Pip: There’s a spiritual danger hiding in plain sight — and it’s not the one the church usually wants to talk about at the potluck.
Mara: cj’s latest post on The Way of the Rabbi takes on gluttony — not just the physical kind, but what the piece calls “gluttony of grace,” the habit of treating God’s patience as a license to keep sinning. Let’s start with what that actually means and why it matters.
Gluttons of Grace: The Spiritual Dangers of Gluttony
Pip: The post opens with a disarmingly ordinary scene — a fast food order, a one-dollar add-on, and a question: is that gluttony? But that small moment is a doorway into something much larger, the idea that we overindulge spiritually the same way we overindulge at the counter.
Mara: The post grounds the argument in Ephesians 2:10, setting up the kind of life we’re actually called to: “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Messiah Yahoshua to do good works, which God prepared in advance as our way of life.”
Pip: So the stakes here aren’t just dietary. The argument is that grace was never meant to be a standing permission slip — it was meant to launch us into something, a life shaped by the Father’s instruction, the Torah.
Mara: Right, and the post is careful to separate that from works-based salvation. The point isn’t that obedience earns anything. It’s that continuing deliberately in sin while claiming grace is its own kind of excess — the “gluttony of grace” the title names.
Pip: The church’s reluctance to preach on gluttony gets a dry observation here — that it hits too close to home and is harder to hide than most sins. Which is a fair point. Gluttony is the one vice you can’t keep in a private browser tab.
Mara: The post invokes Ezekiel 36:26-27 to answer the objection that Torah-keeping is simply impossible: “I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them.” The Spirit, not willpower, is the mechanism.
Pip: And then Paul — the one, as the post puts it, “in whom so many twist to justify their sinful natures” — gets quoted directly against that very use. Shall we continue in sin so grace may increase? Certainly not.
Mara: The post closes on Matthew 7, the sobering passage where Yahoshua tells those who performed miracles in his name: “I never knew you; depart from Me, you workers of lawlessness.” That’s the endpoint of gluttony of grace taken to its conclusion.
Pip: And the landing is Proverbs 23 — a father’s plea to a son to guide his heart on the right course. The frame shifts from warning to invitation.
Mara: Which is really the post’s whole posture. Not condemnation, but a call to search out truth and walk in it — a heart of flesh instead of stone.
Pip: Grace as a floor rather than a ceiling — that reframe does a lot of quiet work.
Mara: It does. The question underneath all of it is what we’re actually being saved toward, not just saved from. Worth sitting with until next time.
Read the full post: Gluttons of Grace: The Spiritual Dangers of Gluttony
The Way of the Rabbi 