We Often Spoil Our Appetite...

... for righteousness.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Matthew 5:6

I suggest that if we are truly hungering and thirsting after righteousness we shall not only avoid things that we know to be bad and harmful, 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. This question of appetite is a very delicate one. We all know how, in the physical sense, we can easily spoil our appetite, dull its edge, so to speak, by eating things between meals. Now it is like that in the spiritual realm. There are so many things that I cannot condemn in and of themselves. But if I find I spend too much of my time with them, and that somehow I want God and spiritual things less and less, if I am hungering and thirsting after righteousness, I shall avoid them.

--Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, p.76