Kolade is a quantity surveyor in Abuja and a deacon in his church. He is the kind of man every congregation needs: the first to arrive when there is a burial to organise, the one who knows which hall can seat three hundred and which caterer will actually turn up. His mother, who raised five children on a trader’s income in Ogbomoso, showed love the way many Nigerian mothers do. She fed people. When Kolade came home from boarding school, there was always pounded yam waiting, and she would stand over him until he had finished a second wrap.
He told me once that food had never been a problem for him. It had simply been part of life. Long days on building sites, late meetings with contractors, a plate of rice at the buka near the office, suya on the drive home because he had missed dinner. Then the owambe on Saturdays, where refusing a second plate can feel like an insult to the celebrant.
At his annual check-up last year, the doctor at the clinic looked at his results for a long time and then told him gently that his blood sugar was high enough to need treatment, and that his blood pressure was not far behind. She referred him to a dietitian and started him on medication.
On the drive home he stopped at his usual suya spot on the Kubwa road, bought a large portion and ate all of it in the car, feeling more ashamed with every bite. The next morning he decided to fix the problem by force. He would eat almost nothing for a month. He lasted eleven days, was dizzy at work for most of them, and then swung back into his old habits harder than before.
The thing that hurt him most was not the diagnosis. It was a joke. At the welfare committee’s end-of-year party, a younger brother had patted Kolade’s stomach and laughed, “Deacon, this one is the anointing of amala.” Everybody laughed, including Kolade. But he could not stop thinking about a sermon he had heard the year before, when a visiting preacher had said that “a big belly is a sign of a small prayer life.”
Punchline“Pastor,” he said to me, “I am ashamed of my body, and I am ashamed of being ashamed. I do not know whether this is a medical problem or a spiritual one.”
It is a fair question, and Scripture gives us a better answer than either shame or indifference.
Food is a gift before it is a problem
The Bible begins its teaching on food with gratitude. Before the law said anything about clean and unclean animals, God had already given Adam every seed-bearing plant “for meat” (Genesis 1:29). And when Moses prepared Israel to enter Canaan, he described the land in terms of food:
For the LORD thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey; A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass. When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the LORD thy God for the good land which he hath given thee.
Wheat, barley, vines, fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey. “Thou shalt eat bread without scarceness.” Moses describes abundance with obvious delight, and then he gives one instruction: “When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the LORD thy God.” Being full is not presented as a danger. It is presented as an occasion for worship. The danger Moses warns about a few verses later is forgetting the Giver, the proud heart that says, “My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:17).
The psalmist praises God for “wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man’s heart” (Psalm 104:15). Paul told the people of Lystra that God had never left Himself without witness, because He gave “rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:17). Every good meal is a small sermon about the kindness of God.
Jesus Himself ate and drank so freely that His critics called Him “a gluttonous man, and a winebibber” (Luke 7:34). The charge was false, but it tells us something. He was a regular guest at tables, including the tables of people the religious leaders avoided. The early church continued this pattern, “breaking bread from house to house,” eating “with gladness and singleness of heart” (Acts 2:46).
So we begin here. Your appetite is part of the way God made you. Hunger is not sin. Enjoying jollof rice at a wedding is not worldliness. Whatever needs to change in our habits, it must change within this larger truth: food is God’s good gift to embodied people.
Received with thanksgiving
Paul gives Timothy a warning that may surprise some readers. He says that in the latter times some will depart from the faith, following teachings that include “commanding to abstain from meats.” Then he explains why such teaching is false:
Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving: For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.
“Every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.” Paul is confronting a kind of religion that made rejection of food a mark of spiritual superiority. The more you refused, the holier you were. He calls this a doctrine that has departed from the truth.
That has something to say to us. Some of the loudest voices about food in church circles have quietly adopted the same assumption. They treat eating less as automatically more spiritual, and a thinner body as evidence of a deeper discipline. Paul will not allow it. Food, he says, is “sanctified by the word of God and prayer.” It is set apart for good use through God’s word, which declares it good, and through the prayer of thanksgiving offered over it.
Thanksgiving is also the beginning of healthy eating, and this is one of the most practical things in the passage. A person who stops to thank God before a meal has already paused. He has noticed what is in front of him. He is eating as a receiver, and a receiver tends to eat differently from someone who is simply consuming to fill a gap. Kolade’s suya in the car had no thanksgiving in it. It was eaten in haste and shame, without attention. The habit of gratitude will leave some difficulties in place. Still, it brings God back to the table.
