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ROKU AppOur Spiritual Diet: Eat Your Cow!
Written by Johnathan Armstrong
The Bible talks about spiritual milk and spiritual meat. Many people don’t get either, and some try to live on only one or the other. But in our spiritual development, we need both.
What do Bibles and cows have in common? They provide us with food that sustains our lives.
The cow provides two basic types of food for us. It gives us milk and meat. Likewise, the Bible gives us milk and meat. The milk is the foundational principles, and the meat is the deeper things that take spiritual discernment and hard work to understand. Since we are all to be growing, we need nourishment that can be provided by the Bible and the cow.
The milk
Let’s look at milk. Milk is the primary nutrition for young mammals before they are able to digest other types of food. Humans continue to drink milk beyond infancy. The milk of a cow is relatively easier to get than the meat. You just milk the cow and it’s ready to go. It’s the foundational stuff that we have to build on. Not a lot of work goes into preparing milk; you just have to drink it.
In the Bible, there are principles that are basic and foundational. “For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food” (Hebrews 5:12). These basics are clear, and it’s easier to see how to apply them to our lives. Therefore, as a starting place, we should “desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby” (1 Peter 2:2).
The meat
Now, however, the meat is not quite that easy. A lot of work has to go into getting the meat so that it provides our bodies with the proper nourishment. First, we have to butcher the cow. Then we have to separate the meat from the fat and other internal organs that we don’t want. Then we have to cook the meat. Then we have to chew it up before we can finally digest it.
We need to dig deep into God’s Word to get to the spiritual meat. We have to put scriptures together properly to get the full meaning. We have to meditate on it to see where it applies to our lives. We have to chew it up and break it down. We have to study God’s Word. This means we have to understand it before we fully digest it and apply it to our lives. That’s the essence of wisdom. Wisdom is properly applying the understanding of the knowledge we have.
We need a balanced spiritual diet
In our spiritual development we need both milk and meat. We have to have a balanced diet. Otherwise we will not grow to the fullest of our potential. As a baby grows, it must move beyond just eating milk, “for everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe” (Hebrews 5:13).
Milk gives us strong bones. But meat helps us develop our muscle structure. Without developing our muscles, we wouldn’t be able to move those strong bones. And where would that leave us? Motionless, meaning we’re sitting still. We’re not developing.
We have to have the right spiritual nutrition. We have to be growing. We have to be getting better at righteousness. We must be growing in the right direction.
We cannot be stagnant. Staying idle means we are getting worse, not developing godly character. Stagnation results in underdevelopment. We get weaker in our spiritual battles. The more we don’t go anywhere, the further behind we get. And we dig a deeper hole and make it harder to get out. We’re hindering our spiritual growth by not eating properly.
We have to eat. What did God give us in Leviticus 23? He gave us His “feasts.” We come together to eat spiritual food on those days. But should we go hungry the rest of the time? No way! We have to eat every day. We have to study the Bible every day for it to be profitable to us.
The Bible is our cow. It gives us the milk and the meat. But we have to open it up.
Remember Jesus Christ’s promise: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5:6).
Johnathan Armstrong attends the Little Rock, Arkansas, congregation of the Church of God, a Worldwide Association, and is a graduate student working on his doctorate in physics.
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