scripture and look at your own experience and think, Food is something God has given me to experience His goodness. That’s exciting to me.

Dannah: Let’s break that word “goodness” down, because I think of two things. One, I think, Yum. Pleasant. Pleasure. Enjoyable.

But I also think, Nourishing. Useful. Strengthening. Like it has that connotation to it, too. When you think of Jesus saying, “Jesus is the Bread of Life.” That’s a sense of “He is sustaining to us.” Just as we cannot live without nourishment to our bodies, we cannot live without the nourishment of Jesus Christ in our Spirit—not truly live. We cannot truly live without that goodness in the midst of our being, in the marrow of our being.

Erin: Right. Just as you could survive for a limited time without food, you can survive for a limited amount of time without knowing Jesus, without feasting on His Word. I mean, that’s another place where food is used. Scripture says, “I took Your Word, and I ate it.” Well, that’s a weird thing to say. Did somebody wad up pieces of their Bible and eat it as food? No. It’s just the idea that I feast on the Word, and it fuels me. It sustains me. It nourishes me.

So, I don’t think we have to set the pleasure part aside. Food is pleasurable. I mean, if you and I were having a pie party right now (I can’t think of anything more enjoyable), but it does go beyond that. It’s one of the ways that God sustains us.

I actually think we have that need meter inside of us. Your body will tell you when you are hungry. And if you ignore that need meter very long, that’s when the tiger starts to really growl. Well, that is alerting you to your need for food.

But it’s also alerting you to the fact that God has met your need for food every other time you’ve been hungry. And God will meet your need for food again. He will nourish you. He will sustain you.

So it is a constant, daily—more than daily—reminder that God is attentive to you. He cares for you. He will nourish and sustain you. Those are good lessons to learn over and over again.

Dannah: When you say that about our need meter for food rises, and it’s telling us, “You need to eat,” if we let that go on too long, I don’t know about you, but I end up eating the wrong thing.

Erin: Yes.

Dannah: Instead of reaching for the nourishing thing—the salad—I’ll reach for the pizza and the burger. I wonder, does that teach us something about how we nourish our spirits?

Erin: Absolutely.

I had an interesting conversation with my doctor not too long ago. I made an appointment with her, which is hard for me to do. I tend to get white-coat syndrome. I made an appointment with her. She came in with her little rolling cart with her computer, and she said, “What’s going on, Erin?”

I said, “I just don’t ever feel good. I’m tired all the time. I’m not sick-sick. I don’t think you’re going to diagnose me with anything today. But I’m relatively young, I’m relatively healthy, but I just don’t feel good.”

And she began to talk to me about food. She said, “The deal is: the more junk you eat, the more junk you want. That’s just the way it works. And the more nourishing, sustaining food you eat, the more of that you’re going to crave.”

And immediately, I was, like, “Oh man.” All truth is God’s truth. There are so many good spiritual parallels here.

The more I read my Bible, the more I want to read my Bible. I never want to read my Bible less by reading it more. It works the opposite.

The more I’m in good fellowship with God’s people, the more I want to be in good fellowship with God’s people.

The more I worship Him and obey Him. It’s the same with all the disciplines of following Jesus. The more we do it, the more we want to do it.

It’s another lesson that food can remind us of . . . if we’ll listen. It’s just taking that leap from something practical, mundane, pedestrian, that we think we all do every day. I really think God has a lot to teach us from it.

Dannah: Yes. This is interesting, Erin. I imagine that there was an experience in your life or a Scripture you came to that made you really decide this. I want to drill down into that intersection between faith and food. What was God trying to teach us? What object lesson was He giving us? What made you want to study this?

Erin: There’s a story in Mark 9 which has been fascinating to me for several years. I don’t know if you ever just get caught by something in Scripture and you just keep coming back to it, but Mark 9 has been that to me. I would encourage those of you who are listening to just spend some time in Mark 9.

There’s a lot going on. The Transfiguration happens, so wow! That’s a doozy! But then as Jesus and some of His friends are coming down from the mountain, there’s another kind of a melee. A crowd is worked up in a fervor, and Jesus and some of His disciples come into that.

And what was going on is a child had been demon possessed, and his father was trying to get him help. The disciples couldn’t help him. That’s where we find that beautiful prayer, “I believe. Help my unbelief.” (This is just like every Christian’s prayer from now to the end of time.) But then, Jesus does heal the boy.

Later, the disciples, in privacy, I think kind of with their tails tucked, are like, “Uh, Jesus, we did what You taught us to do, and it didn’t work. We tried.”

And Jesus said to them, “This kind can only be driven out by prayer and fasting.”

Now, some translations don’t include the fasting, but the fasting is what caught my attention. What did He mean, “This kind can only be driven out by prayer and fasting”?

Fasting is a spiritual discipline that I think we’ve lost sight of.

Dannah: Yes.

Erin: Dannah, you and I have a shared friend named Tippy Duncan. She lives where I live. You stay in touch with her. She has modeled fasting to me for many years, and I’ve just been intrigued by that discipline in her life.

