PODCAST TRANSCRIPT | EPISODE 342: YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT
LIFE TO THE FULL w/ Nancy Campbell
EPISODE 342: YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT
What you eat physically determines your physical health, and what you eat spiritually determines your spiritual health. What does God’s word have to say about eating?
Announcer: Welcome to the podcast, Life to The Full, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.
Nancy Campbell: Hello, ladies! When this podcast goes out, it will be on New Year’s Eve this evening. I hope you've been having a wonderful Christmas time this year, and a wonderful Hannukah celebration. Now we’ll be going into the New Year. For New Year’s Eve, we’ll be gathering here on the Hilltop for games and fellowship. As we get to the end of the night, midnight, I don’t know whether I’ll still be up or not, we’ll be having Communion, and starting the New Year with God.
Today we’re going back to our discourse on what God told His people to do when they were captives in Babylon. He gave them seven things to do, the same things that He had told them in the very beginning. He tells them again, and said, “Now you're in captivity. You’re away from your beloved land, but I still want you to keep doing the very things that I gave you in the beginning.” They were such practical things; to build houses and dwell in them, to plant gardens and eat the fruit of them.
No. 4: TO EAT
Today, we’re up to number four, which is to eat what we plant. This is really for us physically and spiritually. The Word of God says: “first that which is natural, and then that which is spiritual” (1 Corinthians 15:46). Just about everything in the Word can speak to us in the natural and in the spiritual, because that’s what we are. We’re not only body. We’re body, soul, and spirit.
We’re going to look at this today. We’ll start off in the natural and then we’ll move into the spiritual. It comes from the Scripture in Jeremiah 29:5: “Plant gardens and eat the fruit thereof.” Here in America, it is wintertime, so we’re not actually planting our gardens yet. We’ll be waiting for spring.
We have just come back from New Zealand. It was a beautiful trip down to our home country. I was born in New Zealand, raised in New Zealand, and raised our children for the first part of their lives in New Zealand. Then we moved to Australia for ten years, and then we came to the States. We came in 1991, so we’ve been here for a good long time now. We consider America our home. We’re American citizens now.
But it is always wonderful to go back to our homeland. This time we went as a tribe of 14 of us. It was Serene and Sam, four of their daughters, and some of our granddaughters, and Arden and Esther, and little Gethsemane. It was great to take them back to the home where I was raised and then take them to the home where their mothers were raised. That was quite amazing.
We went up to this home (where we raised our children), and we said to the occupants, “We actually built this home. Would you mind if we had a little peek inside?” The lady said, “You come right in!” Can you imagine it? She allowed 14 of us to invade her home! She said, “Come on up to the bedrooms!” The girls wanted to know which bedroom their mothers slept in. It was so exciting for them. The old potbelly stove we had in the lounge was still there. Everything was looking lovely. It was so great.
Then we went on to Rotorua to see the home where my parents lived in their latter years, and which my children loved so much. It was a great memory for them. Sam, Serene’s husband, doesn’t know New Zealand. He booked all the air B&Bs before coming down to New Zealand. It was amazing. Every place where he booked an air B&B worked out unbelievably amazing! Right near where the family lived, and he didn’t know.
In fact, when we came to Rotorua, I said, “Sam, I wonder where you have booked this air B&B. Show me on your iPhone.” He opened up his iPhone, and he said, “Here it is.” There it said the words, “Kawaha Point.” I said, “I just can’t believe this! This is exactly where my parents lived!” He could have booked anywhere in the whole of Rotorua. There we were, so close, and it was only three minutes away. We could walk down the hill, down to the lake where my parents lived in this beautiful home overlooking the lake.
Then we went down to Palmerston North. We were in all these different places where we had lived, or where family had lived. We took the children to see the graves of my parents and Colin’s parents. It was a wonderful heritage trip for them. Of course, it was summertime in New Zealand. They are the opposite to us here.
The gardens! Oh, they were so beautiful. Everybody in New Zealand has beautiful gardens. Flower gardens, vegetable gardens, because the soil is so rich. It rains frequently over there. It’s a very temperate climate so the growth is amazing. In fact, you drive through New Zealand, and it’s like a park.
You look out at the grass and the fields and the hills and it’s so green! It’s like luminous green. Your eyes can hardly take it in! It’s so amazing. You go into the vegetable shops, and the greens and the cabbages and everything are all richer and greener and redder. Oh, it’s unbelievable! I think there’s also something about the ozone layer down there, because when I was a child, it was not as hot as it is here in Tennessee in the summer.
