Welcome friends to the Line of Fire. Michael Brown here as we come to the end of 2024. We are taking into a message I preached in 2017 on breaking the stronghold of food.
I was 3 years into the journey, 10 years in now, and it gets better every day. So, let us go to this message. Pastor Ron's one of the kindest men you'll ever meet, isn't he? So, Amen. You asked me to say something else?
No, just kidding. But each time I've been here, I've been asked to address a different, pretty intense, controversial subject in each service. So, each meeting is going to be different.
And last year, year before, folks came to the all weekend meeting. So, if you want to do that first service tomorrow morning, nothing controversial. We're just going to talk about the church and the immigration issue. And then the second service, again, wanting to avoid all controversy, we're going to talk about the church and gay activism.
But seriously, we'll address everything in a redemptive way, everything in a Jesus glorifying way, and then after the second service, we'll be taking questions as well. All right, real quick before we open the Word together, how many of you are connected with me on social media? Facebook or Twitter or YouTube? Okay, great. Many of you aren't, so if you're online, if you are connected in social media, you can find how to connect with me on my website, AskDrBrown.org.
AskDrBrown.org, jot it down, AskDrBrown.org. We have literally thousands of hours of free resources there for you. Every week, I'm writing between three and five new articles on key cultural and spiritual subjects that will be eye-opening and practical. Every week, we're putting out several new videos dealing with political issues, cultural issues, biblical questions, cutting-edge interviews and things. We've got two hours of live radio five days a week.
You can get it all on the internet. And then when you're on the website, you'll see a link to connect Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. We just released a video of a debate I did with an Orthodox Jewish rabbi last week at Kennesaw State University asking the question, who is Jesus, the Jewish Messiah? So that video has just been released on our YouTube channel, so make sure you connect with us.
AskDrBrown, AskDrBrown.org, and from there, connect to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. And the book that discusses the subject of the night, I've been asked to address this, it's my joy, is Breaking the Stronghold of Food. And the front cover of this book is this really decadent bacon cheeseburger and fries. And once you break the stronghold of food, you eat all this healthy stuff that's pictured there.
So this is before you break it, that's after you break it. But I believe tonight's going to be tremendously helpful and life-changing for many. And if a question does come up while I'm speaking, go ahead, text it to the number you heard, and then we'll be able to answer some of your questions afterwards.
And I'd strongly encourage you, get the book, it'll tell you my story and my wife Nancy's story and how our lives were transformed. Let's pray together. Thank you, Lord. Father, I pray for life, for liberation, for hope, and for tangible change to come as a result of this message, which really is a message of life and death. Give us ears to hear, give us a heart to receive, give us a will to respond.
I ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen. If you told me three years ago that I would write a book, co-authored with my wife Nancy, on breaking the stronghold of food, I would have thought it was an April Fool's joke. It is April 1st today, but this is no joke.
If God could help me make a change in this area, He could help anyone. I was the poster boy for unhealthy eating my entire life until two and a half years ago. I used to eat Oreos for breakfast as a boy growing up. When I taught at a Bible school on Long Island from 1983 to 1987, there was a fabulous pizzeria right nearby. And as a New Yorker, I knew good pizza and it was two miles from the school.
And we estimated that in my time teaching in that school and those four years when I lived there, we estimated I ate 3000 slices of pizza at that one pizzeria. I was not so much a glutton as an unhealthy eater. So whatever I say tonight, please hear me. This is a no condemnation zone. All right.
This is a no embarrassment zone. Some people have struggled all their lives with food, with unhealthy eating, and there are many reasons why we can develop bad habits. And some it's all that we've known.
And some are overweight because of a trauma in their life and fighting depression. The last thing we want to do is make someone feel bad or guilty. But we want to help and we want to talk about the importance of transforming our relationship to food. And you'll actually see that this is a scriptural issue. And I was talking to a friend of mine who prays for the sick and has a ministry of healing the sick. And I said to him, for every one person that gets healed through your prayers, a thousand people will get healed if they change their lifestyle.
This really is a life and death issue. We want to help you tonight. First, let's read from First Corinthians chapter nine, First Corinthians chapter nine, beginning in verse twenty four. I'm going to read some scripture.
