I have always hated trying on clothes.  Sizes vary so much from place to place, in one shop you can be an 18 and in the next shop you are a size 20 to have anything that fits.  I don’t know about you but I like to go into a shop, choose something I like the look of, pick it in my size and buy it.  However this isn’t always possible in the clothing department of many of the shops we visit.

Since the age of 13 I have felt overweight, I weighed 9.5 stone and hated what I looked like.  I would never wear clothes that would show any stomach, I always wore t-shirts or blouses that went over the top of my skirts or trousers or I would wear a jumper so that no one would suspect how fat I was; there is even photographic evidence of me wearing a jacket in the Summer and I remember the feeling of not wanting to go out unless I was covered up.

It’s difficult to piece together all the ways in which I convinced myself that I was overweight, back then obese wasn’t a term used but in my mind’s eye that’s exactly how I saw myself. Looking back over old photographs I came to realise that I wasn’t fat I was just a different shape to other people.

Today it is considered a fact that we come in all shapes and sizes. Some of us are apple shape, some pear and some banana. (The scientific terms are endomorph, ectomorph and mesomorph).  Whether we are concerned with which item in the fruit bowl is more reflective of our shape it is certainly true that our bodies come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

That is why in some shops we can be a size 16 and in others a size 18 because the clothes haven’t been designed with our differing shapes in mind.  When we desperately want to be that smaller size and we know we have lost some weight, we anticipate the acceptance a smaller size will bring us then to have that hope dashed when we can’t even squeeze into the next size up. The American system has taken the shape factor into account, for each of the sizes you can get a small, medium or a large.  This is a much more realistic and practical approach to buying clothes, customers can actually buy something to wear based on what will fit and what suits their body shape rather than squeeze into something that feels uncomfortable; it then becomes a much more practical purchase rather than an emotional one.

One diet fits all

The same can be said of the dieting industry. We see the success of dieting displayed on TV and in our magazines, the hope and promise of a thinner life; a certain diet has proven to be the answer for the lifelong struggle to lose weight.  So, we buy into it, invest our time and money, holding onto the vision of the success of another.  Why didn’t it work? What’s wrong with me? Am I just set up to fail every time? Maybe I haven’t found the right diet! So, we try the next one and the next one only to continue the merry-go-round of futility.  We ultimately conclude that we must be the problem, we must have done something wrong if it works for all those other people.

Maybe there is something else we should factor into the equation; maybe dieting doesn’t work for many of us because our problem is one of the heart.  Dieting doesn’t deal with the inner turmoil of needing to fit in or the feelings of inadequacy. Dieting doesn’t address the relationship with food and the need to overeat.  We have all had different life experiences, different upbringings, we all have different viewpoints of how this world works or doesn’t work, dieting doesn’t take any of this into consideration.

Measuring up

I am sure many of you share in the humiliation of standing on the scale and realising you gained weight rather than the loss you were hoping for, this major disappointment, for me, always resulted in overeating to fill the gap of inadequacy. Or the simplistic idea that all you must do to lose weight is eat less calories and exercise more.  This advice only works if you don’t have a relationship with food, if you don’t have a dependency on the food to provide you with emotional stability.

The diet industry is left wanting because it doesn’t deal with each of us as individuals, it deals with us as a mass of fat and offers the promise that this will melt away if you do what you are told.  However this approach only serves to reinforce our belief system; that we have no power over our lives and that we are failures anyway so why bother trying.

So why is God’s approach different, what has God got to say about our struggle with overeating anyway, isn’t it a modern phenomenon?

Psalm 139:14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made….

God created each one of us to be unique, to differ from one another; we have different finger prints, different DNA, different races.   So why do we spend so much time drooling over magazines and imagine ourselves as the supermodel with the super figure; we were never meant to be the same.  In fact our differences is what makes us the same, we are all human, we all had the same creator, however it is our differences that shouts out that our God is creative and imaginative.

It’s about perspective

In Psalm 139 we see how much time and thought went into our creation, we see that God knitted us together in our Mother’s womb. In Luke 12:7 Jesus told the disciples that each of the hairs on our head have been numbered. Jesus goes on in Luke 13 to explain that he desires to gather up all his children as a mother hen gathers her chicks.

This is God’s starting point that he loves the whole world and wants to be in relationship with his creation.

Instead of allowing society to dictate who you are or who you should be let us consider God’s perspective; consider the loving way in which you were created, consider how much love it took to mould your body into being.

Don’t limit ‘you’ into being the same as everyone else; celebrate your uniqueness by turning to the God who knows you best.

The next time you look in a mirror ask God to show you how He sees you and one day you too will be able to join in with the praise of the Psalmist.

Getting to the heart of the matter

However God also knows our heart, he knows that we have all fallen short of his glory, he knows that without his intervention that we will never measure up to the only standard that matters. This is why dieting doesn’t work because deep down we know we are a failure, deep down we are aware there is something that needs fixing we just don’t know what it is.  So we keep looking for the solution in the world, we exercise more, we buy into the latest food craze or we give up altogether and use the very thing that is killing us to make us feel better.