You could go out on a cloudy day, and it wouldn’t be too hot. It would be temperate. You wouldn’t think the sun could burn you, but, being a redhead, I would come in at night, and I would have blisters on my shoulders and blisters on my nose. I was a little freckle-face growing up. Somehow, the sun Down Under gives you lots of freckles, and it gives you lots of sunburn, and even blisters!
Oh, I remember one time going to the mountains on a ski trip in the snow. It was a sunny day in the snow. I came back from the worst blisters that I’ve ever, ever had in my life! Can you imagine that happening in the snow?
Even Pearl, little Pearlie, you all know who Pearlie is with Trim Healthy Mama. If you look at pictures of her today, you wouldn’t see a freckle on her face because they have all just faded away. But when she was a child, she had so many freckles! In Australia, where it was really hot, she didn’t even like to ever go out in the sun. My eldest son had so many freckles that they all grew into one big brown blotch, there were so many! But his have faded today too now we’ve been away from that New Zealand sun.
Anyway, I was talking about planting and eating from our gardens. It’s very much like what God says in Galatians 6:7: “Be not deceived. God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” That applies in the natural and in the spiritual. What we eat physically determines what our health will be like and what we eat spiritually determines what our spiritual health will be like.
A lot of people today eat a lot of junk food and a lot of fast food. I look back at pictures of when we were young and growing up in New Zealand. You can’t even find a picture of a fat person! Of course, I go back today, and it’s a little different, because now there are fast foods. I guess food is more plentiful and people have got bigger and bigger and bigger. It's amazing.
Of course, that’s the same here in the States. There are so many big and even fat people today. People don’t even mind showing their fat and showing their rolls. It’s become so normal. I think a lot of that is because so many people live on fast food, sugary foods, and fat foods. We are what we eat. Today, people eat, I think, even more than they used to.
But then in the spiritual, people really aren’t living on a lot of fat foods spiritually. They’re living on more shallow food because it’s not only the Word that we need to make us strong spiritually, but even other books that we read. You can read some very wonderful books that feed you spiritually but there are so many books that are so shallow. Not only shallow, they sometimes have a lot of evil in them.
Even so-called good books will have immorality and these things in them. It’s hard to find a book without them. When we’re reading books with immorality and adultery in them, well, we’re really siding with that which God says is a sin, a sin against our own body. In fact, when we remember the story of Joseph, when Potiphar’s wife came to him, and wanted him to lie with her. No! He wouldn’t and he ran from her. And he said these words, “How can I do this great evil and sin against God?” (Genesis 39:9). He looked upon it as a great evil.
But if we’re reading these kinds of things, well, we’re going to be very, very shallow spiritually. Very, very meager in our spiritual life. I often think of reading novels, even if it’s a good one if I’m reading one, maybe on a holiday or something, I like to find one that’s very good and wholesome.
But it’s like a dessert, I think. We can’t live on dessert. If we only lived on dessert physically, wow! That wouldn’t be very good. And it’s the same spiritually. We’ve got to have our meat and potatoes. We’ve got to have our real, good, solid food. The Bible speaks about that too, doesn’t it? It says a lot of people are just drinking the milk of the Word, because they’re not yet ready to have solid food. It’s the solid food in the spirit realm that makes you strong in the Lord (Hebrews 5:12-14).
It’s not a matter of just, “Oh well, even a little bit of God’s Word,” or just hearing it on Sunday. We have to be those who get into the meat, who dig into the solid meat of His Word to make us strong. Even when we’re reading books, we find books that are meaty and will encourage us in the ways of God and enlighten us of Who He is.
In fact, just the other night, we had our annual book party. Every year for so many years now, it became a tradition, we have our book party with all the couples in our family. All our children, and their spouses, and then my nephews and nieces and their spouses. It started when we were having Christmas Day, and the children were raising their children. They were all little. We would have so many in highchairs, or all sitting on the floor having their Christmas dinner. There were so many children screaming and running around. It was pretty wild.
I thought, “Wouldn’t it be good to have something that’s going to be special, just for the adults?” So, I got this great idea of getting all our children and their spouses together for a special meal. We would play the white elephant game, where you bring something, and you give everyone a number, and everyone chooses a gift.
Well, none of us could be bothered with getting stuff. Nobody wants more stuff for their home. We’re all trying to get rid of stuff! But we all love books. We all love reading, so I said, “OK, we’re going to play this white elephant game with books.” We did, and it was so much fun that we kept it going as a tradition.
Of course, now, all these little children who were little then at that time, they’ve all grown up. So many of them are married and have their own families now. Now we have a young couple’s book party. But we had our older adult book party the other night.
