Spiritual Nourishment

Not long ago I moved my home office to a different location and I’ve got to tell you I’d almost rather take a beating than to move things from one place to another. How in the world do we manage to accumulate so much stuff? I mean the room is smaller than 12x12 and I think I filled two large trashcans with nothing but junk found stuck here and there. I never had a home office until after the kids were gone and the personal computer entered my life. I’ve gathered what seem like volumes of stories, of which I regularly share with you, my weekly readers. I’ve been trying to categorize them for easier subject matter access and am finding that to be rather challenging, but that’s another story all together. Well most of the stories I remember as I begin reading them and filing them away for future use, but some I must have laid aside with good intentions to read later because I don’t remember them at all. It’s great to have so much material to work with and that’s going to keep me writing for a good long time.
A church member wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper complaining that it made no sense to continue going to worship every Sunday. “I’ve been going for thirty years now” he wrote, “and in that time I’ve probably heard something like 3,000 sermons, but for the life of me I can’t recall a single one of them. So, I think I’m simply wasting my time and all the preachers out there are wasting theirs by giving sermons never to be remembered.” This started a real controversy in the “Letters To The Editor” column, much to the delight of the editor of course. It went on for weeks until someone wrote this clincher. “I’ve been married for thirty years and in that time my wife has cooked some 32,000 meals. Now for the life of me, I cannot remember the entire menu of a single one of those meals. But I do know this one thing. They all nourished me and gave me the strength I needed to do my work each day. If my wife hadn’t given me these meals I would be physically dead today. Likewise, if I had not gone to worship for nourishment, I would be spiritually dead today.”
[2 Peter 1 & 2 Timothy 2] Peter and Paul wrote about the importance of teaching and being taught the Word of God to preserve the truth and to continually bring to remembrance even the very rudiments of the Christian faith. From the very beginning, people wandered from God’s Word through unbelief, misinterpretation and failure to apply its principles to everyday living. No matter how much we crave to sustain our physical body, one day it’s going to fail and be no more. God has sent us word through the Prophets and finally through His own son, that you and I, all of us, possess a spirit, which will never die, but live for eternity. My question to you is this. How strong will your spirit be as you lay on your deathbed? How strong will your spirit be when you’re faced with a life or death situation? Face it! The body will fail one day and the spirit will birth from it. How well have you nourished the spirit growing within you? When your spirit is released from your body at death, will it be strong and mature enough in the knowledge of eternal life to enter into the presence of God or will your spirit be weak and ignorant, finding itself being dragged off to the pits of hell? We work hard to give ourselves the best in this life, but ignore the consequences of a poor education for the next life. Feed your spirit with God’s Word regularly and you’ll be a lot healthier for it.