What’s your favorite comfort food?

For me, it’s soup. Hearty soup loaded with vegetables. I love chicken noodle soup, Italian wedding soup, tortilla soup, and pho. They’re warm and nourishing and thoroughly satisfying. 

In my opinion, I’d much rather fill my bowl with soup than cereal. Thirty minutes after eating a bowl of cereal with milk, I’m hungrier than before (which is NOT the point of eating). Cereal tastes good, but it doesn’t bring long-term satisfaction.

We need nourishing food to keep the body healthy. Our physical body is a huge part of who we are as humans—it hurts, it craves, it works, it tires—but we are more than our body. There is a spirit that animates the body, and we have a soul that inhabits the body, and the soul will go on living after the body dies. 

That soul needs nourishing food, too, to keep it healthy. Have you ever met someone whose soul is starving and maybe even dying? As people, we crave soul food, and if we don’t know about the gospel, then we’ll seek this soul-satisfaction anywhere and everywhere—in our relationships, our jobs, our hobbies, our causes. But those are all cereal. The gospel is soup.

How does a soul live? By every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord (Deut. 8:3). Only spiritual food can feed a spiritual life. We can find examples of this spiritual food in scripture. 

Jesus called Himself the bread of life. He also promised to give us living water so that our souls would never thirst again. 

The word of God contains milk (the beginner-level stuff) and meat (deeper understanding). 

Lehi had a dream in which he ate a dazzlingly beautiful and sweet fruit, which represented the love of God, something that (whether we realize it or not) we desire above all else. 

It’s this daily intake of spiritual sustenance that satisfies our souls and produces contentment. Reading, praying, singing, fellowshipping, repenting, returning thanks—these keep a heart contented and satisfied with what matters most. 

In the fourth and final week of our scripture study, we’ll take a look at scriptures that teach us what will really, truly, and ultimately satisfy us—so we can live a God-fed life of contentment. 

Download the contentment study here

This article has undergone ministry review and approval.