SEVEN DEADLY SINS
DR. JIM DIXON
GLUTTONY
I CORINTHIANS 10:31
FEBRUARY 18, 1990
The gulo gulo is the scientific name for a particular animal. Its popular name is the glutton. The glutton is a fur-bearing animal and the largest member of the weasel family that lives in the northern woods of the tundra of Europe, Asia, and North America. The glutton has a voracious appetite. It’s three and a half feet long and weighs about fifty-five pounds. It is known to attack other animals such as caribou or deer. A glutton will pounce on the back of its prey and ride the other animal till the animal falls, and then the glutton will use its powerful clause to shred the flesh of its victim and devour it. The glutton is only called the glutton in Europe and in Asia. Here in the United States of America, the glutton is normally called the wolverine. I think it is safe to say that if the glutton were called the glutton in the United States, then the state of Michigan may not have chosen this animal as its symbol. The wolverine state sounds a lot better than the glutton state; and, the University of Michigan Wolverines a lot better than the University of Michigan Gluttons. I don’t think anybody wants to be known as a glutton. Very few words in the English language have such a negative sound and feeling as the word’s glutton or gluttony.
As we examine biblically the practice of gluttony, I’d like us to answer three questions. The first question is this, what is gluttony biblically? Biblically, the greek word used for glutton is the word “faygos.” This word simply means to eat too much. It is over indulgence. The word faygos sometimes referred to over indulgence in the broadest sense, but normally it referred to over indulgence with respect to food.
Robert Earl Hughes was born in Monticello, Illinois, in 1926. Some of you might have read about his tragic life at birth. Robert Earl Hughes weighed eleven and a half pounds. When he was six years old Robert weighed two hundred and three pounds, not your normal first grader. And at age ten, Robert weighed three hundred and seventy-eight pounds. At age thirteen he weighed five hundred and forty-six pounds. When Robert was eighteen years old, he weighed six hundred ninety-three pounds; at age twenty-five, eight hundred and ninety-six pounds; at age twenty-seven, nine hundred and forty-five pounds. He died at the age of thirty-two, weighing one thousand and forty-one pounds. He was buried in a piano case that had to be lowered into the ground by a crane. A tragic life.
We might ask what happened to this tragic man’s body? How did he come to weigh so much? And of course, there’s always a complexity of factors involved in such extreme obesity, physiological factors, psychological factors. But certainly one of Robert’s problems was over indulgence. He ate too much. Even when he ate good food, he ate too much of it. He would sometimes eat his salad from a wheel barrow and he would have three or four chickens for a snack. A tragic life.
Now Robert Earl Hughes was obese. It would be a grave mistake to equate gluttony with obesity. Not everyone who overeats is overweight. Some people who over indulge look normal, and they’re not overweight and not everyone who is overweight overeats. Not everyone who is overweight or obese is gluttonous. You see, there are many reasons that people become overweight. People can be overweight because their life is sedentary. People can become overweight because of genetics, because of heredity. Some people are genetically predisposed towards obesity and their genes and their hormones are such that their metabolism does not process calories in the same way that normal people do. And they have a tendency through heredity, towards obesity. And some people are overweight because of disease and illness. Disease can sometimes attack the endocrine gland and affect a person’s body weight. And sometimes disease affects the satiety center of the brain, which satiates the appetite and causes a person to become overweight. But you see, even when somebody is overweight because of overeating, they still deserve our compassion. People overeat for many reasons. Some people overeat because they were taught to overeat.
I’d have to say that with respect to my brothers and I, that was true in our childhood. My parents taught us to overeat. I love my dad very much, and I love my mom. I respect my dad greatly. I know today he would never want my brothers and I to overeat. But when we were growing up, it was kind of common in those days, in the 50’s and 60’s to view overeating as healthy. The more you ate, the healthier you were. We were taught not only to eat all the food on our plate, we were taught to get another plate. And my dad would laugh, and when we would go back for seconds and thirds, he’d laugh and talk about how we had a hollow leg and wasn’t that great. Dad would take us to these all you can eat places, they were really common in the 50’s and 60’s. You need to understand from my dad’s point of view, this was war, and when you left, there was a winner and a loser. The winner wasn’t simply the person who ate the most. It was possible for the whole family to be winners as long as we made the restaurant the loser. The idea was if, you just ate enough food, what you had was a bargain and if you could eat twenty pounds, twenty dollars’ worth of food when you only paid five dollars, then your meal had been a success. And to some extent, as we were growing up, my brothers and I kind of overrate to please Dad.
Some people overeat out of boredom. eating is something to do when they’re alone and it’s late at night. Some people overeat out of loneliness and food is their company. Some people overeat because of low self-esteem and it is a way to say I love you to yourself when you eat. Some people overeat out of anxiety. There’s a certain comfort that food brings. Food tastes good and hedonism may be involved. For some people, food becomes the primary reward system of their life. Now, I hope you understand gluttony, the word faygos, does not refer to the momentary binge. Gluttony isn’t overeating at one meal,. Faygos refers to chronic, continuous, habitual lifestyle, overeating. That’s what gluttony is.
