The Starting Point For Spiritual Warfare
Throughout history the spiritual fathers and mothers wrote extensively on the topic of spiritual warfare and the battleground of the mind. It is the plane on which the spiritual battle takes place. The enemy dispatches a variety of carefully crafted and pointed attacks on our mind, attempting to change our thinking. If he can influence our thoughts, our actions will undoubtedly follow.
The things that you think about give shape, emotion and direction to what you actually do. This is because thoughts are what drive your body to act. Our actions are a reflection of our character, which is embedded in our body. After all, as Dallas Willard often pointed out, character is what you do without thinking. The mind and body are the starting place on the journey towards character transformation and the forefront of the spiritual battle. Transform the mind and your body will follow.
A 4th century desert monk named Evagrius was one of the first people to articulate and map the attacks of the enemy on the monk’s mind. His initial work in this arena was what later became known in Christendom as the “7 deadly sins.” Evagrius wrote that there were 8 initial “thoughts” or “vices” with which the enemy attacked our mind. The goal for the enemy in hurling these thoughts was to derail the faith of the monk, sending him packing, ultimately giving up his life with God. In some ways, though we ourselves may not find a great deal of commonality with the monks of the Egyptian desert, we all know the attempts of the enemy to pull us as far away from God, our source of life, as possible.
Gluttony: The First of All Attacks
Evagrius wrote that the initial attack the enemy hurls upon the one who has chosen to follow God comes in the form of what we’ve come to know as “gluttony.” Today gluttony is often associated and reduced to pictures or Hollywood representations of morbidly obese individuals. The idea of gluttony nothing more than overeating and excess indulgence that attacks the “unhealthy.” In our culture, gluttony has come to represent an uncontrollable gorging of oneself with food. But gluttonous thoughts are so much more insidious and are undoubtedly the entry point for most of the initial spiritual warfare experienced by God’s people.
Gluttony is not something the church often talks about. In fact, I can’t remember a single time the “thought” or “vice” of gluttony was discussed in any bible study I’ve participated in or sermon I’ve heard. But looking past the initial Hollywood version of gluttony we see a series of thoughts and attacks that are common to almost all of us. Gluttony, as the monastics saw it, was “madness of the stomach.” For the monastics, the stomach represented much more than the place where food was digested. The stomach represented the seat of the inward life – the place where feelings and desires sat.
These gluttonous thoughts seek to manipulate the deepest desires and feelings that lie within us. What are the deepest, underlying desires within a person? Look no further than the chart your 10th grade teacher threw up on a transparency in biology class – Maslow’s hierarchy of needs suggests to us that at the base of our being, our desires are tied to physiological needs and safety needs. In other words, things like food, water, warmth, rest, security and safety are the some of the most primal desires we have as humans.
And this is precisely the first place the enemy tries to disrupt.
Something Terrible Is Going To Happen…
It goes something like this:
“Hmm, why won’t this pain in my side go away? This has really been bothering me for a few days, feels kind of strange. It’s probably nothing. But what if it’s serious. It could be serious. What if it’s cancer?! What if this pain is something like a tumor? Yeah, that would be just my luck, it’s probably a tumor. It just feels different than usual. Will our insurance even cover that? Our out of pocket is pretty high. We should have picked a different plan. This could bankrupt us. How am I going to work if that happens? Will God even help us if that happens? God probably won’t come through. I have to figure out how to make more money and get better insurance in case this pain doesn’t go away.”
Or…
“Oh no, have you seen the latest numbers on the economy? They don’t look good. I read the work force is going to contract. We’re probably headed into a recession. I think my job’s safe. Well, I hope my job’s safe. I heard lots of people are being laid off. I wonder if I’ll be next. How are we going to make ends meet when I lose my job? We have to make sure we’re ready if it gets really bad. I have to figure this out. Who’s going to help us if my job goes? We can’t make it without my salary. I have to figure something out. I should probably look for another job just in case.”