Paul makes a related point to the Colossians. He describes rules like “Touch not; taste not; handle not” and says they “have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh” (Colossians 2:21, 23). In other words, harsh rules about the body look impressive, but they do not actually restrain the desires they claim to deal with. Kolade discovered that for himself. Eleven days of near-starvation did nothing to change his heart. It only made the rebound worse.
Lawful, but not mastered
There is another side to Paul’s teaching, and he gives it to the Corinthians, who had the opposite tendency. They were inclined to treat the body as unimportant and its appetites as harmless. Paul quotes their slogans back to them:
All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.
“All things are lawful unto me” was probably a Corinthian saying, and Paul accepts it as far as it goes. Christ has freed us from the old food laws. But he adds two qualifications. “All things are not expedient,” meaning not everything is helpful or beneficial. And “I will not be brought under the power of any.” The Greek verb here is related to the word for authority. Paul is saying that he will not let anything that is permitted become the thing that rules him.
That is the heart of the matter. Appetite is a good servant and a poor master. The question is not whether a particular food is allowed. The question is who is in charge. When Kolade found himself at a suya spot he had not planned to visit, eating food he did not enjoy, unable to stop, he was experiencing a small loss of authority. Something good had been given more power than it deserved.
Scripture gives us a sobering picture of what that can cost. Esau came in from the field exhausted and saw his brother cooking red lentil stew. “Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage; for I am faint” (Genesis 25:30). His hunger was real. But in that moment the appetite of the hour spoke louder than everything else he valued, and he sold his birthright for a bowl of food. Hebrews later describes him as one “who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright” (Hebrews 12:16). Hunger is not wicked. Yet a desire which is not given its proper place can make decisions that the rest of us would never make. Self-control is partly the ability to let the appetite of the hour be heard without letting it hold the pen.
Paul goes on: “Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them.” Food and the stomach are temporary. They belong to this age. But then he says something that raises the value of the body enormously: “the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.” The Lord is for your body. He cares about it. A few verses later Paul says that the body is “the temple of the Holy Ghost” and that we are to “glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
Notice that the immediate subject in Corinth was sexual immorality, so we should not stretch Paul’s words into a lecture about weight. But the principle he establishes reaches every bodily appetite. The body matters to God. It is not a machine to be ignored or a burden to be punished. It belongs to Him, and He wants us to live in it as free people, not as people mastered by any desire.
The kingdom is not meat and drink
If food is a gift, and appetite can still master us, how should believers treat one another’s eating? Paul addresses this in Romans, where the church was divided over food:
For one believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is weak, eateth herbs. Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him.
Some believers in Rome ate anything. Others, probably out of conscience about meat offered to idols or about the Jewish food laws, ate only vegetables. Each group was tempted to look down on the other. Paul’s instruction is simple: do not despise, do not judge, “for God hath received him.”
Then he states a principle that every church should write on its walls: “For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Romans 14:17). What a person eats, or does not eat, is not the measure of righteousness. The kingdom is measured by the righteousness Christ gives, by peace with God and one another, and by joy in the Spirit.
That principle protects people. Some of our brothers and sisters eat in particular ways because of health needs that are none of our business: diabetes, kidney disease, allergies, pregnancy, the side effects of medication, the aftermath of surgery. Others have backgrounds in which certain foods carry religious meaning. Still others are recovering from difficult relationships with food that they have never told anyone about. A believer who comments on another person’s plate, or body, or portion size, is making food a measure of spirituality. Paul calls that judging the servant of another master (Romans 14:4).
It also means that your own health needs belong outside simplistic spiritual rules. If your doctor has told you to change something about your diet, that is medical advice to be followed with wisdom, and it carries no spiritual grade. If you need medication for blood sugar or blood pressure, taking it is good stewardship. Your righteousness is in Christ, and it does not rise or fall with your test results.
Self-control grows as fruit
Where, then, does real change come from? Paul’s answer to the Galatians is one of the most familiar lists in the New Testament:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.