When I married Barbara, I weighed two hundred and ten pounds, at that time in my life, two hundred and ten pounds was about right for me. After one year of marriage, I weighed two hundred and forty pounds. I was in my doctoral program in seminary, I was doing a lot of writing and research all day long. At night I would reward myself by watching U.C.L. A’s basketball games on the television set. I would get out those frozen turnovers, sometimes cherry, sometimes raspberry. I’d put them in the oven, and they would puff up and turn a nice golden brown. I’d pour myself some low-fat milk and drink two big glasses and four turnovers. I did this for a year. It’s amazing that I didn’t weigh three hundred and forty pounds. When I got up to almost two hundred and forty pounds, I asked Barb, “Do you think I’m fat?” She said, “No, Jim, you’re just big. I mean, you’re a big guy.” I didn’t know how big I was and until, we went to Europe. When we came back and were looking at slides I thought, “Is that really me?” In Dijon, France, the streets are really narrow and it looked like I was hitting the wall on both sides of the street. I was convicted and I began to lose weight. I’ve got to say that year of my life was a year of overindulgence and gluttony. It was sin. which leads us to the second point. Why is gluttony sin?
Why is it a sin to over indulge? I mean, it’s my life, who am I hurting? Why can’t I eat as much as I want to? Why is it a sin? Well, perhaps you’ve heard of a man named Michael Lotito. Michael Lotito was born in Grenoble, France, in the year 1950. He’s been called the world’s greatest omnivore. An omnivore is somebody who will eat anything. At the age of nine, Michael Lotito began to eat metal and glass. Gastroenterologists examined him. They did x-rays, they had various tests. They concluded that he was a very unusual human being able to consume two pounds of metal a day and get away with it. To this day, Michael Otto has eaten a lot of metal. He has eaten ten bicycles, seven television sets, six chandeliers and a supermarket shopping cart. I think most incredibly he ate a Cessna light aircraft in Caracas, Venezuela. Certainly it was easier for him to eat a plane then to board one what with all the metal detectors.
Now it’s said that he is perhaps the only case where a casket ended up inside of a person rather than a person inside of the casket. As my son Drew and I read about Michael Lotito in the Guinness Book of World Records, Drew asked an appropriate question, “Why?” Why would any man want to do this? Why would any guy want to eat metal? Why would any guy eat ten bicycles and seven television sets and six chandeliers and a shopping cart, and an airplane? Why? Certainly metal doesn’t taste good and it’s very bad for you. Most of us would have died before our first bicycle. Now what God wants us to understand is when we do anything willfully that destroys the body, it’s sin.
You don’t have to eat metal to damage your body. You can eat food, damage your body if you eat enough of it. If you eat too much of it, you damage your body. In fact, it’s irrefutable. There is scientific medical evidence that when we consume too much food, we damage these bodies. We become more susceptible to illness and to disease. The heart, the vascular system, is affected by high blood pressure, which can lead to a stroke or heart attack. All of these things have been linked with over indulgence in food. And there’s mounting evidence that when we eat too much, we also become more susceptible to certain forms of cancer. God is the creator. We are the creation. Our bodies were created by God. When we willfully begin to destroy what he has made, it is sin.
If you’re a Christian, and you participate in gluttony by over-indulging, your sin is compounded. It’s compounded because as Christians, our bodies are not normal, they have become temples of the living God. The Bible says the moment you truly receive Jesus Christ as your Lord, and you invited Him, to come and sit on the throne of your life you received and embraced Him as your savior from sin. In that moment you received him, he came into you by his Holy Spirit. And you are born of the Spirit, born from above, born anew. You have become a temple of the living God and the spirit of Christ lives within you. And when you participate in gluttony, your sin isn’t simply physical abuse, but it’s spiritual abuse.
It says in one Corinthians chapter three, verse sixteen, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and the spirit of God dwells in you? Whoever destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him for God’s temple is holy, in that temple you are. It says in one Corinthians chapter six, verse 19, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, given by God you are not your own. You are bought with a price, glorify God in your body.”
As Christians when we participate in gluttony, continuous sustained overeating, we are damaging the body. We are desecrating the temple. We’re mocking the one who gave his life that we might live. Why is gluttony sin that destroys the body and the temple of God? Anything that destroys the body and the temple of God, gluttony, drunkenness, anything else that destroys the body, is sin.
What can we do about it? How can we overcome sins of overindulgence? What would God have us to do? God would have us first to confess and repent. Now you see, if you don’t believe that gluttony as sin, that it’s a sin to over-indulge chronically in food, then you’ll never have victory. The Bible makes it clear where there is sin, we must confess and repent. And when we do confess and repent, he is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us. He begins to transform our mind and our heart if we confess and repent. The first step is to confess and repent of sin.
