In this fourth installment of the month’s study on ReflectionsTuesday, Pastor Ayo Agunloye continues The Objects of Indulgence, still within the year-long Your Potter’s House theme of cultivating a heart after God’s own heart. Last week named the first two places indulgence takes hold—the body and the mind. This week completes the list and supplies the single word that unlocks the whole subject:
Indulgence is the breaking of balance—the misappropriation of even necessary things.
If the danger is always excess—doing a good thing beyond what is needed—then the cure is not joyless denial but proportion. The episode walks through five objects of indulgence, and at every turn returns to the same scale: not whether a thing is lawful, but whether it is balanced.
🎧 Listen to the Full Episode Below
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This is a fuller, wider-ranging teaching than usual—part survey, part self-audit. It rewards a slow listen with pen in hand, asking where, specifically, the balance has tipped.
⚖️ The Heart of It: Balance
Pastor Agunloye grounds the whole message in the gift of manna (Exodus 16). God told Israel to gather only what each could eat in a day; anything hoarded spoiled. And when they measured it out in the camp, “he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack.”
That, he says, is God’s design for everything—eating, sleeping, rest, comfort, dress, the use of our time, our work and pursuits. Creation runs on balance, and:
Where one thing is too much, another is certainly too little. One thing out of balance throws off the rest.
The same principle governs how we treat others. To over-indulge—”let me spoil you a little”—is not kindness but quiet destruction, because it withholds the discipline a heart needs to grow.
✝️ Grace and Truth, Held Together
The freshest insight of the episode comes from John 1:14—that Christ came “full of grace and truth.” Not grace without truth. Not truth without grace. The correct mixture of both.
Truth without grace is harsh. Grace without truth is indulgence.
Many of us, the pastor observes, want only the grace: to be patted on the back, told sweet things, spared the bitter. But truth is what sets free—and it heals only when served “on the platter of grace.” Just as a diet of only sweet things wrecks the body (he reaches for the word—diabetes), a soul fed only affirmation, never correction, drifts unchecked. God set bitter things in the world alongside the sweet on purpose.
This is where indulgence grows—little by little. The pastor points to Solomon (1 Kings 11): a king who could afford anything and restrained himself in nothing, marrying his thousand wives not at once but one appetite at a time, until those very indulgences drifted his heart from God into idolatry.
🫀 The First Object: The Body
The body remains the primary target—the one that always wants more food, more rest, more comfort. Returning to his poultry illustration, the pastor reminds listeners that a laying bird given more than its measured ration only grows fat, until laying itself becomes dangerous. The birds cry for more; to pity them and give in is to harm them.
That is what we do when we indulge ourselves or others: we are not being kind—we are killing.
He grounds bodily discipline in two homely tests. On rest: “yet a little sleep, a little slumber… so shall poverty come”(Proverbs 6:10–11)—the worker who sleeps till six can no longer pray, prepare, and beat the Lagos traffic to a seven o’clock start. On food: by the time you feel completely full, you have already eaten too much; science suggests stopping at about three-quarters of the stomach’s capacity, leaving room for digestion to do its work. Overfill it and you simply “indulge yourself and then kill yourself.”
🧠 The Second Object: The Mind and Media
Revisiting last week’s devotional, the pastor sharpens the practical edge. The mind is the battlefield of the heart, and media is where indulgence most easily enters—flipping, scrolling, hours and data quietly drained.
His remedy is concrete: open the digital wellbeing screen on your phone and audit yourself—how long on Facebook, on WhatsApp, on each app—then set limits that lock you out once your allowance is spent.
The fact that you can afford it does not mean you should do it.
He seals the point with the paracetamol analogy: the very drug that relieves pain in the right dose becomes poison in excess. “Too much of everything is indulgence—and it is killing.” That is why dosage, prescription, and proportion matter in every area of life.
👏 The Third Object: Ego and Recognition
Here indulgence turns inward, to the appetite for praise, attention, and applause. The quiet question—“Nobody complimented my outfit today”—reveals a heart dressing for people rather than for God.
The model again is Christ. The same crowd that cried “Hosanna” later cried “Crucify him”; had Jesus been feeding on their praise, their rejection would have crushed or embittered Him. Instead, “Father, forgive them.” His mind was simply not there. Paul makes the rule explicit:
“If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.” (Galatians 1:10)
Seek the applause of people and you will lose the freedom to deliver God’s message when it stings. The balance caveat still applies—silence does not always mean you have failed to make an impact, so discern, and ask God. But the audience that matters is One:
It is God’s “Well done” that a heart after His heart learns to crave.
🏠 The Fourth Object: Materials and Comforts
Indulgence finds its most seductive form, the pastor warns, in comfort, status, and accumulation. A disciple may work hard, serve, and give generously, yet let an unexamined love of ease quietly become the real motive of the heart—until comfort starts dictating obedience.
The test is whether you can still go where God sends when it costs you: to stoop low, to drink the water from the river, to leave the comfort of the private car. He recalls a man who deliberately parked and took public transport each day simply so he could preach to fellow passengers—comfort surrendered for the sake of souls.
And on accumulation, the warning of Lot’s wife (Genesis 19:26): perhaps it was the things she could not bear to leave behind that turned her head. Christ, by contrast, “made himself of no reputation” (Philippians 2:7)—so a life spent amassing reputation and possessions is moving away from His likeness, not toward it.
😴 The Fifth Object: Spiritual Lethargy
The last and most invisible object wears a spiritual mask. It is not pleasure but heaviness—spiritual laziness, procrastination, “later, later” devotion, half-hearted prayer, delayed obedience.
Indulgence does not always look like indulgence; sometimes it disguises itself as fatigue.
This is the condition of Laodicea (Revelation 3:15–16): a faith that appears faithful while the heart goes lukewarm, neither hot nor cold. A heart after God’s heart stays vigilant, disciplined, and passionate—and where lethargy has crept in, the call is to cry to God for deliverance and rekindle the zeal.
❓ Can You Indulge in “Spiritual” Things?
The episode closes with a listener’s question: can there be indulgence even in Bible study and prayer? The answer, once more, is balance.
Pastor Agunloye recalls a fellow student who repeatedly skipped class, claiming the Holy Spirit had not “released” him from his quiet time—until he was eventually asked to withdraw. It was not spirituality, but the misuse of time hiding behind spiritual language.
A person can be busy with spiritual activities and still not be spiritual—because to be spiritual is to follow the Spirit, not merely to perform religious acts.
Reading the Bible and praying are good; but using them to dodge the legitimate duties of a student, worker, or family member is imbalance. Every part of life is meant to be lived before God—“even your work is spiritual.” The mature path is to do the right thing at the right time, keeping each area in proportion.
🌟 Final Reflection
“The Objects of Indulgence (II)” gives the whole month its sharpest tool. Across the body, the mind, the ego, our comforts, and even our spiritual energy, the diagnosis is the same: indulgence is a good thing out of proportion, and the test is never merely “Is this lawful?” but “Is this measured?”
The image that holds it all together is the One who came full of grace and truth. Balance is not lukewarmness; it is Christlikeness—neither the harshness of truth without grace, nor the flattery of grace without truth, but a heart kept whole, awake, and undivided.
Whatever we refuse to measure, we will eventually be mastered by. The heart after God’s heart keeps the scale in His hands.
The episode closes in prayer:
“May the Lord deliver us from every form of indulgence—help us to identify it on time, and to resist it, reject it, and refuse it, that we may become more like Him in every way. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
This is a message to weigh, not just to hear.
Listen again. Audit honestly. And ask God for the grace to bring every appetite, comfort, and even your devotion back into His balance.