I want to tell you my own story and you can laugh at me as I tell you my story. And then I want to give you some practical principles that can help bring about a radical change in your life. Paul writes here, verse twenty four, Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.
Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last. But we, we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore, I do not run like a man running aimlessly. I do not fight like a man beating near. No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.
And go back to verse twenty five. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.
When we read those verses, we put the emphasis on the type of crowns that we receive. An athlete trains, an athlete is disciplined. They work so hard, they sweat, they sacrifice.
For what? For an earthly gold medal, for an earthly crown. But we, as we serve the Lord, we receive a crown that will last forever.
Yes, that is what Paul's saying, but notice what he says. They are disciplined in all things. They do it to receive an earthly crown, but we do it.
What? We are disciplined in all things also. Part of the fruit of the spirit that Paul describes in his list in Galatians five is self-control.
And Paul speaks about others, false teachers, and he says their God is their stomach. And when you read the scriptures, the few times it mentions gluttons, it's always in a negative context of being decadent and destructive and out of control. Unfortunately, so much of our American lifestyle is unhealthy. The culture in which we're raised is unhealthy. Our foods are unhealthy. What surrounds us is unhealthy.
Dr. Joel Fuhrman, who's an expert in these areas and whose guidelines we follow, said that we're digging our own graves with our knives and forks. So this is something that we don't want to just ignore and say, well, we want to be spiritual. We want to talk about spiritual things. This is spiritual. And as we gain the mastery of it spiritually, we can see transformation in the natural.
And then that natural transformation can help us minister much more effectively to others in the spirit. I don't know if you have pictures before and after. If you do, you can put them up. But August, there we go, August 24th of 19 excuse me, of 2014, I weighed about 275 pounds. I'm a big guy. I work out. I might have looked like some burly football player. But the fact of the matter is, speaking about me, I was obese.
I was fat and I was bothered by it because I thought, this is not in harmony with the way I live the rest of my life. I live a disciplined life. I lead a serious life. I'm disciplined in all these ways, but I've got these miserable eating habits and I'm addicted to certain foods. I'm a chocoholic. And I thought, that's not right.
It's not conducive to how I live. And people didn't point it out and say, Mike, you should lose weight. But I was aware of it. And there were other issues. And this is why my wife Nancy was really praying. You can put her pictures up before and after. Nancy had made her own radical lifestyle change. And she had seen the health benefits of it. And for her, she had really been paralyzed by being overweight. It affects everybody differently.
It didn't slow me down a drop in terms of preaching and ministering and doing what I was doing. But she was terribly embarrassed by being overweight and so paralyzed by it. She was in aches and pains from head to toe. And even though she's about a foot shorter than me, she's about 5'3", she got up to about 200 pounds. And I never thought she weighed that much. And hey, I loved her anyway. She's beautiful to me anyway, but she hated being overweight and was just getting run down and thought, I am hurting my health seriously and I need to make a change. And she had made a radical change in her whole lifestyle. But we knew it would never work for me because I was too much of a food wimp. We knew it never worked for me because all the foods that she was eating, the healthy foods, I didn't like. And all the foods I liked, I wouldn't be able to eat anymore. And plus, I'm on the road constantly, so there's no possibility of me making the changes she made. All right, we've got to take a brief break for an important announcement.
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Michael Brown delighted to bring you back into our 2017 message on breaking the stronghold of fruit. I pray it will be a blessing to you. But as we got into 2014, I remember telling her, you know, I'm getting run down. I was getting three to four headaches every single week. I had constant lower back pain. I had severe sleep apnea. So wherever I'm traveling around the world, I had to bring a breathing machine with me.
And here I am in some small hotel in India trying to find an outlet to plug in the breathing machine at night. It's just what I'm living with. My cholesterol had always been a little high, but the bad was always way too high. And the good was low.
And I thought, you can't play with this. And my blood pressure got as high as 149 over 103. And Nancy was praying. She thought, you're crazy the way you're living. You push so hard, I would work out heavily. And she said, you're playing with fire. You got high blood pressure.
You're overweight. You're playing with fire. And I remember sitting talking with her and I said, you know, I'm getting tired as I think about the future.
I was 59. I'm getting tired. I live with this incredible optimism. I can't wait for the next day and the next ministry opportunity and the next debate and the next thing we're doing and the next trip overseas.
