What you feed your body when you’re hungry shapes you, literally and metaphorically. If your diet is made up of fast food, sweets, and other junk your body will (most likely) begin to put on weight. If instead you eat wisely and fill yourself with the foods that have been proven to be good for the human body odds are you’ll live longer and be significantly more healthy. An oversimplification, but it’s true nonetheless.
And it’s true not only in regards to physical food and our physical body, but also for our spiritual “bodies”. The author of Proverbs states it this way,
The heart of him who has understanding seeks knowledge,
but the mouths of fools feed on folly.
– Proverbs 15:14
Fools and Folly
When you experience hunger or cravings within your physical body you have a choice about what you’re going to use to satiate that hunger. Similarly, when you have cravings or hungers in your emotional or spiritual self you choose what you will turn to to find fulfillment.
When fools hunger they feed themselves on folly. The result? They get even more foolish. The fool fills himself with folly and exacerbates the problem rather than resolving it.
We always have a choice to make about what we will fill ourselves with. When you’re tired after a long week do you feed yourself on the folly of a night spent drinking, or do you find the rest that you actually need? When you crave the deep emotional connection that we are wired for do you seek it in healthy friendship and in Christ, or do you feed on the folly of false intimacy found in pornography or scrolling through your social media feeds?
Seek knowledge
No one wants to be a fool. The writer of this proverb intends for us to to be spurred towards living as person who has understanding and seeks knowledge instead of feeding on folly.
What are you prioritizing in your life? Are you feeding yourself more on the folly of mindless sitcoms, Netflix binges, and social media or are you seeking knowledge and wisdom? The two are mutually exclusive. You can’t fill yourself with junk food and expect to be healthy and strong. You can’t fill your soul with entertainment and distraction and expect to grow in the wisdom of God.
My challenge for you this week is this – cut your mindless entertainment and social media time in half. Fill that half with some form of knowledge seeking. If you spend an hour a day watching a show on Netflix, take three of those seven days and instead watch a documentary that challenges your way of thinking. If you only read popular fiction novels, make the next book you read something non-fiction. If you normally start your day with fifteen minutes of social media before rolling out of bed, spend the first seven engaging in prayer instead.
What you fill yourself with will shape who you become, and I know none of us set out wanting to become ignorant fools. Let’s make sure that our choices and what we feed ourselves with the things that make us who God has created us to be.
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