Wrestling With Our Appetites

Every fall, college football takes over the South. It dominates Saturdays, conversations, wardrobes, and emotional well-being. But while everyone is arguing about rankings and referees, another “sport” is quietly thriving on the fringe of American life: Major League Eating. Yes, it’s a real organization — rules, regulations, rankings, the whole deal — and the records are astounding.

Matt Stonie once swallowed eighty-two strips of bacon in five minutes. Patrick Bertoletti managed nearly eleven pounds of Key Lime Pie in eight minutes. Micah Collins inhaled eighty-four ounces of pork and beans in under a minute. (I can only hope he rode home alone.) But the unquestioned king of competitive eating is Joey Chestnut. He holds the world record at the Nathan’s Hot Dog Contest — seventy-six hot dogs and buns in ten minutes — and he has record titles in everything from asparagus to Twinkies.

Here’s the surprising part. You would think a man would prepare for competitive eating by starving himself beforehand. But Takeru Kobayashi, one of the legends of the sport, once explained that the secret is the opposite. “The more you eat… the more you want to eat,” he said. Appetite expands when you feed it.

That principle is as old as the human race, and Genesis 25 shows us just how dangerous it can be when applied to the soul.

When Genesis 25 opens, Abraham has passed from the scene and Isaac has become the patriarch. His life carries the covenant promises — land, descendants, blessing. But his wife Rebecca has a problem: she cannot have children. Twenty long years pass without a single pregnancy. For most couples, infertility is a personal heartbreak. But for Isaac and Rebecca, the very promises of God seem to hang in the balance.

Isaac turns to the only place he can. He prays. God hears. Rebecca conceives.

But not quietly.

From the moment life begins to stir in her womb, something feels wrong. The babies seem to be fighting before they are even born — as if there is a battle line drawn down the center of her body. Troubled, she seeks the Lord, and God gives her a prophecy that explains everything:

Two nations are inside you.
Two peoples.
Two futures.
And the older will serve the younger.

In other words, the normal order of the ancient world — the firstborn receiving the inheritance, authority, and blessing — is about to be inverted. God is rewriting the script before the boys take their first breath.

When they finally arrive, the contrast is immediate. Esau bursts onto the scene red, hairy, wild — the kind of boy who grows up to spend more time in the woods than at home. Jacob follows, literally gripping Esau’s heel, as if unwilling to let him get too far ahead. As they grow, Esau becomes a hunter, rugged and impulsive. Jacob becomes a quiet man, reflective, measured, and strategic.

Their parents make a mistake that many families make. Isaac gravitates toward Esau, probably because he enjoys the meat his son brings home from the field. Rebecca gravitates to Jacob, perhaps remembering God’s prophecy. The home begins to tilt — and a divide forms.

One day, Jacob is at home cooking a pot of lentil stew. Esau comes in from the field exhausted. Not dying. Not fainting. Not on his last breath. Just hungry and worn out — the kind of condition where your emotions get louder than your common sense.

Esau smells the stew and demands some. Jacob sees an opening and goes straight for the jugular: “Sell me your birthright.”

It is an outrageous request. The birthright represented far more than property. It was the spiritual and covenantal inheritance of Abraham and Isaac. Through it would eventually come the Messiah Himself. It was priceless — literally world-changing.

But appetite has a way of shrinking your world until all you can see is what is right in front of you.

“I’m about to die,” Esau says.

He wasn’t. He was simply tired. But that’s how appetite talks — dramatic, exaggerated, desperate. Esau trades the eternal for the immediate, the infinite for the momentary, the priceless for the pleasant.

Scripture says he “despised” his birthright — not with words, but with a choice.

The story of Esau is more than a tragic moment in a family saga. It’s a mirror held up to our own lives. Appetite — whether for food, pleasure, comfort, recognition, intimacy, achievement, or escape — is part of being human. God designed us with desires. But when appetite goes unchecked, it can distort our vision and steer our decisions.

Modern psychology gives us names for the very things Esau experienced.

There is impact bias, the tendency to believe a certain experience will feel better and satisfy longer than it actually will. Esau convinced himself he was “about to die” — because appetite tends to shout down reason when we are tired, stressed, lonely, or discouraged.

Then there is focalism, the tendency to fixate on one desire so completely that everything else — consequences, values, relationships, long-term outcomes — fades into the background. Esau couldn’t see past the steam rising from that bowl of stew. In that moment, nothing else mattered.

That’s what unchecked appetite does. It collapses your world down to one craving. One impulse. One decision.

And when that happens, wisdom disappears. God’s promises seem faint. Eternity feels distant. The future gets swallowed up by whatever stew is simmering in front of you.

As Chuck Swindoll once put it, “God is never more unreal than in a moment of lust.”

The good news is this: appetites can be mastered. You don’t have to be ruled by cravings, impulses, or desires that shrink your soul and steal your future. The Scriptures show us the way back.

The first step is recognizing the condition you’re in. When you are hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, you make poor decisions. The wise response in those moments is not to act quickly, but to slow down. Rest. Pray. Think. Delay major choices until you are emotionally clear and spiritually centered.

The second step is identifying your own “bowl of stew.” What is the thing you are talking yourself into? What are you justifying? What would embarrass you if it came to light? Your stew may look harmless, but Esau’s did too.

The third is learning to reframe your appetite by lifting your eyes toward the future God intends for you. This is what Jesus did in Gethsemane. His human appetite cried out for life, deliverance, relief. But Hebrews tells us He endured the cross by fixing His eyes on the joy set before Him. When your future is clear, your appetites lose their power to control you.

Take a breath and imagine yourself ten years from now.

Where do you want to be spiritually?
What do you want to see in your marriage?
In your children?
In your church?
In your character, your calling, your legacy?

When that vision sharpens, the stew in front of you loses its shine.

Genesis 25 warns us with sobering clarity: if you do not pin down your appetites, your appetites will pin you down. But with clarity, prayer, and discipline, you can do what Esau didn’t — you can choose the future God has for you over the impulse pulling at you today.

Because in the end, a bowl of stew is just a bowl of stew. But the future God has for you is worth far more than anything your appetites promise in the moment.