Yesterday, Lucy toddled over to a plate of cookies that were meant for dessert after dinner and asked me, “Cookie, Namma?” Now while I love to make her happy and see her eyes light up as I hand her a goodie, I knew she hadn’t had her dinner yet. “No, Lucy,” I said, “dinner first, then, cookie.” At 24 months she grasped and accepted what many of us do not: the “first this, then that comes later” concept.

I wondered how often we’ve ruined our appetites with life’s “empty calorie sweet things” and then turned up our noses at the real food that God provides.

Exploring along these same lines, one minister has written:

“The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie!

It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetites for heaven, but the endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we drink in every night.

For all the ill Satan can do, when God describes what keeps us from the banquet table of his love, it is a piece of land, a yoke of oxen, and a wife (Luke 14:18–20)….The most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but for the simple pleasures of earth. For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable, and almost incurable.”

As Greg says, “More die from food than poison.”

The final verse in Psalm 81 says that the LORD would feed us “with the finest of wheat, and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.”