We're back with guest Paul David Tripp, the author of the book "Awe, Why It Matters for Everything We Think, Say, and Do," a book which easily made my top ten list for best books of 2015. And this week we're talking about awe and how it really does relate to everything in life, specifically to our spiritual growth, our Bible intake, our ministry aims, and even our news consumption, our anxieties, our weight loss attempts, our parenting methods, and our expectations of marriage and romantic love.

And today we're going to talk about weight loss. Paul, the physical side of weight loss is going to happen in a lot of different ways for various people, but there seems to be a common spiritual dimension to weight loss that we all need to be aware of. And you mentioned your own weight loss journey briefly.

Share with us what you learned in the process. You know, one of the things that I encountered in my own walk with God is how there are always areas of inconsistency that need to be addressed. And one of those for me was my relationship to food. I love how much of the glory of God in creation is edible.

That's a sweet thing that God created a pleasurable world of food, but that pleasure of food is meant to be a finger that points me to God. It's not meant to be the thing that satisfies my heart. And so what was happening to me is, you know, if you gain a half a pound a month, you don't notice it, but that's six pounds a year, and in five years, you put on 30 pounds.

And that's all the result of the pleasure of food having too much control over the way you think about a good evening or a good day or a good week. And so I've had to confess that, confess patterns of gluttony, and completely change my relationship to food to eat what I should eat for the maintenance of my physical body.

The result of that is the loss of about 40 pounds. And for me, it was not about weight so much as, I mean, that was an issue, but living in a more appropriate way. - Yeah, so for a Christian who has tried diet fads, where do they start when it comes to the spiritual questions?

- Well, here's the thing we all need to face when it comes to weight and diet, that diets don't work. One of the things that just makes me angry, I hope it's righteous anger, is this industry, this billion dollar industry that's making promises to people that are not true.

Because diets don't address the cause of the gaining of weight. And because they don't address the cause, they don't actually work. I mean, you can't starve yourself forever. It's not healthy to eat packaged Franken food forever. It's only when your heart is properly satisfied with God that you now have the power to say no to other things that would tempt you to go there for satisfaction.

- Thus we return to awe in God, which is what we talked about last time. So gluttony emerged for you. When did this root cause of weight gain confront you? When did you confront it? - You know, a couple of things. It was initiated by the wedding of my son.

I thought, you know, I've gained a lot of weight. And I began to think about that. And what really hit me was as I began to eat in a different way, how hungry I felt, how sort of impoverished I felt. But I wasn't really hungry. It was just that I was so used to loading my body with so many more calories than I actually needed.

And it was that going through that hunger that really alerted me to the fact that food had been too much present in my life. And I'm not hungry anymore. You would probably watch me throughout a day and you would think this man eats like a bird. But I eat what I need to eat.

And I've, you know, kept my weight off for four years. And there's just no going back because it's not just that I eat different things, but the lifestyle of my heart toward food has changed. Very good. Thank you, Paul. And we're going to return tomorrow and transition to talk about awe and how it really helps to simplify the aim of our ministry work, all of it.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with guest Paul Tripp. We'll see you tomorrow. you