What a mixed-up world we live in however this is not a place of despair in fact the very realisation that we need fixing but we can’t fix ourselves is the very place we need to be; to recognise that we need someone to intervene.  We need someone who not only understands our heart condition but someone who can do something about it.

Romans 3:21 – 26 explains to us both the problem and the perfect solution ‘But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. ²² This righteousness is given through faith in^[h] Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, ²³ for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ²⁴ and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. ²⁵ God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement,^[i] through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— ²⁶ he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus’. (NIV)

The solution to our heart problem is Jesus himself, Jesus who willingly came to earth to rescue us from ourselves; the sinful nature that so easy entangles us into sin.  God’s standard is the standard of righteousness, in other words to be made right with God.  This is at the core of our heart problem, we can only be made right not through what we try to achieve ourselves but by faith in Jesus.  By accepting that Jesus both knows our condition but is also the solution to the problem then we begin to find hope; hope that there is more to life than constantly seeking a freedom that seems to elude us.

Hebrews 12:1-3 ‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, ² fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. ³ Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart’.(NIV)

By accepting Jesus as the means to being right with God we begin to see that we can also live right for him.  We have the opportunity to put off the sin, put off the desire to overeat, to put off the self-satisfaction we find from eating the 3^rd bar of chocolate or to put off the desire for perfection.

Romans 3:23 tells us that we have all sinned and have all fallen short of the glory of God.  No matter what our upbringing, no matter what our learned behaviours, even if we consider ourselves a success or a failure one day we need to realise that Jesus is the only fit that we need.

Jesus is the ‘one size fits all’ solution because he deals with us as unique individuals.  Ultimately what our heart is seeking is a relationship with Jesus, this is the gap that needs filling in our heart.  Until we give our hearts to Jesus we will continue to wander aimlessly seeking the solution that the world offers but can never fulfil.

But as the writer of the book of Hebrews says we do not grow weary or lose heart because Jesus is the source of what we need, the solution to who we were, who we are and who we are to become.

 

Last time we considered who God says he is, I wonder how many of us scrolled through the scriptures to find out?

Maybe you thought it really doesn’t matter that much or you thought it was just a waste of your time and energy!

When studying the bible, you get the impression that names are important to God, we see him giving people names and sometimes changing their names too. He even gives different names for himself at different times.  Why is this?  What can we learn from the names that God uses in the bible?

Let’s turn to the bible and see if we can unravel a bit of this mystery of why names are important to God and maybe should be important to us too.

In the first verse of the bible God introduces himself to us using the name Elohim in our modern-day translations it simply says ‘God’ however, in the Hebrew God’s first introduction to us is ‘Elohim’, it is not a singular name it has a plural meaning here we see God introduce us to the Godhead of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. How can we come to this assumption because in Genesis Chapter 1:26 it says ‘Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ NIV.

God refers to himself as ‘us’ so we can deduce from these two references that God introduces himself in terms of a relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit therefore we now know that our existence stems from the purpose and means of a relationship.

Just this small amount of information demonstrates the plans God has for his creation and confirms that relationships are God’s ultimate purpose for us all; in fact, we were created out of a relationship for a relationship with God.  This truth is well worth pondering and considering how this can and should impact on our lives.

I don’t plan on unravelling every term God introduces himself as but I will continue with a couple more examples of the importance of names.

In Genesis 17:4 God changes Abram’s name to Abraham why, why would God change his name after all Abram is what he is called why is it important for God to change his name? The Hebrew meaning of Abram is ‘high father or exalted father’ however Abraham means ‘father of a multitude’ here God demonstrates Abraham’s change of status from being a promised father to the fulfilment of becoming the ‘father of a multitude’ God changed Abraham’s name as a fulfilment that God would carry through his promise to make him into a great nation.  This was also true for Sarai his wife her name originally meant ‘princess’ but by changing her name to Sarah God was declaring that she would become ‘mother of nations’.

Therefore, we see in the example of Abraham that God uses names to describe who the person is or will become.  The ultimate example of this is Jesus himself, God told Mary and Joseph that their baby must be called Jesus which means ‘God saves’ which is the promise to God’s creation that he plans to rescue them however further on in the New Testament he is referred to as ‘Christ Jesus’ this is a means to explain that he not only saves but was the promised ‘annointed’ one from God therefore fully explaining that Jesus has come from God to save /redeem his creation.

In Isaiah 9:6 we are told ‘For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders.  And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’. NIV

In Isaiah, we learn more about who Jesus is and what he came to do approximately 700 years before he did it; in this passage of the bible we see that Jesus takes on the image of the Godhead Father, Son and Holy Spirit he is a complete representative of all three aspects of God.  Jesus declares himself to be fully human and completely God therefore he is the only one who has the right to be called ‘The Christ’ because he is the only one who came from God to be fully human and was God therefore is also completely holy.  This demonstrates to us that he is the only one who has the both the weakness of flesh and power of holiness to take on the sin of the whole of creation, pay for the debt of our sin and have the ability to overcome death therefore showing us the way to eternal life.

