Gluttony (Part 1)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the apostle

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Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

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In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her king.

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Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.

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My name is Mike Abendroth, and I am here to talk to you about biblical concepts. Gritty, cutting edge, biblical.

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You know, our slogan is always biblical, always provocative, always in that order.

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That's what I want to try to do, is to talk about the Bible and talk about it in such a way that there's enthusiasm, interest.

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I want you to be provoked in your thinking. And today I want to talk about one of the seven deadly sins.

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If I ask you, what are the seven deadly sins? You probably wouldn't know what they are. Back in the old days, everyone knew these seven deadly sins, not because they were so biblical, like these are the sins that are super deadly with some kind of false bifurcation of mortal sins, venial sin.

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Actually, every sin that you commit is deadly. Every sin is an offense to the great

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God of the universe, the triune God, and it will cost you an eternity's worth of punishment if you commit even one and have that not forgiven by Christ Jesus' death and resurrection.

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But they had these things called seven deadly sins, and you can look up the background of those seven deadly sins sometime, and I'll probably give you a little bit of that in a moment.

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But the seven deadly sins are pride, one, anger, two, envy, three, impurity, four, slothfulness, five, avarice, six, that's a desire for wealth, that's an improper desire, and number seven, drum roll, the seventh deadly sin is our topic today.

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What is the seventh deadly sin? What is the sin that we don't really talk about anymore?

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What is the sin that I'm talking about? It is the sin of gluttony, the sin of gluttony.

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And so in the fourth and fifth centuries when the seven deadly sins began to be talked about, we had gluttony as one of those sins.

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Gregory the Great described gluttony as, quote, "'Too soon, too delicately, too greedily, and too much.'"

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You don't hear much about the seven deadly sins, and you certainly don't hear much about gluttony these days.

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You don't hear about this topic at all. And certainly this sin, like every other sin, can be forgiven.

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This sin is a very interesting sin because like a woman who gets pregnant before she's married, the sin becomes obvious to others.

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The sin becomes conspicuous. The sin becomes visible. Some people are overweight because of a thyroid problem, and there are other issues that we don't know about.

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But many times people who are extremely overweight or what the society would call obese today are obese because they have indulged in the sin of gluttony.

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And so we wanna make sure we take a look at what this sin is, how can we be helped?

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If I didn't say this, I would be wrong. Some thin people indulge in the sin of gluttony, and we just don't see it.

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It is because their metabolism is too fast. Maybe they binge, maybe they purge, maybe they're anorexic and bulimic.

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And so you have to be careful. Bulimic is what I'm talking about rather. And so they eat a lot. Anorexic people don't eat.

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They starve themselves. But bulimic people eat a lot, but then they throw it up. And so they could have a problem with gluttony.

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It just doesn't show. And so what you wanna do is be very careful that you don't look at someone and automatically assume the worst.

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And I wanna talk today about the sin of gluttony. Gluttony, interestingly, in church history, especially in the fourth and fifth centuries, a lot of attention was given to this sin.

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They talked about it a lot, especially Roman Catholic monks, I guess. I don't really know the reason, but I would assume that if you sit around and you can't talk to anybody else and you can't be married, that you might as well do something fun, something enjoyable, and so they probably ate a lot.

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And so you have to be careful that you don't go too far with this whole thing. The monk

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John Cassian, 360 to 430, talked about it. Benedictine monk who became the

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Pope, Gregory the Great, he talked about this thing. And you say to yourself, why are they called deadly sins anyway?

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Well, they're deadly sins because these sins, they say, beget other sins.

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These sins have daughter sins. So Gregory the Pope would say that gluttony spawns or propagates foolish mirth, uncleanliness, babbling, and dullness of mind.

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Now, nutritionally, he might not have known that this was happening, but in their minds, they thought, well, we've got a sin and it propagates itself.

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It's like rabbits in the springtime. You have a couple and then before you know it, you have dozens and dozens and dozens.

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And so what happens with gluttony? Certainly everyone eats occasionally more than they ought to, more than it is appropriate.

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But what happens to the gluttonous person? The gluttonous person really makes his food and his eating an idol.

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As we used to say back in the King James days, they make their God, they make their belly their

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God. Now, like with every other sin, it seems, you can have something that's good and you could tweak it for evil.

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For instance, with alcohol, alcohol is neutral. It's not good nor it's bad. It's what the human heart does with it.

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And so the same is said for sex. Sex isn't necessarily good or bad.