I live with this incredible optimism and energy. But I was getting worn out. It's the first time she ever heard me talk with anything less than tremendous optimism for the future. So she was crying out to God on her end. And she was saying, God, help Mike.
And she was saying, God, give me ideas of food I can give him because he's such a food wimp. And I was praying. I said, God, I've got to make a change.
I've got to make a change. I didn't know she was crying out. She didn't know I was crying out.
I sat down with her August 23rd and I said to her, my plan is not working. You see, I always figured, well, if I just have a little less M&M's here, if I just work out a little bit more here. And, you know, if I was going to get, say, go to Dairy Queen and get a chocolate extreme blizzard, you know, and, you know, I'd skip a meal so to balance it out for having that, you know, and one less slice of pizza here. If I was going to Ben and Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk that night, you know, and I thought, OK, my plan is not working. It's been years.
And as I'm getting older, the way eight years ago, it's not working now. And I'm getting heavier and I'm always looking at the trajectory. If I keep living like this another year, another five years, another 10 years, where is it going?
What's it going to look like? And I thought, you know, I've got clothes that fit me. If I'm a little bit lighter, I get clothes that fit me here. And now the clothes, the fat clothes are getting tight. And I thought, I'm not.
I can't. I'm not getting other clothes. I said to her, my plan is not working.
She said to me, just eat what I give you. Now, bear in mind, in the months ahead, I was going to go to Singapore for two weeks. I was going to go to Hungary for four or five days. I was going to go to India and to Malaysia.
So I was going to have a lot of overseas trips, plus trips around the States. How in the world am I going to sustain any of this? But I knew I had to make a change. So August 24th, 2014, I started a brand new way of living. Less than eight months later, less than eight months later, I had lost 95 pounds.
Not by dieting, but by transforming my relationship to food and completely getting rid of all the bad stuff and eating only good stuff without deviation by the grace of God. And when people ask me, when Pastor West picked me up at the airport last year, and he said to me, how often do you cheat? I said, how often do you cheat on your wife? Hey, if it's wrong, if it's destructive, it's unhelpful, why cheat?
Why play games with it? Less than eight months, I lost 95 pounds. My cholesterol went down to 123. Blood pressure went down to 100, over 65. Haven't had a headache in two and a half years. Lower back pain disappeared. And I no longer need a breathing machine for sleep apnea.
My energy level is off the charts. My immune system radically transformed. And by God's grace, I'm not looking back or turning back or experimenting with what would happen if I tasted a peanut M&M.
But hear me. It was harder for me to give up chocolate than to give up heroin. I'm not exaggerating. I was a heroin shooting, LSD using, rebellious hippie rock drummer when Jesus saved me in 71. And I got radically wonderfully set free and changed. But when it came to food, I knew I was going to go cold turkey. So I got rid of all the junk, no chocolate, no breads, no this, no all the stuff I ate all the time, none of it. And I went through three miserable days of withdrawal.
I remember just feeling lousy all the time. And I thought, okay, this is good because it means toxins are leaving my body. This is good because it means bad stuff is leaving my body that shouldn't be in there. Poisons are leaving my body.
This is not stuff I should be having. And I thought, hey, I'm a day and a half into this. If I quit now, next time I start, I got to do it again. And what makes me think I'm going to do it again? And the third night I got hold of God and I prayed and I said, Jesus, when you set me free from drugs, you were so real to me. You so filled my life. I didn't care about any of this stuff.
I didn't care about drugs. I didn't want, you were so real to me. I said, surely you're more real to me than a chocolate donut. Surely the power of the Spirit is greater than the power of M&M's. And I cried out to God.
I got free that night. And now the next problem was renewing my mind. Changing the way I related to food. Every day Nancy would send me another testimony of someone's life transformed by the changing their lifestyle and changing their diet.
And she'd send me quotes from Dr. Fuhrman just to encourage. I mean, just simple things like you'll never fulfill the purposes and goals for your life if you're chronically sick or dead. Just simple things like that. Reminders. And then I started to think about everything in life. And nothing had any meaning with it if it didn't involve food.
