According to the Center for Disease Control, about 30% of Americans are overweight. And this comes after years of being warned, of countless diet programs and diet pills and diet shakes and diet meals. With so much money being poured into weight loss, one wonders: is it really in the best interest of Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers for people to gain a healthy weight and then maintain it? Generally speaking, the problem is that we’re just consuming more calories than we need in a day. So what are you having for dinner tonight?

If nearly a third of Americans may need to go on some kind of diet, I wonder what that means about our spiritual health. There’s no test we can use to determine our spiritual health. I can’t draw your blood to see how strong your faith is. And that’s maybe one reason we tend to avoid the subject of spiritual health. What standard do we use to measure ourselves? The reality is that the standard is determined by God and it’s impossibly high for us to reach on our own: perfection. We know we can’t reach that ourselves because we know what kind of spiritual junk food we eat. So maybe its time we go on a diet.

Let me interest you in the Christ diet. The Christ diet is great because it always works. It’s not like the diet programs of the world which come and go. The Christ diet gives you results that last for eternity and you start seeing results right away.

All we do is we give our sinful obesity to Christ. It’s that easy. We don’t have to shed the pounds of sin by sweating them out and working to death. Christ takes them from us because he wants them. He takes our sinful thoughts, our sinful deeds and carries that weight himself to the cross. And there he suffers for them. There God makes him pay for our sin. There Christ dies and offers his life as payment for sin. Put your sins on Jesus. Put your guilt on Jesus. And let him die for you. And dying, he will give you life. The pounds of sin and guilt are removed and we get the body of Christ. That perfect body that never sinned. That perfect body that never opened its mouth for spiritual junk food. Christ was spiritually fit and toned for you.

It's the Christ diet, and it always works.