Taste of God

One day a while back I was trying to put into words the way that God has been working in my heart.

I was trying to express the joy and freedom yet fear and humility. I was trying to explain how I was a slave to Christ and how freeing that was. I couldn't put into words how I was (am) learning to fear God and stand in awe of His power, yet come boldly before Him as His child... a child of the Creator of the Universe!

The look on this person's face was making it painfully evident that I wasn't doing a very good job of explaining myself. I ended the conversation with something lame like, "I don't really know how to explain it. It's just amazing."

Not long after that, I heard a Christian radio announcer discussing Psalm 34:8:

"Taste and see that the LORD is good.
How happy is the man who takes refuge in Him!"

That was it! Of course I couldn't explain adequately the transformation taking place in my heart on a daily basis. Each person has to taste it for themself!

I started thinking about this analogy of "tasting". It's interesting that of our five senses, God chose to use the sense of taste to describe experiencing His goodness.

You can smell something without being intentional at all (can I get a witness parents with little ones in diapers??) You can't really help it if you hear something. You may brush up against something and feel it unknowingly. Your eyes see thousands of things every day that you don't even notice.

But taste... that's something you have to be intentional about. It's something you have to make an effort to do. Think about it. It's a rare occassion that we don't purposefully put something in our mouth to taste it.

We look forward to tasting various kinds of food and drink every single day and we enjoy it.

That's how it is for us when we intentionally seek God. When we get a taste of Him, regardless of our circumstances or situations, we find that He is indeed good and His mercies are new each day (Lamentations 3:22-23).  When we experience His divine love and how He is intimately involved in every single detail of our lives (Psalm 139:16), words will fail us. When we taste His goodness, it's not something that can be put into words so that others can understand.

They gotta taste it themselves!

Oh that all would taste and see that the Lord is good!!