The second step is prayer, see, the Bible says, prayer changes things. Do you really want to change? Prayer changes things. Over indulgence, gluttony, drunkenness, these are spiritual struggles as well as physical. Wherever there is addiction, it is always a spiritual struggle. Satan gets in there and he, he wants to bind us to what is wrong. We need prayer. We need prayer for deliverance. We need prayer that those bonds would be broken. We need prayer that we might obtain the liberty of the children of God. We need not only to pray for ourselves, but we need to ask others to pray for us if we really want victory. So repentance is the first thing, prayer the second and the third, self-control. It sounds simple, but we all know it’s hard. The Bible says over and over again to us as Christians, that we are to exercise self-control. Now the Bible says, the world is without self-control. This word in the Greek is awcratos. When we look at the Greek and Roman world to which the gospel first came, we see a total absence of self-control.
Have you ever wondered why throughout the New Testament, you’ve seen gluttony linked in a list with drunkenness, immorality, and idolatry? You ever wondered, well why? Is gluttony associated with drunkenness and immorality and idolatry? Well, it’s because in the Greek and Roman world, these four sins were joined, to which the gospel first came. Pagan temple parties were common, particularly for men. They would go to pagan temple parties with their animals to sacrifice to pagan deities. They would have a great feast with the meat that was not consumed on the altar. They would participate in gluttony, drunkenness and bring in fertility goddesses and temple prostitutes. They would participate in immorality. And of course all of this was in the context of idolatry. And that’s why you see these things joined and linked in the New Testament. It was a world without self-control, and to this world, the gospel came in and Christ called everyone who believed in his name to exercise self-control.
Now everyone in the world has some measure of self-control, but if you’re a Christian, you have exceptional self-control. There’s something different about you. There’s a strength in you. There’s a power in you that the world doesn’t have, I firmly believe that because as we have already seen, the Holy Spirit has come into you. You are temples of the living God. And the fruit of the Holy Spirit, as it says in Galatians chapter five, is self-control. If you really will to do his will and you’re willing to pass through painful barriers, you’ll find that there’s power in you that the world doesn’t have. This call is a very practical call when God exhorts us towards self-control.
Well, there’s a final instruction with regard to overcoming, and that is group support. God knows sometimes we need the help of others. The Bible says, encourage and exhort one another. The Bible says, build one another up. Even the world understands this. It’s why Weight Watchers and various programs encourage people to come into a group situation where there is encouragement and accountability. We need that. See, sometimes in our life we’re not finding the victory or overcoming. We’re continuing on in our over indulgences and we feel defeated. We’ve repented, prayed, tried to exercise self-control, but we still fail and we need help. God says, seek the help of your brothers and sisters in Christ. Group support. There’s a lot of eating disorders that are awfully hard to overcome. If you know anything about bulimia or anorexia, you know that even chronic overeating is simply hard to overcome.
God says, seek the help of the body. Sometimes we need to go to a counselor. Sometimes we just need brothers and sisters who will begin to hold us accountable. Of course we need humble ourselves to do that. It’s one thing to confess to God, something else to confess to a brother or sister in Christ. When we humble ourselves, he exalts us, and we begin to find healing. You know, we got a lot of choices to make in life. You have to choose to honor God in your body. It’s a choice.
I read recently about a whale that was killed on March 20th, 1947. It was a blue whale, a sulfur bottom whale said to be the largest whale ever discovered in modern history. The heart weighed one thousand and five hundred forty pounds. The tongue weighed nineteen thousand five hundred pounds. The whale itself weighed two hundred and nine tons; four hundred eighteen thousand pounds larger than any whale ever found. How did it get so big? Scientists tell us that the average blue whale consumes three million calories a day. Wouldn’t that be fun? Three million calories a day. But they also tell us that this particular blue whale consumed four to five million calories per day. Simply put this whale over indulged. But this whales over indulgence was not sin. It wasn’t a sin because biblically seeking speaking biblically speaking, whales are not morally culpable. They’re not held accountable before God. They do not have moral autonomy. They do not have true volition in God’s sight. People are different. We’ve been created in the image of God. We have special endowments and special gifts, and we are morally culpable. We will be held accountable. We have some measure of volition and some measure of autonomy, and we can make choices every day. We make choices. You have to choose Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. You have to choose to honor him, body, soul, and spirit. It’s a choice. Even if you find yourself unable to overcome certain shortcomings in your life, you can always choose to get help. We have to choose to repent. Choose to pray. Choose to exercise self-control. Choose to seek the help of the body.
Joshua that said to Israel, “Choose, ye this day whom you will serve.” Everyday Jesus Christ says to his people, “Choose ye this day whom you will serve.” We’ve got to choose everyday to serve Him. “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, glorify God in your body.” Let’s close or the word of prayer.