Once again, it was just a riot, because after a beautiful meal together, we all got into it. We all try to buy something that someone, or many, will want to fight for it! So, books are being passed back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until they actually win. What we do in our family, once you have got the book three times, then you have it. That’s yours by then. But they have to get it three times.
Many of the books are political or great stories. People search for the greatest books that there are around. But someone brought a book on Tozer, three books of A. W. Tozer put together, The Pursuit of God, The Way of Holiness, and so on. Oh, I looked at that book, and I said, “Wow!” I picked it up and hugged it to my breast, because Tozer is one of my greatest authors I love to read.
Have you read any books by Tozer? I encourage you to do so. He writes on the character of God, and he takes you into a new realm of understanding of who God is. One of my sons went home with that book. I said, “Rock, you're going home with the best book of the night!” Because there are books that are so meaty and so feed you. They’ll make you strong in the Lord if you eat those kinds of books.
So, we’re talking about eating, but let’s get back, shall we, to physical planting and eating. Let’s read here. Luke, oh yes, this is a very interesting Scripture. Luke 12:42. It’s a one-verse parable that Jesus told. There are quite a few parables in the Bible that are only one verse. They are pretty amazing. Actually, my husband spoke about them yesterday at church, two of them that were so amazing.
But this is Luke 12:42: “And the Lord said, who then is that faithful and wise steward, whom his lord shall make ruler over his household, to give them their portion of meat (or food) in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing.” A while back, I read that Scripture, and I looked at the word “household.” That’s another word for the home.
I thought, “I’m going to look up and see what that word is in the Greek,” because throughout the New Testament, the main word for “household,” or “home,” or “family” is the word oikos. It means “the home, the family.” But when I looked up this Scripture for “household,” it was a different word completely. It was the word therapeia. Wow. Already I began to think, “Wow, is that where we get our word ‘therapy’?” I looked up the meaning, and it means “to give care and attention, especially medical care; domestic, healing, health-giving.”
I thought, “That is so amazing. The word that’s used here for “home” is a “healing home.” God wants our households, our homes, to be healing homes. This word, therapeia, is only used in two other places in the Bible. In Luke 9:11, Jesus “spake unto them of the kingdom of God, and healed them that had need of healing (therapeia).”
Then again, in the last book of the Bible, Revelation 22:1-2: “And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” Once again, the word “healing” was therapeia.
So, God want us to have healing homes. Is your home, dear mother, a healing home? Are the foods that you are eating in your home healing foods? We, as mothers, are responsible for all the food that comes into our home, and the food that we give to our husbands and families. That’s our responsibility. Therefore, we must take it seriously.
We don’t go to the supermarket, get our trolley, and go around all the aisles, and “Look at this, ooh, that looks good! I think I’ll put it in my trolley.” Is that what we call them here? Or “carts”? I don’t know. I get mixed up. I still use words from New Zealand. What is it then? A cart? A cart! Yes! We must use “trolley” back in New Zealand. There are so many different words that we use that are so different.
Anyway, we can be taken away by something new, and something that looks pretty good. But we’d better remember to read the ingredients, because if we don’t, wow! We’ll be bringing home things with lots of stuff in them that we shouldn’t be eating.
Sometimes my husband will bring home something. He loves to have jam on his toast. He knows he’s meant to get healthy stuff, but he’ll bring it home. I’ll look at the ingredients, and I’ll say, “Darling, didn’t you read the ingredients?” Because the very first thing that it said was either cane sugar, or what’s that very bad one? Help! It’s just gone from me. Cane sugar isn’t as bad as this other one that is just about everything. I can’t even think of what it is at the moment! (Corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup!)
But we must watch what is in the ingredients. In fact, when I go to the supermarket, really, the main aisle I go to is the fruit and veggies aisle, although I prefer to get that out of my garden. But that’s where I go mostly. Then most of my grains, and all my things like that, cereals and grains and so on, I order online anyway.
I don’t really do a lot of shopping at the supermarket. But we do have to watch, ladies, that everything we bring into our home is healing food. When we’re buying it, we think, “Is this going to be healing for my husband and for my children?”
DON’T BRING ANY FOOD INTO YOUR HOME UNLESS IT IS HEALING FOOD
A lot of mothers will say to me, “Oh, my children love to eat this cereal, and they love to eat this, and they love to eat that, and they don’t really like the good things.” I say, “Well, have you got them in your home? Why have you even bought them? If you don’t have them in your home, well, your children are not going to be tempted to eat them! Don’t even bring anything into your home unless it’s a healing food.”
