Craving Soul Food
I Peter 2:1-3
INTRO: Eating healthy—health foods—craving junk food.
Let’s try an experiment: say, “I have a craving for broccoli and brussel sprouts.” NOPE. It just doesn’t work. Now try, “I have a craving for chocolate.” “I have a craving for barbeque.” Yes, that sounds right.
People feed on what they crave. They feed on what tastes good to them whether or not it is healthy for them. Immature people are less concerned about balanced diet and healthiness and more concerned about taste.
So these verses turn around these two concepts:
1. Only those who cut out junk food can have a healthy appetite for nourishing soul food.
2. Only those who want nourishing soul food will progress toward spiritual maturity.
Let’s spend the bulk of our time this morning looking at the second of these two concepts. Vs. 2 is our focus.
Crave spiritual food. The phrase is usually translated “the pure milk of the word.” We have all understood this to mean the Word of God. But before we get there, literally it should be translated “wordy milk.” This same word is used in Romans 12:2 to talk about worship, and it is usually translated “REASON”able --there it is “reasonable service.” It comes from a root word that contains the word LOGOS or word. It means word. It means thinking or reasoning.
One of the things Peter wants his readers to do is crave spiritual things that will help them grow in their understanding of what they believe. CRAVE BRAIN FOOD! Too many Christians are satisfied with fluff. They are satisfied with flamboyant. They are satisfied with junk food. Peter challenges them to feast on things that are healthy and have substance.
Something I was taught many years ago is a little phrase that says, “Sermonettes make Christianettes.” If you want food that feeds your souls, it is going to have to be food that makes you think. This is what Hebrews 5 means when it says “You people have been saved long enough. BY NOW, you should be chewing on solid food, but you have become dull of hearing and slow to understand…and all you want is baby food.”
But then, go back to the meaning we’ve been taught for many years: that Peter is saying we need to feast on God’s Word, the Bible. That is a legitimate translation based on the context: 1:23 says you’ve been born again through the Word of God; and 1:25 reminds us the Word of God endures forever—and this was the gospel message preached to you. So, 2:2 follows that up with NOW grow up through the Word of God. Jesus said this to Satan in the wilderness. Matthew 4:4 “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”
Remember, Peter was writing to people who didn’t have the written Bible in front of them. It is very possible that these people were illiterate, too. But that isn’t our excuse. We’ve got the Bible. We’ve got Bible studies. We’ve got translations we can understand. We’ve got no excuse. This is our soul food.
You know, when I...when I emphasize the Word of God, and harass you about reading it every day and getting into Bible studies and digging deeper—it’s just because I care. I know what gives your Christian life protection and health and strength and intimacy with God. It's the Word of God. This isn't medicine. This isn't painful stuff. This is tasty and healthy and filling.
Jeremiah got it right. Jeremiah, preachers love this guy, was the greatest preacher of his time and everybody hated all his sermons. They did, they hated him. They finally threw him in a pit. Couldn't shut him up so just threw him in a deep mud hole and said, "Preach to the walls of the pit." Nobody heard him but he said this, "Thy words were found and I did eat them. And Your Word was in me, the joy and rejoicing of my heart."
Let me put it as simply as I can: the challenge to you this morning is that you need to examine your heart as to the level of your craving for the Word, because everything flows out of that, absolutely everything.
If you don’t, you are saying you are satisfied with where you are; you don’t need any more.
In the New Testament, this word is used for the desire a husband or wife has for their spouse; for the desire of a parent to see a rebellious child come back to the Lord; for the longings someone has for a deceased loved one, and for extreme hunger. All these point to a strong, consuming desire. That’s what we are supposed to have for spiritual things.
How do you get to the place where you have that craving? That's the question. How do you get to the place where you have that longing? You have that passion? You have that desire? How do you generate that?
Notice that it's a command to desire. Now, isn't that amazing! A command to desire! A command to feel longings we do not feel. A command to feel desires we do not have. What’s up with that?
Maybe this will help: There is a little poem by John Bunyan (who wrote Pilgrim’s Progress). It's one of the best statements I have ever heard about the difference between the law and the gospel. You'll see how it relates.
Run, John, run, the law commands
But gives us neither feet nor hands,
Far better news the gospel brings:
It bids us fly and gives us wings.
In other words in the old covenant God gave commandments, but did not give the divine power that overcomes the deadness and sin and rebellion of the heart. But in the gospel God not only gives commands, but he also gives the power and motivation and ability we need to fulfill them.
