Taste
I have a brother-in-law named Matt. Matt is a good guy as far as brothers-in-law go, but in one pretty important way he has kind of destroyed my life. Here’s how it happened. If you know me, then you know that I like coffee. And it used to be that I liked all coffee. I first started drinking coffee when I was in Middle School and got a job on the clean up crew at our local sale barn. Whatever coffee was left over in the coffee pot from the sale a few days before, that’s what we drank. And from then until very recently, my standards for coffee never really changed. If it was black and preferably warm, I drank it.
But then my brother-in-law Matt went and started his very own coffee roasting company. Because he’s good at his job, he imports some of the best coffee in the world from all around the world and fresh-roasts it for his customers. And because he’s a good brother-in-law, he sends me lots of coffee, and usually for free! But guess what happened after I started drinking my brother-in-law’s coffee? After all that world-class, fresh-roasted coffee, when I would drink other coffee, it started to not taste very good. And then other coffee started to taste— just plain bad. My whole life, coffee was just coffee. But now that I’ve gotten a taste for good stuff, the good stuff is all I want to drink.
Here’s why we’re talking about this. In my experience in life and with God, we all tend to settle and settle hard. We get a taste for life that is quite frankly pretty bitter, and we accept it and settle in to it, because we believe that that is what life tastes like. And even when we see a few other people living lives that appear to be much sweeter than our own, still we just keep on in the midst of our own bitterness because one way or another we come to the conclusion that even if the sweet life is out there for somebody, it's not out there for us.
As it turns out, God has a little something to say about that. There is this old song in the Bible called Psalm 34. It's about how great God is and how he rescues people. In this song there is a line that says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”
When I think about that line, I smile. That is the line that comes to my mind when I think about my silly experience with coffee and all of our deadly serious experiences with life. With coffee, once I got the good stuff, it was hard to go back because I knew what I was missing.
God's love is like that.
It may be the case that you are slogging through a pretty bitter life right now having never had a taste of real life with God. If so, my hope is that you will follow the advice of that song and taste and see that the Lord is good. Further, my hope is that He will destroy your life like my brother-in-law destroyed my coffee drinking. I hope that as you taste and see how great He is, life apart from Him will become more and more bitter and you won’t even want it anymore. You will just want Him. He loves you, He is powerful and amazing, and He is free.
You ought to try that.
