Peanut

“I pray that we will be a people who refuse to gorge our spiritual stomachs on the entertaining pleasures of this world, because we have found our satisfaction in the eternal treasure of his word.”

- Radical by David Platt

Refuse. “Refuse to gorge our spiritual stomachs.” Not, “eat less of what the world has to offer,” not “keep a healthy balance between the good and the bad,” but “refuse.”

My first thought is, “Really? Doesn't that sound a little extreme?” Then, I remember that we aren't talking about the difference between candy and vegetables here. This isn't a case of one is good for you and the other one should be eaten in moderation. This is the spiritual equivalent of a peanut allergy.

No matter how carefully you nibble at them, the one will kill you and the other won't.

The problem is that, instead of running a Google image search on “peanut” to learn to recognize the things we should avoid, we tend to go at it by trail and error. “I'll just nibble on this until I have a reaction, then I'll know whether it has peanuts in it or not,” we think, knowing that we have an Epipen in our pocket and the ER is just down the street.

And, off we go, nibbling on this pleasure or that entertainment until we realize that our spiritual oxygen is being cut off and that it's getting harder to see or think or breathe. We panic for a few seconds while fumble with the cap of our Epipen, but, within a few days, the incident is forgotten. We've been to the ER, had someone pray a confession over us, read our Bible enough times to feel like we've done penance, showed up at small group or on Sunday morning and made a farce of participating.

All is well, so we move on to the next treat and begin nibbling on it in turn.

Or, we turn around and beginning labeling everything, “PEANUT,” “PEANUT FREE.” But we never actually run that Google search, so we're not sure exactly what a peanut looks like. (Which, quite frankly, is a terrible plan.)

As ridiculous as it sounds, we do it every day. We dabble our toes in things, figuring that, “It hasn't hurt my walk yet, so there must not be any harm in it;” or we run around with our mental shopping cart, finding things that look “Christian” to listen to and look at and hang on our walls and avoid anything “secular,” without ever taking the time to find out if Christ is in any of it.

If we want to become a people who reflect the glory of God on earth, we have to learn what a peanut looks like.

If we are going to refuse to fill ourselves with things that are not of God, then we have to know God well enough to recognize him, both when he's dressed up as a mega church and when he looks like the homeless man on the street. We have to see him in music and art and literature and relationships. We have to find him in a sunrise and a bird song and a crying child.

To do justly, we have to know God.