This post of Alisa Keeton’s new book, The Wellness Revelation – Lose What Weighs You Down So You Can Love God, Yourself and Others, is a review of Week 2, Be Free.
Week two is about addressing the deep issues of the heart on the inside – the broken places – that might keep a person from being free. Two Christian terms for these issues are bondage and slavery.
The activities for this week include reading and meditating on Bible verses, spending time with God, keeping food and hunger logs, and reflecting on the following topics by answering several questions: bondage and slavery, idolatry, and gluttony.
Excerpts from the Week 2 Chapter – Be Free.
Somewhere between Creation and now, our approach to food has gone seriously wrong. We have taken food and placed it in it’s on shrine.
When food – or anything, for that matter – is given the highest value in your life, it no longer serves you. You serve that which you give highest value. Looking back, I can see the emptiness my family was trying to fill with food and other material things that will never have the power to satisfy.
Any good thing, like food, pain medication, wine, or money, has the ability to be used incorrectly. The enemy of our souls is placing bets that we will take something good and use it for selfish game or pleasure. When we use something inappropriately, it gives birth to sin. The sin that starts out as “a little here, a little there” eventually grows into something that masters us – even as it seems to promise some payoff or reward. This is bondage. Bondage is involuntary servitude, or as it is more commonly known, addiction. Common examples of addictions or dependencies are caffeine, sugar, fat, and salt. You don’t enjoy the payoff, but you keep returning to the addictive behavior because you feel trapped. You feel is if you have no will or choice, so you keep doing the very thing you don’t want to do.
Remember, it is never about the food. The food is not the enemy. It is something deeper. A relationship with food is broken because something deep within us is broken. God wants to heal us in those deep places!
You and I were made to worship. If we don’t worship God, we will worship a false god: an idol (see Romans 1:20–23).
So what are you worshiping?
Allow me to suggest some idols: food, drink, sex, entertainment, shopping, drugs, acquisition, competition, body beauty, nature, sports, family, children, pets, or a significant other. It is anything and everything that keeps us from wanting and loving God, dedicating in sacrificing ourselves to Him.
There is only one God. There is no substitute (see Exodus 20:4–5).
When gluttony and addiction take root in our lives, we spiral from numbness toward death and away from true life.
The Wellness Revelation is a battle cry for a vigilance against greed and excess.
Fasting is a great way to free ourselves from being preoccupied with what we want. Fasting allows us to concentrate on our relationship with God and what He wants.
There is no lasting benefit to a fast unless it is accompanied by a spiritual hunger.
My Comments
In the initial part of this chapter, Alisa shares in a transparent way how she learned to use food to cope with her life circumstances… to feel better about herself. She also includes short stories about others who did the same thing.
Alisa wants her readers to get to the bottom of their eating, drinking and other unhealthy/addictive habits. She knows, through personal experience, that there is little lasting or eternal value in having a chiseled body on the outside when you are hurting badly on the inside.
This chapter is about gaining awareness of the chains that keep a person from being free from addictive-type behaviors.
And it’s about being in a relationship with the One who heals the wounds and fears on the inside.
The Wellness Revelation is available where books are sold on August 8, 2017.
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