The Broken Commandment
December 21, 2011 by Standing on Truth
Filed under Christianity, Nutritional Living
“You shall not make for yourself an idol” (Exodus 20:4).
Many of us think of idols as those bronze statues that we bow down to, but if only that were the only kinds of idols we make. A definition for idolatry from my Webster’s Dictionary says it is “excessive admiration or devotion” and calls an idol “a person or thing devotedly or excessively admired; a false notion.” The way that I understand it, this includes the material (money, gold, people) and the non-material (fame, love, comfort) idols that we can create; the people, things or ideals that we place in direct competition to God for our focus and attention.
For myself, I have made an idol–a false god–out of my health. . .and my god will fail me.
It began innocently enough. I developed an interest in health in my early 20’s and decided that before starting a family, I would become as knowledgeable as possible on how to take care of myself and my family from a nutritional standpoint. I went back to school and ate up those textbooks on enzymatic therapy and power food antioxidants! I finished a master’s program in holistic nutrition and began implementing many of the principles that I read about and studied into my family’s diet and routine. Sometime after this, good health changed from a passion to something I felt that I needed in order to feel in control. Health became my god.
And then I started to feel tired all the time and I developed food sensitivities that left me often guessing what was wrong. That’s the thing about being overly focused on your health–you then start to notice each and every sign of your body being out of balance, and if that is your measure of security, your mind and body can be your worst enemy. Yes, I have a gluten-free and dairy-free diet that I am supposed to follow in order to feel at my best. And yes, I can get incredibly cranky with too much sugar. But the more my need for perfect health took over (and who has perfect health?!), the more I began to obsess about it. And the more that I began to need my health more than I needed my God, the more God lovingly showed me that any god we put in place of Him will fail us. My health can never comfort me and love me and protect me like my Savior can. All gods will fail except the One True God that has proven Himself over and over again to be trustworthy, capable, and personally interested in each one of us.
So I gave up my idol–with my words of surrender which I often have to repeat daily and in the way I try to live “by faith and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7); living by what I know to be true about God and His love and protection over me rather than what signs of health or lack thereof I see in my body. Health is a great blessing from God. It is something for which I continue to strive and always will as my body is a “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). But my motivation is different, my intensity is different, and my need to have control over it is different–because any control I try to obtain is just an illusion anyway.
I remember well what Pastor Jack Graham said one time as he battled prostate cancer, and this may be a paraphrase of what he said, “My power in this life is not in my strong constitution–it’s by God’s Spirit.” It is this truth from Zechariah 4:6 that I remind myself of often.