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It is what the human heart does with it. And sex in particular has a context. And that context for righteous sex is always in marriage.

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Some people would say, well, we should get rid of all the alcohol because look at all the people that drink too much.

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Well, that would be A, unbiblical. You could see John 2 or Psalm 104 for some interesting discussions there that would refute that idea.

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But we can't say the same thing about sex. A lot of people abuse sex, so let's just get rid of all sex.

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No, that wouldn't be right. And the same thing is true for food. We have to eat food.

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We need food to survive. We have, by God's wonderful common grace, the ability with our palate to enjoy foods.

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And we have bitter taste and sweet taste and salty taste and all those kinds of things.

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And so we can't get rid of food. We have to just make sure we remember to think properly about food.

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Thomas Aquinas said, nature has introduced pleasure into the operations that are necessary for man's life.

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That is true. I don't like a lot of things that Aquinas said or stood for. I've always been kind of surprised that R .C.

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Sproul loved him so much, but I'm not smart enough to really get into the depths of Aquinas' philosophical thinkings about religion.

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We want to make sure we think biblically about gluttony and eating too much.

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And so when people gorge themselves and eat too much, they overeat.

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That is certainly sinful. We want to make sure that when we eat, we don't even excessively eat super costly foods.

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Some would think that would be some kind of gluttony, some kind of inordinate desire the old folks used to talk about, inordinate desire.

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A 19th century Russian bishop said, wise temperance of the stomach is a door to all virtues.

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Restrain the stomach and you will enter paradise. But if you please and pamper your stomach, you will hurl yourself over the precipice of bodily impurity into the fire of wrath and fury.

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You will coarsen and darken your mind. And in this way, you will ruin your powers of attention and self -control, your sobriety and your vigilance.

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Gluttony, according to the medieval folks and even some of the church fathers, was some kind of daughter sin.

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Well, I wonder what the Bible says. Just because you're fat doesn't necessarily mean you're a glutton.

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And just because you're thin, it doesn't mean you aren't a glutton. I'm not talking about people's shapes, how much people weigh.

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We're talking about this inordinate desire for food, so much so that it becomes an idol.

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Interestingly, there was an article by Frederica Matthews Green, and her article is entitled, "'To

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Hell on a Cream Puff.' Gluttony makes you soft and lovable. It's the cute sin."

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And so she does say, "'External dimensions are no predictor of internal rebellion.'"

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That is true. So we want to think Christianly. We want to think with love. We want to think that other people can have struggles that are more seen on the outside.

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And our struggles, nobody ever knows about them. And there are issues with gluttony that tie into people's problem with drunkenness or immorality.

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There's some of the same cravings, some of the same issues of having no self -control. And we'll talk about that with the fruit of the

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Spirit soon enough. But we live in a country that deals with eating and overeating a lot.

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There's all kinds of things, whether it's the gourmet food people that want you to get to eat more, milk companies that want you to drink more, tasting fairs at some kind of carnivals.

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We have magazines about food, books about food, TV shows, Julia Child shows, and the people are obsessed by food.

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Their lives revolve around food. On the flip side, there are people who are obsessed with diets.

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I guess if you're obsessed with food and culture, you're going to be obsessed with diets because you'll realize that you need to lose some weight.

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And people are on zone diets, Atkin diets, cookie diets, grapefruit diets, sapritican diets,

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Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Healthy Choice, diet sodas, light ice cream, and the list goes on and on and on.

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God wants us to understand food in its proper way. There's a biblical way to think about food.

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Food has nothing to do with one's spirituality, the actual food itself.

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God isn't concerned with that. He wants the heart. He wants the inner man.

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And so we want to make sure that we look at things biblically. That's what I say all the time.

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Gluttony simply is this defined. My name is Mike Abendroth. It's No Compromise Radio Ministry. Gluttony is excess in eating or drinking.

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It is immoderate consumption of food. The thesaurus that I looked at says gluttony.

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Here's the synonym for gluttony. Very fascinating. Greed, greediness, gastronomy, guzzling, glossity, epicureanism, and voracity.

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Those are synonyms for the noun gluttony. The synonyms for the noun glutton would be gourmandizer, cormorant, hog, gourmand.

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And the synonyms for the verb to gourmandize or to be a glutton would be to gorge, over gorge oneself, overeat, to glut, to satiate, to engorge, to eat one's fill, to cram, stuff, guttle, guzzle, bolt, devour, gobble up, and gulp.

