Beloved Reg

       Are you familiar with a certain slimming product that claims to burn down the carbohydrates you will take in even you eat a lot of it? The first time I saw it on a commercial; I got tempted to buy and try it. Just imagine, the same volume of food I enjoy, yet I will never get fatter. What a dream come true. It would be very tempting to have this product because you can have two birds in one shot. But how this become an unhealthy mindset for me? It’s because I neglected the essence of why I would want to lose weight – to stay healthy.

     The same is with our bad habits and Christ. We cannot both keep our ugly old life together with Christ. It is true that Christ can remove those unnecessary weights in my life, but why would I keep on taking in lots of carbohydrates when I know that my body won’t need that? If I have been set free from my old life and I am now a new creation, why would I keep on sinning? I know there’s enough grace for any sin I would do; but that’s not the way God wants me to live, Jesus came to set me free from the extra carbohydrates that are surely just a waste for my body.

      He doesn’t want me to regularly do my bad habits and then do a ministry work, attend all the services of the week or read my Bible from cover to cover whenever I start to feel the guilt. I believe that Jesus is not a regular solution for my recurrent weight problem but He is, a once and for all, the only solution for it.

2. I decided to lose weight (again) for someone.

             If you have decided to lose weight to impress that certain guy in your Math 17 recit class, then you are doing it wrong. Why? Because you are doing it in vain.  I did that years ago wherein I tried so hard to lose weight for a guy but ended up frustrated and even resulted to eating more due to rejection.

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             As Christians, there are more pressures given to us. People expect us to be nothing less but perfect individuals. Hence, many times, we got conscious if what we are doing, how we do it is still able to meet other people’s standard for us. I know it is just right that we do good works. But once we focused more on pleasing these people around us and forgetting why we are supposed to be doing things right, we might end up burnout and frustrated of doing it. Worse is, when rejection comes, just like what I did before, we might find ourselves rebelling, and doing the opposite things of what we are supposed to be doing.

               We have to keep in mind why we are doing good works. It is not to impress the people around us. It is not to gain approval from other people, even from God. We do good works because you know that God give you an identity that is more than just being a couch potato during weekend. That there’s more to life than keeping my unhealthy lifestyle.

3. I skipped meal. I ended up eating more.

               One of the craziest diet tips I got from a friend: Skip your lunch. I thought that since I eat nothing during lunchtime, there are fewer tendencies for me to gain weight. I sacrificed my lunch dates with my friends so that I won’t be tempted to eat. However, during dinner it is when I eat most. Two cups of rice, TJ hotdogs, coke. At school my classmates think that I am already determined to lose weight but they didn’t know what I am eating when at home.

                Just like skipping meals, we tend to spontaneously remove bad habits that we have. Perhaps, it might be of help, but I assure you, it won’t be permanent. Why? Because the more we manually change our sinning in our own way, the more we become aware of how to unchange it. It’s just physical solutions; the problem is something from within. On Sundays, we sing praise and worship, on Tuesdays, we attend small groups, Wednesday or Thursday we attend Youth Service, but how about our Fridays and Saturdays? What do we do during those times we are not surrounded by other people?

                   It is so hard to overcome old life by simply not doing a bad habit without replacing it with the Truth that would make us healthy. In our nutrition life, it would not be easy to follow a diet plan without accepting the fact that the way we eat food is not right. It is hard to be consistent eating balanced food when everyday we are served with many junk foods of life. But what God’s word is saying that HE has the best “diet plan” for every one of us (Jeremiah 29:11), plans to prosper us and not to harm us and that in every temptation, he is faithful and will provide a way out (1 Corinthians 10:13).