Dharius Daniels - You Are What You Eat

I’m excited about the opportunity to build into you a well-listened winter series called «Fire Starters.» We’ve been attempting to provide you with keys to help you strengthen your spiritual life and your spiritual core. If you don’t know what that means, I want you to go back and watch part one of this teaching on «Fire Starters.» We spent a couple of weeks talking about prayer because that’s a fire starter. We spent last week talking about meditation. This week, I want to jump into another one, and that is the study of Scripture. It is the ingesting and digesting of the Word of God. Remember now, I want to teach in context a little bit and give you some application. It’s going to take us a couple of weeks to do that, but I want you to buckle up and get ready, y’all.

So, Matthew, chapter four, verse one: I’m going to read a few verses just to start our time together, and then I will read it from the New King James Version. Then we’re going to get to work, and hopefully it’s going to add some value to you. Listen to this: Matthew chapter 4, verse 1 says, «Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He was hungry.» Now, when the tempter came to Him, he said, «If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.» He answered and said, «It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.’»

Y’all, listen to me. I have a love-hate relationship with fitness. I kind of love the results in terms of the energy that I feel it gives me and the energy I need to serve my family well and to do my job well, but I’m not in love with the things that you actually have to do to get fit. I don’t like running or things of that particular nature. I remember one day I walked into a training session with a guy I was working with at the time named Bristol Jenkins. I walked into Bodies by Bristol there in South Jersey, and I saw that Bristol would always write these inspirational statements on the chalkboard. I’ll never forget this: I walked in, and this statement was written on the board: «You can’t out-exercise a bad diet.»

Now, those of you who know me somewhat well, or if you’ve been following this teaching ministry for a significant amount of time, then you know that the diet area is a struggle for your boy. Yes, I am sometimes captured by candy, cookies, and you name it. When I saw that, it spoke to me in a unique way because unconsciously, I was trying to outwork a bad diet. I wasn’t getting the results that I wanted. Watch this: I wasn’t reaching the goals that I wanted to reach, not because I wasn’t working hard, but because I wasn’t working smart. I think this contributes to a lot of people’s frustration with religion. They’re working hard, not seeing the results, and then they incorrectly assume that there’s something wrong with religion. That’s the equivalent of me working out but not monitoring my diet and then saying that exercise doesn’t work. No, exercise works if I work it right, and the Christian religion works if you work it right.

Now, let me address this. I don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill. I don’t want us to get caught up in semantics here because there’s this phrase that’s super popular: «I’m not religious; I’m in a relationship.» I think the essence of what they’re articulating is this: it’s possible to have religious regimentation, right? You can do all the church stuff and not really cultivate a relationship with God. I think that’s what they mean: if you’re attending church or studying Scripture or engaging in prayer, and these actions are independent of actually cultivating a relationship with God, then yeah, I get that you want to have a relationship. But I want to tell y’all something, and I’m not trying to get into a tiff over semantics here. If that’s the essence of what they mean, then I agree, and I think that’s supported by Scripture, okay?

However, the phrase itself is not scriptural. Let me tell you why. The Bible is not anti-religion; it’s anti-bad religion. It’s not anti-religion, actually. This is what the Bible says. In the book of James, it says, «Pure religion and undefiled is this, ” and then it starts talking about feeding widows and orphans. Watch this: how pure religion is going to be revealed and exposed is not just by how people treat God, but how they treat other people. Yeah, read it: pure religion and undefiled. So, the question isn’t whether or not a person is religious; the question is whether or not your religion is pure. Has it been defiled? Has it been perverted by man-made traditions, practices, and legalism? I’m not trying to fight about that, but I want you to know what I mean when I use the word religion because I don’t think the Bible is anti-religion. As a matter of fact, I think if you’re going to have a healthy relationship with God…