After New Year’s resolutions, ‘giving something up for Lent’ has become a fashionable way of disciplining our appetites. What we give up is often connected with food (chocolate and alcohol are perhaps the two things most frequently renounced over Lent), and certainly, there can be real benefits from looking at what we eat and drink and curbing our appetites. Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins we rarely talk about, though it is quite possibly one of the most prevalent in Western churches. Certainly it is a sin I struggle with. I’m known in my family as a ‘feeder’, someone who finds comfort, worth, reassurance and value in food. I used to work with someone who would frequently forget to eat because he was so busy, something I cannot even imagine doing, no matter how busy I am!
Molière, a 17th century French playwright, once wrote ‘il faut manger pour vivre et pas vivre pour manger’ (‘you should eat to live, not live to eat.’) There are many health benefits to giving up certain foods (especially sugars) over a period of time, but the primary purpose of renouncing things over the Lenten period is not as a way of dieting or benefitting physical health, though these may well be useful things to do. We give things up for spiritual reasons: to focus our minds and hearts on God, to have more time for prayer (preparing, consuming and cleaning up after eating take a lot of time in an ordinary day!) and to enable us to become more spiritually attuned and alert to God. (Luke 2:37, Luke 5:33, Matt 6:6-16)
Fasting is an important spiritual discipline, training our bodies that physical appetites should not have the last word. When we first give up some food or drink, it seems that’s all we can think about! Our bodies crave the substance we have renounced; our minds perhaps do so even more! But as we deny ourselves, we enter into the spiritual principle that the way to life and freedom is through renunciation. (Mark 8:34) We can never under-estimate the importance of bringing our appetites and earthly desires under God’s control, of establishing His rule and reign in every area of our lives.