Cheers to Starvation.

My flesh has been extremely prominent in my life lately. I am aware that my flesh is always there, always begging for attention from me. However, the past couple of weeks it seems like it's been harder to quiet. It's been clingy, needy, and desperate. More times than not, I have been giving into the worldly things that help quiet my flesh down. To put it more simply, I have been choosing to feed a hungry flesh with things that only make it more hungry. And all of this has made me think a lot about something...

It's okay good to let my flesh go hungry. To refuse to give it food. To put it into a state of starvation. 

This might seem obvious, but I don't think we really grasp this. I know that I haven't and that I am still struggling to. We live in a society that tells us to satisfy our desires as quickly as possible. Rarely to we practice the discipline of waiting. We don't like the way we feel when we are having to wait for something and we definitely don't like the way we feel when we are abstaining from something that we know has satisfied us in the past. Because of this, the trend I have noticed in my own life as well as in the life of those I live the closest with, is that we just don't wait--we don't abstain simply because it doesn't feel good in the moment. Sure, we tell ourselves it isn't all about feelings but then we go on to act like it's all about feelings. We say one thing and then we let our actions tell another. This type of living is dangerous and it doesn't give much credit to the Gospel that we proclaim.

When I have weeks like the past couple that I have had, I am really tempted to follow and to feed my flesh. To even go as far as to become friends with it. Maybe even best friends.

But I must not do this. I have the fuel that I need to walk by the Spirit. I have everything that I need to choose godliness because my sweet Savior's word has said so.

2 Peter 1:3 says this: "His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of Him who has called us by His own glory and goodness". 

Faith and trust in Jesus will quiet my flesh. Faith that He will give life to this body in the same way He gave life to Christ's. It was faith in the resurrection that allowed Jesus to walk to the Cross and it's that same faith that allows me to starve my flesh. Worldly things will also quiet my flesh but only temporally and in the lamest of ways.

C.S Lewis says it way more eloquently than I ever could when he says this:

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Heres the challenge that I am giving myself and I offer it to you as well:

Choose the Spirit. Starve your flesh. 

Trust that God is your Shepherd and that He is good.  He withholds nothing good from you and He knows what you need and when you need it. 

My flesh is indeed needy and hungry. But today and everyday I get to tell my flesh that it's okay that it isn't satisfied right now. It can continue to long and can continue to be needy without me feeding it. One day in the same way that my soul is satisfied by the sweetness of my Savior, my flesh will be too. When my flesh meets Jesus face to face then it will find complete satisfaction but until that day it won't be satisfied and that's okay. 

My prayer is that I will accept this truth. Cheers to starvation.