In fact, I never buy packaged cereals. I can’t believe that people do. You can go to Whole Foods and even buy so-called “healthy” packaged cereals. But they are still not the grain in its original state, how God gave it. It’s all changed. They might add a few things to give you a few good things. Most of them contain sugar, and sugar is a poison. I think you might as well eat the cardboard.
But when I’m having our breakfast grains, I will cook rolled oats, or the original oat groats. That’s my favorite. I love to soak the oat groats for about three days, changing the water every day. Then when they are soaked like that, boiling them up. They’re so beautiful. I love that. And millet, and quinoa, and so on, all these wonderful grains that you can cook up, right from scratch. You’re getting it in the original as God gave it to us.
Watch what you bring back into your home, dear mother. Don’t bring these foods, packaged foods, tinned foods that have sugar in them, and all these words that you can’t even pronounce. If you can’t pronounce the words, there’s all those additives. They’re not good for you, and many are cancer-forming. And all the colors that they add, many of them are cancer-forming.
Just keep to an original healing home, because that’s the word that is used in the Bible for “household.” Did you get it? Therapeia. Healing. Yes, we’re to be healing mothers, bringing healing to our families through the foods that we give them.
You notice in this word, “Plant gardens and eat the fruit of them.” Really, a lot of our food, a good proportion of it, well, really, the biggest portion should be from our garden! That’s what God planned in the very beginning.
Even when you go to the supermarket, even when you buy foods that are organic, you look at them, and help! They look a little bit wilted, and you think, “How long have they been sitting here?” Even when you buy organic lettuce and organic greens in those plastic containers, you get them home, they hardly last a day, and they’re getting all soggy. You find all these yellow ones in them. How long have they been sitting there?
But when you go out to your garden, you're picking it fresh! I just love springtime and summertime when I can go out to the garden. Lunchtime, and then suppertime, and pick things fresh! Oh, that’s how God wants us to eat them. That’s how we get the most healing from them. The most healing way to eat is to plant gardens and eat the fruit of them.
Then we read in Revelation that “the leaves are for the healing of the nations.” When we have healthy homes and healthy children in our healing homes, we’ll have a healthy nation. It says here “the leaves of the tree.” We drink a lot of tea, although Americans drink more coffee than tea. When I grew up in New Zealand, we were a tea-drinking country.
You wouldn’t believe this. Do you really want to know what it was like? OK. Of course, many of our New Zealanders were farmers, especially back when I was living there. It’s well over 40 years since we left the shores of New Zealand. But right up until that time, it was a tea-drinking country. They drank black tea, mainly.
I have to admit, I never liked the taste of black tea. My mother didn’t drink black tea. She didn’t like the taste of it. So, somehow, I grew up like her, not liking it. In fact, I hated the taste of it. It was a very, very embarrassing thing, because everywhere we went, you could only take one step into the home and people would be pouring out the tea! It was always black tea.
Before they could do it, I had to say, “Oh, sorry! Do you mind if I just have hot water?” Because back in those days, they didn’t even have all the alternatives. What do you call them? The teas that we have today? The herbal teas! Of course, the herbal teas. And I love herbal tea. They didn’t have them back there.
So, I would have to try and drink something else, and there wasn’t much else to drink but hot water. But everybody else would have black tea, and they got up in the morning first thing. If they were milking cows, or getting up early, they’d have their cup of tea. Then they’d come back for breakfast and have a cup of tea.
Then morning teatime. In New Zealand, you always have morning tea. It’s a little break between breakfast and lunch, and you’d have a cup of tea. Then at lunchtime, you’d have a cup of tea. Then in the afternoon, you’d have an afternoon tea break.
We even did this at school! We’d always have school, and then we’d have morning tea break. Actually, they didn’t give us tea at school. They used to bring around (because we were a dairy country), they brought round these little, pint bottles of milk. Every child had to drink this pint of milk. Oh, I used to want to gag, because sometimes it was sitting out in the sun, and it was all warm. Oh, you had to get down this pint of milk! But they were trying to make the nation healthy.
Then again, at afternoon teatime, you had your cup of tea. Often, they had two or three cups of tea. Then at teatime, which down in New Zealand, our teatime is what we call suppertime here. You’d have another cup of tea. Then, before you go to bed, you have suppertime. Our suppertime down under is what you call your main meal. But for us, it was a little snack and a cup of tea again before you went to bed. Everybody had that many teas, and some had even more in between. Can you believe it? Ooh! We were a tea-drinking country.
But now you go back to New Zealand and there’s hardly a person who drinks tea. They are all drinking coffee. They’ve copied the United States of America. In fact, I think they’re just about ahead. Everywhere you go, you can get coffee. Everyone is a barista who will do a beautiful design on your coffee. You go to coffee shops here in the states, and not everyone will do a design on your coffee. But every single coffee you get in New Zealand, there’s a design on it.
