The Amazing Christian Diet – Eat More and Lose Weight!

I can remember teachers at school back in the 1950s telling us to ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest’ our textbooks in preparation for tests. Being brought up in a good non-conformist family, I had no idea that they were quoting from the Book of Common Prayer a ‘collect’ about reading the Scriptures – it was just one of those things that adults were fond of saying back then.

However, it’s true that the Bible is our food. We can actually digest it. Some of it is milk for infants, and some is food so solid that it takes a while to digest and become part of us. As we ‘grow’ in this way, we become spiritually fitter, but we also lose weight!

What is this weight? It’s in Hebrews 12:1 - 'Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.'(KJV). Weight, according to the NT Greek dictionary, is ‘ogkos’, defined as ‘a mass (as bending or bulging by its load)’, which quite well describes the body of an unfit person…!

So what’s the answer, if you’re not spiritually fit and carrying too much surplus weight? Eat more solid food, so that you can lose the surplus weight by just ‘laying it aside’. It is no longer part of you! What an amazing fitness diet, where the more you eat the more weight you can lose!

Prayer: Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience, and comfort of Thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life. Amen.

(Book of Common Prayer 1662, Collects. 2nd Sunday in Advent)