Taste and See: Part 4 – The Word
John 17:17
“Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.”
If out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks (Luke 6:45)…and we are feeding our heart poison, what comes from our mouth? We might be temped to say, “I don’t talk about inappropriate and vulgar things, I don’t cuss much,” but does that prove that we are feeding our hearts on the good things of the Lord? Psalm 34:1 says, “I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth.” Praising the Lord is a far cry from just refraining from speaking evil.
May I be honest personally? Psalm 34:1 is not me. I have moments of praise, but my praise is not continual. I take that to mean a couple things:
1) I am not feasting my heart in meditation on His character revealed in Scripture, and
2) I am tasting of something other than Him instead.
What is the difference between my life and David’s? David was able to praise the Lord continually only because he had tasted of the Lord and seen that He was good, and committed to obeying all that the Lord had commanded. In Psalm 119:9-16, David showed that his heart’s intake was the Word of God, and his lips poured forth accordingly. If you want to praise the Lord as David did, you must spend the time with the Lord in His Word that David did. Robert D. Foster put it this way: “To know God, it is necessary to spend consistent time with Him…The intimacy of communion with Christ must be recaptured in the morning quiet time. Call it what you want — the quiet time, personal devotions, the morning watch, or individual worship — these holy minutes at the start of each day explain the inner secret of Christianity. It’s the golden thread that ties every great man of God together — from Moses to David Livingstone, the prophet Amos to Billy Graham — rich and poor, businessmen and military personnel. Every man who ever became somebody for God has this at the core of his priorities: time alone with God!”
Scripture makes the prescription for our heart’s sickness clear, and I am walking the path towards Psalm 34:1 with you. As we consider the tastes of the world, find them wanting in comparison to our beautiful Lord, we reject them in order to turn to the Lord in His Word. It takes faith in God and a belief that He will reward those who seek Him (Hebrews 11:6), but letting our minds dwell on the reality of God and His character by meditating on His Word will not fail to produce a harvest (Galatians 6:7-10). Psalm 1 is yet another picture of the one who does not have any dealings with sin, and bears the fruit of delightful meditation on the Word (also see Jeremiah 17:6-10; Isaiah 5:24; Hosea 4:1-6, 8:7, 10:12; Matthew 3:8-12; Galatians 5:22-25).
The Word plays the central role as we seek to overcome sin. It shows us what is right and wrong, as well as allows us to gain an intimate knowledge of of our Father. You will only know the Father to the extent that you have been in His Word. If we have a 10-minutes-a-week plus church relationship with God, we will know Him about as well as we know the people we wave at on the streets and cannot remember their first name. But we want more than that. We want to taste and see in such a way that sin is exposed as a lie and its promises pale in comparison to the delights of knowing God.
Father, You are a holy God, completely set apart from sin. By Your Word, sanctify me so that I am able to step out of sin and see You more clearly. When I gaze through a shroud of sin, I find myself unable to see Your goodness with clarity. My heart longs to taste and see, please sanctify Your child.
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