How the Holy Spirit “flavors” your life so you want to live for God …

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I wear multiple hats, from minister, to Christian clinical therapist, to Personal Trainer. As a Personal Trainer, I witnessed all kinds of ways people try to lose weight, most of which were ineffective for long-term weight management.

But this story, as reported by Harry Jackson for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, caught my attention …

    Renee Berdar, 51, of Weldon Spring, says it’s easy to lose 250 pounds. OK, maybe not all that easy, but it worked for her.

    “I just didn’t eat anything I liked to eat,” she said. That’s what she decided when her weight topped 420 pounds nearly three years ago. “My problem was if I liked what I was eating, I’d eat all of it. If I liked the flavor, I’d just keep eating.”

Berdar was able to shed a remarkable amount of weight by making her food intake as bland as possible. That’s because her temptation was for food with flavors she enjoyed; instead of exercising self-control over deliciously flavored food, she opted to make her food as unappealing as possible.

Many think that’s the only way to get through other temptations in life. Instead of realizing the power for self-discipline that God supplies us (2 Timothy 1:7), some think they have to rid their lives of all the things they like and want and settle for doing what they don’t want.

That is not the life God has called us to!

Instead, He’s done a miraculous work of giving to us the gift of the Holy Spirit, who “flavors” for us the things of God so that we have new desires! One unidentified commentator noted this about the work of the Holy Spirit:

    To aid us on this journey, God doesn’t just leave us with a list of “do”s and “don’t”s, but offers us the gift of the Holy Spirit. And with this gift comes a whole new set of desires — godly desires. This is how God empowers believers to love those things that are good for them, things that produce blessing. By the work of God’s Spirit, we prefer others before ourselves, we show mercy rather than seek revenge, we seek to serve rather than be served.

    Don’t settle for a life of doing what you don’t want to do in order to avoid the negative consequences of doing what you do want to do. Let God change what you want! Then your life will be filled with both goodness and joy.

Instead of a bland life, God changes His adopted children to enjoy the flavors of holy living! The Apostle Paul put it this way:

“For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him,” Philippians 2:13.

Life becomes “delicious” with the joy of God by having our minds and hearts transformed so that His desires become our desires. If you’re still desiring the junk of this world, you may be “grieving” or pushing against the transforming work of the Holy Spirit in your life. If you yield to the Holy Spirit, you will soon have a desire and taste for what pleases God, and the joy of God will abound in you.

Scotty