The last item is temperance, which translates the Greek word egkrateia. It means self-control, mastery over oneself, the strength to direct desire rather than be driven by it. It is the same quality Paul describes when he speaks of an athlete who “is temperate in all things” (1 Corinthians 9:25).
Notice three things about where Paul places it.
First, it is fruit. Fruit grows. It is the natural product of a living connection to the Spirit, developed over time. Nobody shouts at a mango tree to make it produce. You water it, protect it and wait. Self-control in eating grows the same way: slowly, through daily dependence on the Spirit, and often unevenly.
Second, it is part of a cluster. It comes after love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith and meekness. Self-control that has no gentleness in it will become harsh. Self-control without patience will collapse at the first failure. When the Spirit develops temperance in you, He does it alongside gentleness toward yourself and patience with the process.
Third, “against such there is no law.” Paul has just spent a whole letter warning the Galatians against returning to law as the way to live. Self-control is not a new law. It is the life of the Spirit expressed in the area of appetite. The grace of God, Paul says elsewhere, is what teaches us “that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly” (Titus 2:12). Grace is the teacher. Shame never trained anyone to eat well.
This is why Kolade’s eleven-day fast failed. He was trying to produce with his fist what only grows as fruit. He did not need more willpower. He needed a different source.
NuggetSelf-control is fruit, not a fist. It grows alongside gentleness and patience, through the Spirit’s life in you, and shame has never been its gardener.
When we eat for reasons other than hunger
Most of us know that we do not always eat because we are hungry. We eat because we are tired, anxious, lonely, bored or grieving. We eat because a day has gone badly and food is the one comfort within reach. We eat because the hostess will be offended. We eat because we skipped lunch and are now ravenous at ten at night.
None of this is surprising. Food is one of the first comforts any human being knows, and many of us learned at a mother’s knee that food means love. The problem comes when food becomes the only way we deal with our inner needs, because food cannot carry that weight.
I find great tenderness in the way Jesus met Peter after the resurrection. Peter had denied Him three times. He had gone back to fishing and caught nothing all night. When the disciples came ashore at dawn, this is what they found:
As soon then as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread. Jesus saith unto them, Bring of the fish which ye have now caught. Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land full of great fishes, an hundred and fifty and three: and for all there were so many, yet was not the net broken. Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. And none of the disciples durst ask him, Who art thou? knowing that it was the Lord. Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise.
The risen Lord had made a charcoal fire and was cooking breakfast. “Come and dine.” Before He said a word to Peter about the denial, before the threefold question about love that follows, Jesus fed him. The meal was not a reward for good behaviour, and it was not a substitute for the conversation that came next. It was care for a tired, hungry, ashamed man who needed both bread and restoration.
That gives us a pattern. Our physical hunger is real and should be met with good food, at sensible times, without guilt. Our deeper hungers are also real, and they need to be brought to the Lord, who meets them in ways food cannot. When you notice yourself reaching for food late at night after a hard day, it may help to pause and ask honestly: What am I actually hungry for? Sometimes the answer is supper. Sometimes it is rest, or company, or the chance to tell someone what happened. Jesus invites you to come and dine, and He also invites you to stay for the conversation.
Some practical habits help many people. Eat regular meals so that you do not arrive at night starving. Sit down to eat rather than eating in the car or at the desk. Give thanks before you begin. Eat with others when you can. Notice when you are satisfied. These are not rules for righteousness. They are ordinary wisdom, the kind that helps an appetite find its proper place.
Bodies without shame, and when you need help
The church must stop joking about bodies. The comment at Kolade’s party was meant kindly, and the visiting preacher probably thought he was being bold. But both of them treated a man’s body shape as a public spiritual report card, and that is both untrue and unkind. Size is not a measure of holiness. Thin believers can be enslaved to appetite, and larger believers can be deeply self-controlled. Bodies differ because of genetics, health, medication, age, childbirth and a hundred other things. The psalmist’s confession belongs to every believer: “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).
We also need to say something carefully to those whose struggle runs the other way. For some people the difficulty with food lies in refusing to eat, or cycles of bingeing followed by secret purging, or a fear of food that controls every day. Some believers have found that church fasts became a way to hide a pattern of restriction that was already harming them. These are serious health conditions, sometimes called eating disorders, and they are not failures of faith. If that is your story, please tell someone you trust, and speak to a doctor. There are trained professionals who can help, and seeking them is itself an act of faith.