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Just some of those words should tell us that those controlled by the spirit of God and who have self -control should not do those things.

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One man says, Kenneth Gentert said, people don't always have the rotund bodies to show for it, but the anorexic, the bulimic, the gourmet, and the chronic dieter are all obsessed with food.

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They're all gluttons in their own way, end quote. One man said, while the glutton may be someone who obsessively eats and is overweight, a glutton is also an extremely thin person who, although never eats much, dwells excessively on food.

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And so my question to you is today, how much do you think about food? Now there's, you know, stomach pains, and we all think about our wife's special lasagna when you get home, or whatever you like to eat, or you're gonna go out and have sushi and you really need to look at, you need to look forward to that.

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I'm not saying anything about that. I'm saying this is a preoccupation. This is loving food with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

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Having your life revolve around food. Lots of times I think of food wrongly, but I do think about food rightly sometimes.

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I just think, what do I need to eat to keep my body going? I have to go on a 50 mile bike ride and I have to put the right kind of fuel in my body, which acts like a machine with good fuel.

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And if I were to put bad things in my body, well, there's going to be a price to pay for that. And so sometimes

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I just eat because I know I think better. I can work longer and faster if I have the right kind of fuel.

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I eat in the morning, not because I'm hungry, but I think it's good for my metabolism. And so I start off, I'd say 90 % of the mornings with some oatmeal, some blueberries thrown in, and maybe some walnuts.

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And so many times to me, food is utilitarian because I need to utilize food so I don't keel over and I'm exhausted.

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That's not to say I always have the right view of food, but I'm concerned that people don't just look at someone who is overweight and say they're a glutton.

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And I'm also concerned for these people who are overweight or underweight and think inordinately about food, think about it too much, have their lives revolve around food.

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Every week to them is some kind of Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day, where it's just these huge parties, food piled up, that there's a problem.

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And could it be a spiritual problem that needs to be addressed? Weight is a huge issue today.

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And whether we have too much food or not enough, local churches realize there's a lot of talk about it.

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Dennis Olcom said, between ages of 20 and 50, the average person spends about 20 ,000 hours over 800 days of eating.

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And we schedule our days around mealtimes. We have TV dinners, fast food drive -up windows, tailgate parties.

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We are obsessed with food. Although some overweight people could be healthier than some thin people, we have to be careful.

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Walter Willett says, the next to whether you smoke, the number that stares up at you from the bathroom scale is the most important measure of your future health.

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So I have a concern. And that concern is I want the Christians to take care of their body in such a way that they're maximizing their desire to serve the

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Lord and their ability to serve the Lord. We want to make sure that we have our bodies functioning at a high level.

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One lady said 21 % of Americans are medically obese. And so if we are obese, our health suffers.

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People who are obese and people who have weight problems suffer more with high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease, colon cancer, diabetes.

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They call these things, interestingly, obesity -related diseases. And so we want to, at No Compromise Radio, talk about things maybe other people don't talk about.

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And so we will deal with this subject of food both today and maybe tomorrow.

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This is a sin that people seem to like the most. They cheer this kind of thing.

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They go to these, you know, who can eat the fastest and the most. In the Weekly Standard, I read about the

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Glutton Bowl, the world's greatest eating competition. It was on Fox even. Contestants were challenged to eat bowls of mayonnaise, sticks of butter, and the only rule was this.

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What goes down must stay down. The winner, Takuru Kobayashi, weighed 130 pounds, received $25 ,000 after besting his opponents in the final round where he had to eat a lot of cow brains.

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And whether it is hot dog eating contest, one man ate 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes, happened to be the same person.

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Kobayashi reminds me of the Star Trek move, the Kobayashi Maru. One man in a contest was named

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Bill Simmons and he was known as El Wingador. He consumed 137 chicken wings in half an hour.

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At Eagle's Deli in Boston, Beacon Street, there's the Riley Burger, six eight -ounce patties, three pounds of beef total, 12 slices of cheese, five -pound bag of fries for 25 bucks.

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Good news is you get free soda. You have two and one half hours to eat it.

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Now, once in a while, I don't know, I don't want to spend that kind of money. I hate the feelings afterwards.

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Jim Donahue is somewhat of a legend. In 1993, this six -foot -two, 200 -pound man who used to play football for Georgetown said he was going to try to eat the entire

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McDonald's menu. He finished the entire menu in 21 minutes.

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The article says a stunned manager took their pictures and offered the contestants hot fried sundaes.