And just like that, our minds are off to the races.
That’s what gluttony does. It actively works to try and get the person of God to give up their life with God because, after all, “you probably have an incurable disease or something awful is going to happen to you, and God surely won’t help you – you’re on your own.”
It Happened To Them, It’ll Probably Happen To Me Too…
Along with these thoughts of imminent threat, come a slew of images filled with people and experiences found in the recesses of our memories – reminders of those who’ve suffered.
“Remember Michelle, her hair was so beautiful, was the chemo even worth it?”
“Mike lost his job and never recovered; I hope we don’t end up like his family.”
“Remember that story of the girl who was hit on the side of the road on the interstate, I don’t know what I’d do if I lost my little girl.”
“You saw those pictures of the floods in California, awful, we’ve had some brutal storms lately, whole subdivisions were completely submerged and washed away.”
Ultimately the thoughts associated with gluttony attempt to drive us to obsess over our physical survival and the imminence of disaster that undoubtedly (or so it’s presented to us) will cause our downfall. It attempts to lull us into thinking we alone are responsible for our survival and must do everything and anything we can to secure it. Gluttony preys on our deepest desires for safety and provision.
And when gluttony takes root in our mind it produces some ugly fruit. For we know, that the things we think about direct our actions.
I’m On My Own, God Won’t Come Through…
When we attempt to take matters into our own hands, believing we’re on our own, it often leads us to build resentment towards God. The list of resentments borne from the entertained thoughts associated with gluttony are legion. “God, you didn’t provide. You didn’t help us. You are too slow to act.”
These thoughts drive us to “overeat.” In a sense, it’s a way of hoarding for various facets of our life. Whether we horde physical food, money, or stuff, it is an active overconsumption rooted in the fear that I will not have what I need when I need it. In a way, it drives us mad, because ultimately, when we say yes to the lies of gluttony there will never be a point where we have “enough,” for the enemy will perpetually move the goal posts.
Take for instance, a fear that your car will imminently break down. The gluttonous thoughts will drive us to do everything we can to make sure that the car is “ok.” In our mind, we think, once we “know” it’s all fixed and in great working condition we’ll feel better. But what really happens when we entertain these thoughts? As soon as we “fix” all the potential threats with the car, our mind in conjunction with the enemy, immediately changes the game: suddenly we’re worried that our house is falling apart. This is the result of “overeating,” we horde to protect ourselves, but it’s never enough, it’s insatiable and ultimately makes us sick even unto death.
When we give ourselves over to gluttony, it can drive us to long for things that we don’t have. For the monks it was the desiring of delicate or “special” foods that were never a part of their diet. For us, it can simply be longing for the things that we don’t have, shifting our attention evermore towards our lack and away from our Provider.
We Don’t Have To Live That Way…
The thoughts that come with gluttony drive us headlong towards avarice; for, “if only I had a house like that, then I’d feel safe.” “If only I had a bigger paycheck so I could grow our savings and investment accounts, it’d be so much easier to weather the recession that’s coming.”
When you say it aloud, it’s obvious how ridiculous it sounds. But when we so much as entertain the gluttonous thoughts in our minds, the enemy subtly and quickly invites us to double down on our perceived lack, further driving the wedge between the true faithfulness of God and our perception of God’s lack of care and provision. This is precisely what Paul gets at when he says to not give the enemy even a foothold. The image of one who’s so engorged they look as though they’ll explode is a powerful metaphor. To live with a constant fear of never having enough or that the next horrible thing is right around the corner is an enslavement that leads us straight to death. It flies in the face of scripture’s continual exhortation to “let tomorrow worry about itself.” The truth is we were never intended to live like this.
Spiritual warfare often begins with gluttony, attacking our mind as much as our stomachs. It seeks to make us believe we won’t have what we need and we’re on our own to figure it out. Nothing could be further from the truth. The important thing for us to remember is that when we understand the lies, we can more intently hold on to the truth.