I sought the Lord last night for a battle plan for today. Since my wife and I will be meeting with our twin daughters for lunch, I decided to use intermittent fasting from dinner last night to lunch today (17 hours of fasting). For exercise, I will be using incline intervals on the treadmill for 30 minutes.
Greetings again friend, welcome back to your course, so good to be here with you today!
Physical hunger is such a necessity. Anyone that says differently is probably trying to sell us something - a new diet, a pill of some kind, a costly program. We must accept hunger as needed and let our hunger work for us, urging us on in weight loss: “A worker’s appetite works for him, For his hunger urges him on” (Proverbs 16:26).
You want to have a daily goal to feel hunger. Some of us have never let ourselves get hungry, running to food before we feel hunger pangs, and so we might not even remember what it is like to be hungry. Hunger is one of the benefits of intermittent fasting; it allows us to rediscover the blessing of hunger: “Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be satisfied” (Luke 6:21).
On the other hand, we don’t want to walk around all day in a state of hunger. Continuous hunger is not only frustrating; it is not sustainable. We want to feel hunger pangs before eating; then, we can eat (slowly and deliberately) until full and satisfied. In this course, you will learn to listen, first of all to the Lord as He gives you a specific plan to lose weight, and second to your own body as you rediscover the value of hunger. In this way, you will lose weight and increase your enjoyment of food (Proverbs 27:7).
As a reminder, we learned in our previous lesson about the absolute necessity for heart change. If we don’t have a heart change, we’ll go from one program to another, studying and learning about food, macros, calories, etc., yet keep falling and failing. A heart change remedies this.
So, how do we get a heart change?
We will begin to answer that question in this lesson, but first, let me share with you that before I received my heart change, I was so deeply involved in overeating that I had gained 40 pounds and was in poor physical condition. And since I had been doing diets for many years, losing and gaining weight, I knew something needed to change in my heart for good. I had to accept that overeating and laziness were sins, pampering my flesh rather than crucifying it, and came from not walking by the Spirit.
Suffice it to say that God has changed and is changing my heart. I’m now at my ideal weight, and my heart is free. All the glory for my transformation goes to God alone for only He can change a human heart.
I’m glad you’ve come to this course, and I am praying that it will be a means of God’s grace in your life, but understand this: no program, friend, mentor, pastor, etc. can change your heart, only God can. Turn to Him and ask Him for this. He will do it in His time.
Question 1. Are you seeing the need for a heart change and asking God to do it?
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In the previous lesson, we read Psalm 51, where David is crying out for God to wash him and cleanse him from his sin (Psalm 51:7). This soul-cleansing is what is needed for us too. We need to experience a deep cleansing, a washing of renewal (Titus 3:5), a purifying of our hearts (Titus 2:14).
The reason for this is that all sin is defiling; it leaves dark splotches on our souls, like black ink on canvas. Food advertisements make food glitter and shine, but when we overeat and put fat on our bodies, it leaves us with shame and guilt. And that guilt is like an undertow that drags us back out into the ocean of sin.
But God has given us a heart-changing, life-transforming way to be free of this guilt, which then breaks the power of sin in our lives. I'm excited to share it with you.
Today, we are going to discuss the first of three foundational principles to freedom. This principle is first in importance (1 Corinthians 15:1-4), for without it, there is no real hope of freedom. This first principle is "Washing at the Cross."
King David prayed to be cleansed from his defilement, to be washed and made new. God answered David's prayer in fullness years later when Jesus Christ came to this earth, took David's sin upon Himself, and died under the penalty of it, thereby providing a cleansing fountain that removed sin.
What I want us to understand in this lesson is that when we first see the cross of Jesus and believe that He is dying for our sins, we are washed and saved (Titus 3:5) for eternity (John 3:16); and yet coming to the cross is not merely for salvation; it is not a one-time event. It is to happen daily! (Luke 9:23)
And you and I may have remained trapped in the cycle of overeating because we were walking around defiled, not knowing how to be cleansed. The key message is: when we are cleansed, we are also freed!
Let's look at a passage of Scripture today that shows the real function of the cross:
“On that day a fountain will be opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity. 2 “On that day, I will banish the names of the idols from the land, and they will be remembered no more,” declares the Lord Almighty. “I will remove both the prophets and the spirit of impurity from the land.” Zechariah 13:1-2 (NIV)
Question 2. What is it that would cleanse people from impurity and remove idolatry from the land?