Spend sometime reading through Isaiah and wonder at the detail God shares with us so that we can understand and respond to his purposes for our lives.

The greatest impact of Jesus’ name for me came a few years ago, when I was suffering from an emotional breakdown, life felt completely out of my control and I felt I was losing my mind.  Nothing made sense, my relationships were messy and my marriage seemed to be falling apart.

However, it was in the midst of this mess that Jesus challenged my thinking and challenged me to consider who He really was, not who I thought He was.  He showed me that I had been treating him as some sort of lucky charm turning to him when things were difficult but not fully giving my whole heart to him.  Over a period of a couple of months he showed me, through passages in the bible, that I was holding back my emotions from him and trying to present myself to him complete and in control.

The phrase ‘Do you believe I am who I say I am’ kept coming to my mind.  It took me awhile to turn to Jesus and say ‘OK then who do you say you are’ then the passage of Isaiah 9:6 kept repeating in my mind particularly ‘Wonderful Counsellor’ it was then that I realised that there was someone who could deal with my unruly, demanding emotions, Jesus himself.  He wanted me to stop expecting my husband or other people to be the solution to my demands expecting them to meet the needs that seemed to want to burst out of my heart.

Jesus himself wanted me to be honest with how I felt and in that declaration of honesty he showed me the healing I needed, he showed me that he was the only source that could provide me with emotional stability.  It took a lot of soul searching and a willingness to trust Jesus with every emotion going including; anger, bitterness, rage, jealousy the list seemed endless and painful. In time, he showed me the people I needed to forgive, those I needed to apologise to and those I needed to serve.

Today I can declare that I have emotional stability that I no longer demand my husband meets the needs I have, I no longer expect another human being to come along to solve my problems, my first port of call is Jesus himself; now I know what it is to make Jesus number one in my life and I am continually learning day by day how to do this.

This has resulted in an ability to trust others, to see their hurts and have a desire that others know Jesus the way I do, so they too can know of Jesus’ desire to care, ability to transform and provision for our eternal life.

The apostle Paul declared in 1 Timothy 1:15-17 ‘Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. 16 But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his immense patience as an example for those who would believe in him and receive eternal life. 17 Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen’.

Not that I am comparing myself with Paul’s standing with Jesus but I understand his motivation; that the reason I want others to know Jesus is that I know the power of Jesus’ forgiveness.

So what’s in a name? Our identity, the very essence of who we are.

Have you ever thought what life would be like if you could just have everything you wanted when you wanted it?

Worded like that it seems silly; to have everything we ever wanted, deep down we know to have everything we ever wanted doesn’t bring any sense of achievement or satisfaction. However, If we stop to consider what drives us we realise this is exactly what many of us pursue.

It has a real childish sound to it, doesn’t it?  We are quick to discipline our children when they demonstrate this kind of behaviour so why as adults do we have these same demands and expectations?

Some of you may be aware that there is an increasing obesity epidemic. Everywhere we go there are advertisements encouraging us to lose weight or join a gym.  In our schools our children are being taught about healthy eating and how too much sugar is bad for us. Health officials are even going round schools weighing our children and advising parents that their children are obese.  Governments around the world are investing huge amounts of money to encourage more people to lose weight as they believe this will save the country medical funds later down the line.

However, what if our focus is in the wrong place, what if our focus on healthy eating and exercise isn’t the starting point, what if our maker has already shown us the problem and has the solution available but we just can’t see it?

In the bible, we are made aware that our core problem is sin, what if the solution to the epidemic of obesity is recognising that we are sinners and are in need of a saviour?

Sounds too simplistic?

For 25 years I have been seeking Jesus solution for my addiction to overeating; the problem was I wasn’t ready for the answer that came back.

In the book of Colossians Chapter 3 verse 5 we read ‘ Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry’.

Here I came face to face with my problem; the source of my overeating was self-satisfaction in other words greed and the source of my greed was idolatry.  In other words food had become my God. How did this happen? How can I, a grown woman, be caught out like this and use food to medicate myself, use food to encourage myself, use food as a means of celebration, use food as a relationship replacement!

All these years of trying to lose weight, trying to exercise when I didn’t have the energy or the inclination, the lost years of trying to deal with internal issues by focusing on external solutions.

But this is what we do as human beings we try and fix the problem ourselves, we think if only I was size 10, if only I had more time to myself, if only people liked me……the list is endless.

The problem of my overeating was the age-old problem of sin and the only solution was to submit my whole life to the only one who could rescue me, the only one who knows me completely, the only one who willingly went to the cross to pay for my debt of sin.

Jesus Christ is our Saviour for a reason, because we needed him to be.