What is your Savior?

"But now thus says the Lord, He who created you, O Jacob,
He who formed you, O Israel:
“ Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the Lord your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior."
Isaiah 43:1-3a

As Christians, when we are faced with difficult times we are faced with a choice. Who or what will our Savior be? The danger that Christians fall into is that we are often offered a functional savior in place of the real One. The functional savior of choice of many Christians today is food. So many of our other functional saviors have been identified as evil, but food has been given the blessing of the church pitch in. Biblically, eating together was an intimate thing, and food played a center role in the Bible. However, many of us have moved past what God intended as good, and have learned how to use it to manage emotions and stress.

When a young woman is dumped by a boyfriend, the cliche response is to eat a quart of ice cream while watching sappy movies. This is an example of seeking to manage feelings through food. Instead of dealing with feelings, and taking them to our Savior, we turn to another savior to temporarily deal with them. There are large number of women, and a growing number of men, who have been diagnosed with an eating disorder, and it is quite common for many people to turn to food for a temporary fix for their feelings. This can especially be a danger to those in ministry, who tend to deal with pressure, burdens for their flock, and attacks. Rather than deal with those feelings by going to the Lord, they turn to the functional savior of food to manage those feelings.

At the other end of the spectrum is a growing tendency to manage feelings through health. Eating right and regular exercise are important for taking care of our bodies, and also for dealing with stress. However, when that becomes the functional savior we have once again turned away from the real Savior. There is the real danger that we begin to rely on our own strength, that we developed in the gym, for dealing with the difficult things.

Health and taking care of our bodies is an important thing. We must not make food our god, and we must not make our health our god. We should be good stewards of what God has entrusted us with, including our health. Any time that things begin to get out of balance we need to go to the Lord and seek to understand how we have gotten out of balance. We must seek to find where we have created functional saviors instead of going to the real One. If our health is getting out of balance, we need to examine whether we are turning food into a god, or if we are not taking the time to take care of ourselves. God has given us a wonderful gift in these miraculous bodies, and we have been called to take good care of them. We want to be able to be there for our families and flock, and we want to be able to do that for as many days as we can. The beginning of care begins with the heart, and seeking to understand the heart behind the decisions we make and the savior we are going to.