This also means that fasting needs wisdom. Fasting is a biblical practice, and many believers find it a real help in prayer. But anyone with a history of disordered eating, diabetes or other medical conditions, anyone who is pregnant or on regular medication, should speak to their doctor before fasting from food, and no one should ever be pressured into a church fast. It helps to remember what Daniel’s refusal of the king’s food actually was. “Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king’s meat” (Daniel 1:8). His concern was faithfulness to God’s covenant in a foreign palace, where the royal food was likely connected with idolatry and with the law’s prohibitions. It was a matter of conscience and loyalty, not a weight-loss programme, and it was undertaken by young men in good health. A partial fast modelled on Daniel can be a meaningful discipline, but it should be chosen freely and with wisdom about your own body. Fasting can take other forms. The Lord who said “when ye fast” (Matthew 6:16) did not say it to make anyone ill.
And if you, like Kolade, have received a diagnosis that touches your diet, let your doctor and a qualified dietitian guide the specifics. They know your body and your results. The role of your faith is to give you a secure identity while you make changes, gratitude for the help available, and patience for the slow work of new habits.
Patient direction over a lifetime
Paul wrote to the Philippians about his own relationship to food and need: “every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need” (Philippians 4:12). The word translated instructed was used of being initiated, of learning something over time. Paul had learned contentment. It did not arrive on the day of his conversion.
That should encourage anyone whose habits are slow to change. Appetite needs patient direction, and patient direction takes years. There will be good weeks and difficult ones, festive seasons when the plates keep coming and stressful seasons when old patterns return. A lapse is not a verdict. It is simply the next moment to return, give thanks and continue.
Paul’s simplest instruction may be the best summary: “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). Eating can glorify God. A meal received with thanksgiving glorifies Him. A body cared for as His temple glorifies Him. A table shared with the lonely glorifies Him. And a believer who refuses to judge another’s plate glorifies Him too.
Kolade did not change his habits overnight. He began meeting the dietitian at the hospital once a month, and he followed her guidance. He started taking his medication without telling himself it was a defeat. His wife joined him in eating supper earlier, at the table, with the television off.
He told me the turning point came one evening on the Kubwa road. He had stopped at the suya spot again, tired after a long day on site. He bought a small portion this time, and before he started eating, sitting in the car, he did something he had not done in years. He bowed his head and thanked God for the food.
Punchline“It sounds small,” he said. “But I realised I had been eating like a man running from something. That night I ate like a son receiving something. I still enjoyed the suya. I just did not need to eat the whole tray.”
He also went to see the brother who had made the joke at the party, and told him, kindly, how it had felt. The young man apologised, embarrassed, and said he had never thought about it. A few months later the welfare committee started a Saturday walking group. Kolade leads it.
If food has become a source of shame for you, hear this. Your appetite is part of God’s good design. Your body belongs to the Lord, and the Lord is for your body. Self-control is fruit that the Spirit grows patiently. Give thanks, seek the help you need, and come and dine.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- What did you learn about food and love growing up, and how does that still shape the way you eat?
- Where have you treated food choices, your own or someone else’s, as a measure of righteousness?
- What would it look like for thanksgiving to change the way you eat this week?
- When do you tend to eat for reasons other than hunger, and what might you actually be hungry for in those moments?
- Is there anyone in your church you have joked about, judged or overlooked because of their body or their eating? What would kindness look like?
This Week
For the next seven days, pause before every meal, wherever you are, and give thanks to God by name for what is in front of you. If you notice yourself reaching for food when you are not hungry, stop for a moment and ask, “What am I actually hungry for?”, and tell the Lord honestly. If you have a health condition affecting your diet, follow your doctor’s guidance and book any appointment you have been putting off. If you have been struggling with patterns of restricting, bingeing or purging, tell one trusted person this week and ask them to help you see a doctor.
A Prayer
Father, thank You for food and for the body You have given me. Forgive me where I have eaten without thanks, and where I have let appetite rule me. Forgive me too where I have shamed my own body or judged anyone else’s. Teach me to receive every meal with thanksgiving. Grow in me the fruit of self-control, together with gentleness and patience. Meet the deeper hungers in me that food cannot satisfy. Give wisdom to those who care for my health, and help me to follow good counsel. Let my eating and drinking bring glory to You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.