When a young man left for his freshman year at Duke University, his parents gave him a Bible, reminding him it would be a great help. Later, as he began sending them letters asking for money, they would write back telling him to read his Bible, citing chapter and verse. He would reply that he was reading the Bible—but he still needed money. When he came home for a semester break, his parents told him they knew he had not been reading his Bible. How? They had tucked $10 and $20 bills by the verses they had cited in their letters. (John T. Spach, in Reader’s Digest)
There is value in reading God’s Word—maybe not monetary value. But you’ll never know the value unless you stop fooling yourself and stop lying to yourself and get serious about getting motivated to get into God’s Word.
I want to show you how Peter surrounds this command with the motivations. The command is to Desire the Word of God. The things that will create that craving surround the command. Peter gives us three things that produce the craving.
Number one, remember your salvation.
Go to verse 1. You see the first word there? What is it? Therefore, right? Now what's the therefore there for? To take you back, right? So my first point is built into the therefore. "Therefore putting aside all malice and all guilt and hypocrisy and envy and all slander like newborn babes crave the pure milk."
"What do you mean--therefore?" "Well what have you just read?"
Let's go back, verse 22 of chapter 1. "Since you have in obedience to the truth…" -- that is, you believed the gospel; verse 23 "you have been born again…” -- He's talking about their salvation.
So the first part of getting that craving is to remember your salvation—you desperately wanted to get saved, right? Remembering the joy of salvation should make you hungry for more.
Remember in Revelation 2, to the church in Ephesus, Christ said, “You left your first love, so remember from where you have fallen”? He is saying go back to your beginning. Go back to your salvation. Remember what it was like to want to know God and Christ and want to know about His love for you?
So in verse 2, Peter's question is then this...if you already know the power of the Word to save you and transform you and make you a new creature in Christ, why would you not crave what it can continue to do in your life?
Look at vs. 3. This verse is best translated as an already completed action. He doesn’t say “IF” assuming that something may or may not happen. He says “IF” in the sense of SINCE or BECAUSE it has already happened. They have already tasted the kindness of Christ = they have already experienced the grace of God = they are already saved. “IF IT IS A FACT THAT you are already saved, then it is your responsibility to grow spiritually. You don’t get to stay a baby Christian. Your desire for the Word must be based on the fact that you are already saved. You know what the Word of God can do in your life in leading you to the truth. Now take the next step. You need to grow up.
Vs. 3 is the end of the sentence of vs. 2.
Secondly, Peter says, you have to eliminate your sin. Verse 1 he says, "Putting aside all malice, and all guile and hypocrisy and envy and all slander." The ugly elements of the old life still hanging on need to be dealt with otherwise they will spoil the spiritual appetite and they'll take away the taste for holy truth and they will dull the desire for the Word seriously.
If you have burned your taste buds on some hot chocolate or hot coffee, it affects how everything tastes. If you have had one of those acid burps that gets that junk up into your mouth and leaves such a horrible taste, everything you eat after that tastes bad.
Well, if you have sin in your life, it will affect how the Bible tastes to you. And if you KNOW there is sin in your life, the Bible will taste really bad! Because every bite of the Bible will reveal to you that what you’ve got is sin and it is bad.
So, in I Peter 2:1, Peter says, you need to purposely set aside things that won’t help you grow. He lists those in vs. 1. We’ll call them junk food. They may seem to taste good, but there is NO spiritual nourishment in them. Vs. 1 is NOT soul food. It doesn’t matter how justified you think you are, malice and deceit don’t help you grow. Let me state something obvious: It doesn’t matter how much truth is involved, slander and gossip do not help you become stronger Christians. It doesn’t matter how much you LIKE eating junk food, you aren’t going to get any nourishment from that stuff.
Writings of the early church tell us that their ceremony of baptism involved the person stripping off all their clothes and going into the water naked. Then after being baptized, they came up out of the water to put on new clothes—new baptism clothes. It was supposed to symbolize abandonment of the old way of life and taking on new, clean, washed innocence. So, vs. 1 is saying, you have laid aside those old clothes, haven’t you? When you declared your commitment to Jesus Christ, you did set aside those old ways…didn’t you? Well, then, leave that old way of life behind and start growing.
Thirdly, get desperate. Crave it. Understand that the Word of God is where you find nourishment. Pursue it. Crave it.