I began to think about it and said, wait a second. Why go on vacation if you can't eat whatever you want to eat? And why take the grandkids to a family movie if I can't get nonpareils and popcorn? And why go to the airport if I can't get Sbarro's pizza and TCBY yogurt?
And why do I want to fly on this flight going to India if I can't get the pretzel rolls? And I thought, well, everything in life is about food. And I realized food was my reward. See, everybody eats for different reasons. Some are just gluttons. You just love food and you eat because you love food.
You're addicted to it. Some eat. You're depressed and discouraged and you eat. Someone stops smoking cigarettes and they put on 20 pounds because they substitute one habit with another. But for me, food was my reward.
And I had to understand it to break the stronghold. And I remember thinking, okay, when I get to a hotel, because I'm on the road all the time, and sometimes when you arrive at the hotel, they have fresh baked chocolate chip cookies there. That's like a gift from God. You'd be a bad steward. I mean, I think I'd be a bad steward.
They're free. They're at the hotel. I'd be a bad steward not to eat it. And here I finish preaching. Maybe it's a Sunday. I preach, you know, two, three services in the morning and then another service at night. And then you get back to the hotel.
What do you do? Well, I'm not going to put on some unclean movie. I'm not going to get high. I'm not going to sit. But you eat. Heat up some nice popcorn, maybe order a pizza. That's the reward.
You earned it. And then I write most nights. I write all night. So here, as I'm writing, what do you do? Well, eat, snack, have some pretzels, have some jelly beans, have some more pretzels, have chocolate ice cream.
And that's part of the reward, part of the perk of writing all night. So I had to say, no, no, no. Food is the fuel for life. I'm not living to eat. I'm eating to live. The reward of life is life, not food.
Food is the fuel to life. Think of it. You eat a meal. How long does it take? How long does it take to eat your meal?
Think of it. I mean, maybe 20 minutes, maybe a half hour. Sometimes you guzzle it down five, 10 minutes. And then you've got to pay the price of that meal the rest of the day. And then as you start to get older and your body starts to break down because you haven't been putting healthy stuff in it, you're paying the price for those few minutes of pleasure. And there's nothing spiritually that we relate to in that way. We know that you discipline yourself rather than have the few minutes of pleasure for years of pain. Or the person, they commit adultery, they have that excitement and the thrill, but then they destroy their marriage.
Or the person goes out and gets drunk and then gets killed in a car wreck. You think it's not worth it, but we do it with food. And the problem with food is that we need it to live, and we're surrounded by it all the time. I was flying somewhere the other day, I think coming back from California, and they offered me a meal. I said, no, I'm good, no thanks. And at first they come by with the nuts, the salted nuts. I said, no, I got my own. Just had some unsalted raw nuts with me.
Great, I'll have those. Time for the meal. No, I got a salad.
I'm good. I don't want that. And then they come by now with the rolls, and pretzel rolls somehow are my favorite. They put it right in my face. You want them? No, you sure? Right in my face.
And then after that, when it's all done, some of the most delectable-looking chocolate cake I've ever seen on a plane. So you want dessert? No, are you sure? They put it in front of my face. And I was thinking, you know, when I got free from drugs, no one was coming up to me. Like if I was flying somewhere, no one's coming up to me and saying, you want some ecstasy, cocaine? Are you sure?
Here it is. Here's the needle, sir, for your heroin. No, but with food, there it is. And you just go to a restaurant, and the portions are massive. I mean, in desserts, it takes three people to bring it out. You know, death by chocolate.
Sir, would you like to try our chocolate suicide cake? This is part of our culture. So it's challenging. It's hard.
That's why I said the last thing you'll get from me is any type of condemnation or criticism. This is challenging, and it's lifelong habits. But I want to tell you that God's grace can help us overcome the stronghold of food, just like everything else. If we can talk about God's grace to overcome pornography, God's grace to overcome depression, God's grace to overcome fear, God's grace to overcome alcoholism, then we can have God's grace to overcome gluttony. We can have God's grace to overcome food addictions. All right, we're out of time today. On tomorrow's broadcast, we will complete the message on breaking the stronghold of food. Remember, all of our messages, all of our podcasts are archived at Courage in the Line of Fire. So go ahead and subscribe to that podcast, Courage in the Line of Fire, or subscribe to our YouTube channel, The Line of Fire.
