(NKJV) Psalm 119:103 “How sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth”
(NKJV) Psalm 119:103 “Your teachings are sweeter than honey.
God doesn’t want us to just know Him in our mind. Many verses throughout the Bible indicate God actually Wants us to taste Him in our heart through His Word.
The Word of God is a real feast prepared for us by God. So how do we come to it with the intention of enjoying Him? We need to eat food to sustain our physical life and to keep ourselves healthy. But just because we have to eat doesn’t mean that it’s a tedious chore. In fact, eating is enjoyable to us, especially when the food is tasty. Similarly, the Bible tells us that God’s Word Sustains us and keeps us spiritually healthy. But how do we feel about reading it? Is our time in God’s Word a dry, tedious duty we feel like we have to fulfill? Or is it a time of enjoyment and nourishment? God Desires that our time in His Word would not be a duty, but a delight.
The fact we now enjoy the vegetables we hated as children shows that as we mature we can cultivate a taste for healthy, life-giving food. And since the Bible is our spirit’s food, you can cultivate a taste for that too. Eugene Peterson writes: ‘Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community, as food nurtures the human body. Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in…a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love.’
Research indicates the average Bible owner has 3-4 Bibles and is looking for more. The unexpressed secret is that many people find the Bible boring. This is quite a recent problem – and a serious one. Ancient Greek, the language of the New Testament, has no specific word for boredom. The word didn’t acquire its current meaning in English until the last few centuries. When we consider the ancient world – no television, internet, movies and virtually no books , etc- we’re inclined to think how boring it must have been. But the ancients weren’t bored.
We’re the generation that gets bored, because capacity to focus our attention and delight our minds in prolonged thought has been diminished by dependency on external stimuli. We have too many tempting alternatives. That’s why becoming a Faithful Bible reader begins as a discipline, continues as a duty, and finally becomes a habit. ‘How sweet are your words…sweeter than honey to my mouth’ (Psalm 119:103 NIV)! And that can be your experience, too, when it comes to reading God’s Word. You just need to get serious about it.
Since God’s Words come out of His very being, they carry the Flavor of God – the Flavor of God in His Word is sweet and good. God can be enjoyed in His Word: so, if the Word is tasteless to us, the problem isn’t the Word itself; it must be the way we come to it.
Amen
