The Christian Spiritual Diet

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Free eBook by Rev. John Aeby.

Take a Look inside

Chapter 1 The Cross 7
Chapter 2 Prayer 13
Chapter 3 Scripture 25
Chapter 4 Fellowship 35
Chapter 5 Obedience 41
Chapter 6 Armor of God 49
Chapter 7 Rest 59
Chapter 8 Conclusion 61

Read the Introduction

As we listen to Christian radio programs and read Christian
self help books, our walk for Jesus becomes more and more
complicated. We struggle trying to balance all the information that
is available to us in our search for a strong Christian walk. Many
times we find ourselves overwhelmed to the point of wanting to
“drop out of the race.” It seems that God puts us up against unfair
and impossible tasks. How can we become perfected if we are so
imperfect due to the plight of sinful corruption? Surrounded by all
the help we need, we sometimes find ourselves feeling hopeless
and incapable. Is God that cruel? Has God left us without the help
we need to move forward? Of course not. There’s just something
about retaining the simplicity of Jesus Christ. Over all, I’m not
saying that it isn’t good to listen to Christian radio programs or to
read additional material that may better help our understanding of
the Bible or our God. What I hope to teach is how to put
everything into balance or to have a better perspective on our
Christian walk, making our walk far less complicated.
To help relate to the issue of being overwhelmed, lets take
a look at a disease. If our body had cancer, the cancer in our body
would cause many symptoms. Fever, body pain, nausea, Jaundice,
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sudden weight loss and loss of appetite are just a few possible
symptoms that come from cancer. We may treat the symptoms all
day long but treating the symptoms never cures the cancer. We do
need to recognize the symptoms because it’s the symptoms that let
us know that there is a problem in our body. Just the same as
having a physical disease, our spiritual body works in much of the
same way. Within our spiritual body, we have a cancer and it’s
called sin. We can’t operate on it but Jesus is the cure. In the same
way cancer causes symptoms, sin also causes symptoms. Lust,
hate, coveting, jealousy, greed, impatience, adultery, fornication
and lying are just a few of the symptoms of sin. Again, our
problem is that we keep trying to attack the symptoms instead of
dealing with the source issue of the sin in our flesh. The one true
cure is Jesus Christ and if we don’t apply Him to our lives
effectively then one or many of the symptoms will return. We need
to stop attacking the symptoms in ourselves or others and start to
simply recognize the symptoms as warning flags to the real issue
of not applying Jesus Christ in our lives as we should.
We need to shed away all of the things that aren’t
foundational toward our Christian walk. Everything that isn’t a
scriptural (spiritual) requirement of God has a way of hindering
our walk by throwing us off balance and throwing us off course.
Man has a distinct nature to add on to God’s laws. Eve added to
God’s command when she said we shouldn’t eat or touch the fruit
of the tree or they’ll die (Gen.3:2-3). God didn’t say that we
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couldn’t touch the fruit but to the contrary we were supposed to
tend the fruit (Gen.2:15-17). How could we tend the fruit without
touching it? So, even in the beginning of history, man has begun to
add our own rules onto Gods commands. Man continued to add to
the laws even in Jesus’ time. The Scribes and Pharisees fought
Jesus with great anger, time and time again, to defend their rules.
Jesus at one point said that for the sake of their traditions they
transgress the law (Mat.15:3-7). Jesus had to defuse these laws
man added and placed on themselves. The fact is that we put
ourselves in danger doing so (Mat.5:20). In this case the scribes
and Pharisees clearly have worshiped God with lip service and not
from their heart.
We have to admit that chances are, we have some personal
doctrinal garbage that we need to “take to the curb.” This isn’t
intended to be a personal attack on your character or identity, but
there is a bit of a need for some house cleaning. Sometimes it isn’t
easy to look past what we believe and/or how we were raised
because of what I call childhood familiarity. We build our identity
on what we are taught to be true. When someone speaks against
what we believe, we take it as a personal attack. This also
contributed to the anger the Scribes and Pharisees had when Jesus
confronted them. Throughout the pastoral/Christian scholar
communities there are thousands of differences in scriptural
interpretation. The only one that knows which interpretation is
correct is the Lord. The Holy Spirit needs to be our source
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(John16:12-15). We need to read scripture and allow the spirit to
interpret it for us, instead of taking man’s opinion that is often
swayed by selfish gain.
These issues I view as being the complexity of man vs. the
simplicity of Christ. There are a few requirements that I found that
can’t simply be placed to the side because they are fundamental.
Most important is the cross. So, on the cross I’ve hung the rest of
our spiritual requirements for a balanced spiritual life. Now we
have a visual aid to help us remember what these requirements are.
As we place each piece on the cross, we begin to have an image to
remind us of the requirements. Similarly to the food pyramid that
reminds us of a balanced diet for our bodies, we can use the cross
itself to remind us of our spiritual balanced diet.
Each chapter of this book will be dedicated to each of these
spiritual requirements. With each piece we’ll build a strong
spiritual foundation for our spiritual walk. Also, in each chapter I
plan to dispel some of the issues that need to be taken to “the
spiritual curb.”