Enjoying Dinner

Are you a Christian who enjoys a good dinner? Who enjoys traveling to beautiful places? Who enjoys watching—or even participating in—a contest of skill between two strong teams?

Paul says in Galatians 2:20, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. He also says later, in 6:14, far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. The entire New Testament echoes this theme of death and new life, including Romans chapter 6 which applies it to every believer.

So if all this is true, if the world is crucified to me, how can I enjoy a good cup of tea? How can I enjoy a good dinner, either at home with the family or on a date with Dream? How can you enjoy whatever pleasures you enjoy from the list above? Aren't all these things of the world?

First, the life you and I now live, we live to God. If your enjoyment of pleasures in the world is not living to God but actually pleasing yourself in deviation from God's calling upon you, it is sin. You need to give it up. You need to repent.

For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has spurned the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? (Hebrews 10:26-29)

Some months ago, for example, I threw away the vast majority of my classic rock music that I used to listen to. I had kept it for a while after God saved me but after He revealed that listening to it was sin for me, I had to throw it away.

That said, however, Paul says in I Timothy 4:2-3 that we may enjoy foods as a gift from God. He says that there are false teachers whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. How do we do this?

Well, enjoying my cup of tea or my date with Dream is God-glorifying, and righteous, if and only if I do so giving thanks to God. And why do I give thanks? I am glad you asked!

First of all, I am a creature of the Creator God. He has a right over me as my Creator to treat me as He wishes. And not only am I a creature, but was (and, in a way, still am) a sinful man, deserving of His wrath! But God, despite all my merit to the contrary, treats me wonderfully! Unlike the Eastern gods and their ascetic followers, God's grace—due to the precious value of Jesus' blood—is abundant! I am not only saved to thereafter sit in "time out". I am not only saved to live a mediocre life and then get nosebleed seats in Heaven. I am saved to live a life of joy on Earth—sometimes joy in suffering, sometimes joy in a Rosemary Baked Chicken—and then pleasures forevermore at God's right hand (Psalm 16:11). Thank you, Jesus, for the food I eat, my hope of Heaven, and everything in-between!