So you combine that woman who I admire in that verse in Mark 9, and I’m going, “Okay. What am I missing here?” Because I have things in my life that . . . I feel like I’ve done the things that Jesus has asked me to do. I’ve prayed with at least the faith of a mustard seed, and nothing happens.

I started to really be interested in what the Bible says about fasting. I read a lot of books about it, a lot of Scriptures about it. But when I look at my whole Bible, I have to face the fact that the Bible doesn’t just talk about fasting. The Bible talks about fasting and feasting. There are at least two distinct food rhythms in Scripture.

Dannah: Okay, “food rhythms in the Bible.” What do you mean by that?

Erin: I mean that it’s not just feasting. There are some of us who when the idea that the Bible calls us to feasting, we’re, “Awesome! I’m on board for that.” There are others of us that when we hear the Bible calls us to a food rhythm of feasting, we go, “I’m not sure about that. Aren’t we supposed to live a life of denial? Aren’t we supposed to live incredibly self-controlled lives? Does the Bible really give us permission to have times of feasting?”

And the answer is, “Yes! It does.”

You’ve heard me talk before, Dannah, about my passion for the seven feasts that are in Leviticus. When God gave the Israelites their calendar, when they had fled from Egypt and they were learning to live life in the Promised Land, He gave them these feasts that they were supposed to observe every year.

So just from that passage alone we can say, “Okay, feasting, or celebrating with food, isn’t bad in God’s eyes.” That’s one rhythm—regular rhythms of celebrating with food. But that’s only part of the story.

You flip that coin over, and we also see throughout all of Scripture, including in those seven feasts, actually, this call to fasting. In the Bible (and we’re going to talk more about fasting later on) fasting is talked about not as something God’s people might do. In the Bible, fasting is talked about as something that God’s people will do. It’s supposed to be just a part of our lives.

Now, of course, it’s not tied to our salvation. You could be a follower of Jesus and never fasted a day in your life. But this story in Mark 9 is just one of many where we get this glimpse that fasting is actually a really powerful spiritual discipline that the Lord has given us as a tool in our toolbox to live the Christian life.

So, both rhythms are there in Scripture just like there are time rhythms in Scripture. There are rest rhythms in Scripture. And there are food rhythms in Scripture. And when we pay attention to those, it transforms how we see food.

We’re really influenced by these cultural messages about food rhythms. We just kind of take them as gospel. I’ll use three meals a day as an example. We think, Oh, you’ve got to have three meals a day. Well, where did that even come from? I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, but when we look at Scripture, we go, “There are other kinds of food rhythms that God gives us.” And again, always for our good, and always just as a tool in our toolbox to live the life He’s called us to live.

Dannah: So I’m wondering, if we have a rhythm where we tend to get stuck in the rut of one or the other. We are constantly feasting; we never stop feasting, or we get in these places where, whether it is literally a diet or fasting, we become hyper-focused on withholding food from ourselves in a way that maybe isn’t healthy.

But as you say that, I’m thinking, I don’t know that I have a regular rhythm of feasting and fasting. I tend to fast every January, pretty hard core, but I don’t know that I have a rhythm of fasting. And I think, in this culture, I often say, “We live in a food-porn culture.”

Erin: What do you mean by “food-porn”? It’s an interesting term.

Dannah: I don’t want to belittle the tremendous damage of pornography in our world, but I also think that there’s a parallel to where we almost worship . . . When we look at pictures of food, we’re actually enjoying the food. We’re premeditating the actual experience of pleasure with food. It’s not about food as fuel. It’s always about food as pleasure.

And this becomes very paramount in our social media, in the billboards, in the number of hours we spend not just eating every day and every week, but planning our food, thinking about our food, choosing our restaurants, looking at menus.

It’s maybe out of balance and pointing us to food as the source of pleasure rather than the One who has created and provided our food as the source of our joy.

Erin: Amen! And it’s not just food as pleasure. It’s food as romance. All of our romantic interactions come around food. Food is my stress relief. I’ve got to eat when I’m stressed.

Dannah: Stress eating. Yes.

Erin: I’m not going to win any friends here, but I think we’ve elevated coffee, which is just a drink at the end of the day. But if you talk about how our culture talks about coffee, it’s like, “We can’t survive without it. We can’t face our day until we’ve had our cup of joe. We love our gourmet eighteen-dollar-a-cup coffee.”

Those are all indicative of cultural heart issues.

Dannah: Well, coffee is a stimulant.

Erin: It is.

Dannah: And it can become addictive.

Erin: Right.

Dannah: I think if you’re enjoying it periodically and maybe even sometimes using it to help you wake up, but . . . I got to the point at the beginning of the pandemic where I was drinking two, three, four cups of coffee to get me through the extreme number of hours I needed to work, just to keep the ministry moving and working in those first few months. When I came off of it, I had headaches. I had withdrawal. I didn’t feel well. I was, you could argue, chemically addicted to a substance.