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And then there's the Chicago Chop House, steakhouse in Chicago.

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You get a bowl of Caesar salad and then you get a 64 -ounce bone -in porterhouse steak, then a 48 -ounce lobster tail in its entirety, then another 48 -ounce porterhouse finally three scoops of chocolate ice cream and you have two and one half hours to eat it.

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There is a problem in America with food. There's a problem in local churches with food.

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Even with the nonsensical Weigh Down Diet, sold a lot. Why? Because she has the wrong view of the

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Trinity, Gwen Shamblin? No, because there are Christians who struggle with this. So what does a

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Christian do when he or she eats too much? We have lots of things in the

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Bible about self -control. You can look pretty hard before you can find some kind of verse that says, thou shall not be a glutton.

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Now, before I give you the positive ways to fight this, I just want you to know that if you find a uniquely

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Christian diet program, for the most part, it's a farce. It's ludicrous, it's laughable.

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I think you need to be very careful for Christian diet programs. Christian dieting,

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I think, has a historical background. Presbyterian Pastor Charlie Shedd, 1957, pray your weight away.

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And so slenderness meant for Pastor Shedd that you had discipline and you were righteous.

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If you were overweight, forget some kind of hormone problem, you certainly were decadent and your fat showed that you were rebellious.

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There's another book called, I Prayed Myself Slim from Deborah Pierce. That is another

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Christian book. My favorite one that's laughable, Joan Cavanaugh has a book titled,

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More of Jesus, Less of Me. More of Jesus, Less than Me.

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And just as laughable, just as ludicrous, just as loony, to use alliteration,

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Patricia Kreml's book, Slim for Him. And for the meat eaters in your family, there's a sequel of that, that was

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Slim Jim's for him. I had a Slim Jim a while ago, and if you squeeze a

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Slim Jim, the round ones, out of the end, they cut them off in sections, slabs, and out of the end,

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I just squeezed it, I squoze it, and out comes some kind of gross, horrible trans fatty orange goo.

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And you know, if it's cold outside in the winter and you squeeze that, it's just some kind of, I don't know, orange

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Crisco that comes flying out. Cavanaugh said in More of Jesus, Less of Me, quote, being fat is basically a sign that something is seriously wrong.

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It is a big coverup, and when we get serious about losing our cover, we will need a big exposure. We will need to admit that we need help and we will have to expose our hidden faults to the healing power of God.

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As much as I hate the title, it is true in the sense that if you're fat because you idolize food and your life revolves around food and you overeat, you say, well, you know,

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I just need this much food to function through the day, but I just want to eat more because I just like the taste and I can't control myself.

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You are going to need the healing power of God. But on the flip side, there are people like we see on TV that can lose weight without God's help.

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Now, maybe it's common grace help, but what about for the Christian? Should a

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Christian have secular diets? Should a Christian go to Weight Watcher programs?

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Should Christians do Atkins? You look at something like Weigh Down several years ago, that was probably in 12 ,000 churches, and the churches said, so what, they don't believe in the

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Trinity. We like to lose weight. So what's a Christian to do? My name is Mike Abendroth.

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This is No Compromise Radio Ministry, and we're talking about gluttony. We're talking about the

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Christian diet industry. I would love to read, I haven't read it yet, One Size Fits All and other fables about the

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Christian diet industry and how society is obsessed with thinness. There is a problem on the flip side.

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There is a problem there. When you read Christian diet books, typically here's what happens. Run back to Old Testament.

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Be under Old Testament law and Mosaic law, and whatever the

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Bible says for Israel, you do too and eat some Ezekiel 9 forebred or whatever it's called.

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Only do that. Approved lists of food in the Bible. Betty Miller wrote a little article called

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Making Jesus Lord of the Fork, and she's got the approved foods listed in the

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Bible. Milk, Isaiah 7, Nuts, Genesis 43, Olive Oil, Leviticus 2, Salt, Leviticus 2,

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Wheat, Psalm 81, Eggs, Job 6 -6, Dates, Genesis 3 -2, Cheese, 1 Samuel 17, and off she goes.

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We're gonna talk about that more next time. What does the Bible say about gluttony? What does the Bible say about self -control?

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How should we live our lives? Certainly not obsessed about food.

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Eat, drink, and be merry. Eating food is wonderful. I'm gonna go have something to eat tonight and enjoy every bit of it, but there's a right way to eat and a wrong way.

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This is Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio. Give me a call. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.