Taste and See
Can I be brutally honest with you? One of the things I don’t like about being human is that if we hear something over and over again, we get used to it. This applies to the sounds around us, to Scripture we hear each time we’re in church and to the people we know in our lives. If we are around those who nag or complain all the time we have a tendency to quit listening, don’t we.
How about God’s word? There are certain verses of Scripture that we’ve likely heard so often that we have grown accustomed to hearing them and they no longer have the same power they once had. For instance, if you have grown accustomed to saying, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want” you may miss some of the joy and wonder of it all.
So let’s try something different. Rephrase Psalm 23 by asking yourself these questions, “If the Lord is my Shepherd then I shall not want. If the Lord is my Shepherd then wherever He leads me I am going to be just fine. If the Lord is my Shepherd then I will dwell in His house forever.” That adds some excitement to it and that is certainly something I can use and I hope you can as well.
David implores us to experience the goodness of God. How do we do this? Read Psalm 34:8-10 (Amplified):
“O taste and see that the Lord [our God] is good! Blessed (happy, fortunate, to be envied) is the man who trusts and takes refuge in Him. O fear the Lord, you His saints [revere and worship Him]! For there is no want to those who truly revere and worship Him with godly fear. The young lions lack food and suffer hunger, but they who seek (inquire of and require) the Lord [by right of their need and on the authority of His Word], none of them shall lack any beneficial thing.”
Sometimes when we reach a place in our lives where we are struggling financially, in our physical bodies or in some other area, we develop more of a dependency upon Christ and it is then that we discover that He truly is all we have need of.