I want to talk to you this morning about desiring the Word...desiring, longing for the pure milk of the Word. The pursuit of God starts here. Walking with Christ starts here. Knowing the will of God starts here. Being used by the Holy Spirit starts here. And genuine godliness and genuine spirituality is always marked by a love for and a delight in God's truth. Jesus said in John 8:47, "He who is of God hears the words of God; for this is the reason you do not hear the words of God, for you are not of God.”
The richest words about the delight of the Word of God are found in Psalm 119. And let me just read you some of the verses in Psalm 119 that express this delight.
Verse 16, "I shall delight in Thy statutes, I shall not forget Thy Word."
Verse 24, "Thy testimonies also are my delight, they are my counselors."
Verse 35, "Make me walk in the path of Thy commandments for I delight in it."
Verse 72, "The Law of Thy mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces."
Verse 92, "If Thy Law had not been my delight, then I would have perished in my affliction."
Verse 127, "Therefore I love Thy commandments above gold, yes, above fine gold."
Verse 167, "My soul keeps Thy testimonies and I love them exceedingly."
And then verse 174, "I long for Thy salvation, O Lord, and Thy Law is my delight."
Repeated over and over again is this idea that someone who belongs to God delights in His Word.
You say, "Yeah, but that's King David and he's way beyond me spiritually." Oh? The last verse of Psalm 119 ( He comes crashing to earth here.) "I have gone astray like a lost sheep, seek Thy servant, for I do not forget Thy commandments." That, friends, is a parallel to Romans 7. "In the inner man I delight in the Law of God, but I see another thing warring in my flesh." He's no different than we are, but if there was anything that gave him triumph, to the psalmist and to the Apostle Paul wrote Romans 7, it was his delight in the Law of God.
As you know, God has built into babies loud, crying mechanisms. I mean, they're weak everywhere but in the voice, and I've never been able to figure out how they strengthen their voice in the womb. How do they come out with a fully developed set of vocal chords—and have never to that point used them? But, they come out with this tremendously strong set of lungs and vocal chords.
But that crying mechanism is so they can tell you they want milk NOW! When they want milk, they want milk. And so those little hungry bundles come into the world, understanding the desperation of their condition, and knowing they need nourishment.
That's what Peter's talking about here. That's what he's talking about. He's talking about a compulsion here. He’s talking about an obsession. Knowing you need to grow…knowing you need nourishment …knowing you need the nutrients and antibodies that mother’s milk gives. Are you desperate to drink the milk? As you look at your own life, ask whether you have that kind of craving, whether you have that kind of compulsion?
Christians who don’t crave God’s Word are going to be malnourished, starving and weak. You simply cannot have a healthy Christian life without an intake of God’s Word. Binge eating and crash diets don’t work long term.
Let me close with this thought: Craving God’s Word will eventually become a developed appetite, the result of having “tasted the kindness of the Lord.” Peter found this out from experience! Think back to Acts 10. Peter was a very hungry man as he waited for the meal to be served on the rooftop of Simon’s house (Acts 10:9-10). When he saw the vision of the sheet being lowered from heaven, he was repulsed by the thought of eating unclean food. But when God called it “clean” he was now permitted to eat of it. Peter had an appetite. The food which had been unclean was now declared clean. Only after Peter ate his first bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich did he know what he had been missing. I’m sure that the more he ate of these foods, the more he learned to like them. His appetite for these foods was developed by eating them. It’s called an acquired taste—or a developed appetite. It’s the same with our appetite for the Word of God. We have an inborn appetite – but it needs to be developed so that we have an appetite for the right things. And once we begin to fill that appetite with the tastiness of God’s word, we will develop an even greater appetite for more of it. And this appetite should be satisfied, just as in eating, on a regular, daily basis so that we might “grow in respect to salvation.”
A man in Kansas City was severely injured in an explosion. Evangelist Robert L. Sumner tells about him in his book The Wonders of the Word of God. The victim’s face was badly disfigured, and he lost his eyesight as well as both hands. He was just a new Christian, and one of his greatest disappointments was that he could no longer read the Bible. Then he heard about a lady in England who read Braille with her lips. Hoping to do the same, he sent for some books of the Bible in Braille. Much to his dismay, however, he discovered that the nerve endings in his lips had been destroyed by the explosion. One day, as he brought one of the Braille pages to his lips, his tongue happened to touch a few of the raised characters and he could feel them. Like a flash he thought, I can read the Bible using my tongue. At the time Robert Sumner wrote his book, the man had “read” through the entire Bible four times.
How many of you can say you’ve read through the Bible four times—with two good eyes? This man had a craving—and even losing his eyesight wouldn’t prevent him from reading God’s Word.