Erin: Yes. And I think what the Bible does with everything, but including with food, the Bible takes us to the heart. And I have same conviction, Dannah. I was depending on coffee to parent. I thought, If I was depending on a substance to run a marathon, that would be considered a performance-enhancing drug. And the fact that I’m depending on this to run the marathon of motherhood is no different.

I’m not here to convict anybody about coffee—that’s the Holy Spirit’s job. But I do think that all these things that we just think are really benign, they’re just our food rhythms. They’re just our cultural food rhythms. But when we take them to Scripture, I think they get flipped upside down a bit. We have to then look at the heart behind the way we use food or don’t use food, our attitudes towards food, and all of that. I do think Scripture addresses it.

Dannah: Well, when you say there’s this rhythm of fasting and feasting, something I think about is the discipline of what’s in the middle?

Erin: Are you talking about what’s in the middle of an Oreo?

Dannah: (laughter) That’s a good example. I feel like we live in a culture that’s on constant feast mode.

Erin: For sure.

Dannah: And if there’s a time to fast and a time to feast, those are set-apart, unique times. That means the middle space is the mundane, routine, normal space. And we don’t live in a lot of that. We live in a lot of feasting without hardly any effort or desire to fast.

Erin: Well, and I think what we might think of as fasting is really just dieting. It’s like, “I overate this weekend. I’m going to try again on Monday, and I’m going to starve myself.” That’s not fasting. That’s not the rhythm that Scripture calls us to. I do think we tend to swing between the two extremes. “I’m going to super over-indulge, then I’m going to super under-indulge.” That’s not what Scripture is calling us to.

Scripture is calling us to a relationship with food that invites Jesus into all of it. That requires walking in the Spirit. That uses food as something we gather around uniquely as God’s people. I mean, every time we gather at the table, we think of Jesus and all that He has done for us.

Dannah: What a sweet thought.

Well, let’s make this practical, Erin. We’ve eaten today. We’re going to eat again today. That’s what we do every day. What’s something simple that we can do to start remembering and being grateful to Christ when we sit down at the table?

Erin: Well, I’d love to show you that this intersection of food and faith is always practical because food is so practical. And, again, it’s in the Psalms. Let me read us Psalm 103:1–5.

Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me . . .

A lot of times we stop there. And that’s a good verse. It’s inspired, certainly, but keep reading.

Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

So here in the context of all of these amazing, supernatural things God does: He forgives us. He redeems our life from the pit. He crowns us with steadfast love. And, oh yes, “He satisfies us with good things, (that’s food language again) and He renews us like the eagle.”

That’s, again, what happens when we eat. When we’re “hangry,” we eat. We get some fuel to go on a little bit further.

So, I really just think it’s as simple as when you eat, blessing the Lord. “Thank You for this gift.” I know many of us have a habit of praying before meals. We say the same prayer before every meal at my house. But just that heart of, “This is a gift God has given me. It’s a big gift. Thank You for it.” No matter what it is.

It’s a practical step you can take right now as you go munch on some popcorn or have another cup of coffee or wherever you’re going to go to next.

Nancy: Erin Davis has been talking with Dannah Gresh, helping us find those healthy rhythms, keeping food in its rightful place as a good and gracious gift from our loving heavenly Father.

Erin will be back to pray in just a moment.

Her book came out earlier this month. It’s called, Fasting and Feasting: 40 Devotions to Satisfy the Hungry Heart. Don’t you love that subtitle? And that’s something we all need because we all have hungry hearts, and these devotions will help you think biblically about how we can satisfy those longings.

This week we’d love to send you a copy of Erin’s book as our way of saying “thank you” for your gift of any amount to the ministry of Revive Our Hearts.

We often remind you that we’re a listener-supported ministry, and that just means that we rely on the donations of friends like you to bring you this program and to continue our various outreaches to women all around the world. So, thank you for giving—not only giving financial resources, but also for the gift of your prayers. We need those more than you’ll ever know.

To get in touch with us and make your donation, just visit us at ReviveOurHearts.com, or give us a call at 1-800-569-5959. When you call, be sure to let us know you’d like a copy of Erin’s book, Fasting and Feasting.

Dannah: Friend, I want you to think about: how do you need the Lord to deliver you? I hope you’re going to join us tomorrow as we continue to visit with Erin to learn more about the connection between food and fasting, and how God can use a healthy, biblically-based rhythm of those two things to deliver us.

But, Erin, would you close up our day today by praying for us?

Erin: I’d love to.

Jesus, we love You. You’ve given us every kind of feast. In Your Word You talk about setting the table for us to feast with You. And then You’ve also called us to this life of sacrificing ourselves and dying to self so that we might glorify You.

I pray for those women listening, every single one of them has a “this kind.” I don’t know what it is, but You do. So, I would pray that by the power of Your Holy Spirit, now or in the days and weeks to come, that You would help her know what is that thing that she cannot drive out of her own life. And then, would You just show her how, maybe fasting, or maybe feasting, but certainly prayer and certainly surrendering to You, can help her find victory in that area.

We love You. We love the way You work in our lives. We’re grateful for the many gifts You give us. It’s in Your name I pray, amen.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is calling you to healthy rhythms as you find freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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