So, going back to the leaves. Now tea is made from leaves, and, of course, we now have our herbal teas, and they’re made from all kinds of leaves from different trees and bushes. Here the Bible is speaking about it. Tea is actually very healing because the Bible says: “The leaves of the trees.”
We think of vegetables, but even the trees, the leaves of the trees (unless you find a poisonous one), just about every tree, the leaves are healing. You can pick them, especially in the spring when they’re new and fresh, and you can put them in boiling water and make tea out of them. Because they’re healing.
Food is meant to be healing. There are two words in the New Testament for food. How much longer have we got girls? Oh, yes, about five minutes. OK, let me share this with you. The main word for food in the New Testament is trophe. It’s used 16 times in the New Testament, and it means “nourishment, both literally and figuratively.”
REAL FOOD IS NOURISHING
Food is to be nourishing. But if it’s not nourishing, then it’s not really food. A lot of foods we eat today are food, but they’re not nourishing, so they’re not real food. Real food is nourishing. Make sure you're nourishing your children, your family, with nourishing foods, trophe foods, mothers.
The other one is trepho. It’s used eight times in the New Testament. It’s amazing how much God talks about food. This is only the New Testament. Oh, He talks so much about it in the Old Testament. Trepho means “to fatten, to cherish with food, to pamper, to bring up, to feed, to nourish.” Once again, food is meant to be nourishing.
We see an interesting Scripture in Luke 4:16: “And Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up.” That is trepho. It’s interesting that it uses that word for raising a child, even for raising Jesus. Jesus’ mother, Mary not only raised Him and trained Him, but fed Him. Feeding our children is a big part of our mothering. So, Jesus was fed. He was brought up. He was nourished with physical food, but also spiritual food.
Dear mothers, we are the nourishers of our families. We’re to nourish them with physical food and nourish them with spiritual food that is good for their souls and their spirits. Not all this shallow junk that’s around today, on TV, and on social media. Oh, the children and the young people of our day are being raised on such shallow junk and many times evil junk. Oh, mothers, we have a responsibility. We are to nourish our children. That’s bringing them up physically and spiritually on the healing food.
1 Timothy 5:10, this Scripture speaks about the women who were widows. Paul was telling Timothy that these widows, if they had no one to care for them, and they had lived a certain lifestyle, they were to provide for them from the church. They had to be 60 years of age and older, and they had to have lived this kind of lifestyle. It’s a beautiful lifestyle.
We see it in 1 Timothy 5:10: “Well reported of for good works; if she has brought up children.,” That was the very first criteria, the very first thing that God said, “If she’s done this.” That’s the same word, trepho, “brought up and nourished” children. She fed the children, and she fed them nourishing food. And she fed them on nourishing food spiritually. She was a nourisher of her children. Then it goes on to say: “if she has washed the saints' feet, relieved the afflicted, lodged strangers, and done every good work.” But the first one was nourishing children, both physically and spiritually.
I do believe that our children’s memories of the home should be of the family table, with the aroma of good food, nourishing food, conversation, dialogue, and fellowship, because God loves to bring us to the table to eat—to eat for our physical bodies and to eat for our souls and our spirits too.
In fact, I think that everything that happens in life, we should celebrate with food!
Do you notice, as you read the Old Testament, that God mandated so many feasts to remember His ways? All the feasts of the Lord, they were literal feasts where they could feast on food and wine. What a wonderful thing to have a party for everything. God loves feasts and everything that He wanted them and us to remember, He ordained a feast.
That didn’t mean that they feasted every day. They ate basic, healthy food every day, but they were interrupted with feasts. I think that’s a wonderful way to live. That’s how we live. We eat basic food every day, but our lives are interrupted with lots of feasts, parties, anything to have a wonderful celebration as a family.
Time is up.
“Dear Father, we thank You again for Your living Word, which is so practical, and comes right down to the nitty-gritty of our lives in our homes. Thank You for showing us, Lord, that the word “household” is therapeia, to be a healing home.
“I pray, Father, that You will help each one of us to be healing mothers, healing our children with the foods we prepare for them. Healing them, and nourishing them with Your wonderful, living Word each day. Nourishing them with our encouraging and upbuilding, and Lord God, the good words that we speak into their lives.
“Help us to be truly nourishing mothers and healing mothers. We ask it in the precious Name of Jesus. Amen.”
Blessings from Nancy Campbell
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Transcribed by Darlene Norris
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