Making Provision

“But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” – Romans 13:14

These days, we have to make provisions. Given lines at grocery stores, longer amazon delivery times, and the scarcity of certain goods (as David Haley said on last Sunday’s stream, “the whole circle of life at Costco—gone”), we can’t live moment-to-moment in quite the same way. We have to think ahead more about what we need, and people are stocking up. Paul writes here, “make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” This word for “desires” refers not to good desires, but specifically to wanting what is unlawful. The previous verse names four examples: desires for drunkenness, sexual immorality, quarreling, and jealousy. Paul says, starve those desires to death! Don’t supply them with anything they need to live! Deprive them of paper products! Make not less provision, but no provision.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes a wonderful (albeit long) commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, including several chapters on the beatitude, “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” Part of hungering and thirsting after righteousness, he writes, is avoiding anything that is opposed to such righteousness. This means avoiding things we know to be patently bad or sinful. He uses a timely analogy: “I say that to hunger and thirst after righteousness means avoiding such things just as we would avoid the very plague itself. If we know there is an infection in a house, we avoid that house. We segregate the patient who has a fever, because it is infectious, and obviously we avoid such persons. The same is equally true in the spiritual realm.” 

But, he says, it doesn’t stop there. “We shall even avoid things that tend to dull or take the edge off our spiritual appetites. There are so many things like that, things that are quite harmless in themselves and which are perfectly legitimate. Yet if you find that you are spending much of your time with them, and that you desire the things of God less, you must avoid them.” There is something to this, I think. Every parent knows that a child’s appetite for food is a valuable, and not inexhaustible, commodity. Spoil dinner with a snack right beforehand, and suddenly food they would have otherwise devoured becomes completely unappealing. The same is true for all of our appetites: fill up on mental, spiritual or emotional junk food, and we have no taste for what truly satisfies. 

Making no provision for the flesh means avoiding anything we would admit feeds sinful desires, even if they aren’t obviously sinful themselves. What falls into that category is a question only we can answer. But the point is that appetites are malleable. They can be fed or starved; stoked or smothered. And the more we starve our sinful desires, the more we open up space to hunger and thirst for what truly satisfies. The more we can put on Jesus and live into the reality of his Lordship over every area of our lives, over even our desires.