She has thought about God very carefully for nineteen years.
I want to say that with respect, because it is not a small thing and a lot of people never do it. She has read properly. She has held difficult things without flinching and without pretending they were easy. She has changed her mind twice about matters that cost her something to change.
If you wanted somebody to think clearly about this, you would want her.
And a few months ago she was reading a psalm she has read a hundred times, and she stopped on a verb, and she has not really got past it since.
The verb is taste.
Not consider. Not weigh. Not conclude, examine, believe or even trust. Taste, which is a thing you do with your mouth, and which cannot be done at a distance, and which no amount of care can substitute for.
And she sat there and did the honest arithmetic. Nineteen years of considering a Person.
She has not been faking. That is what makes it hard rather than shameful. She has done the real work of the mind on this and she would not take a year of it back.
She has simply never tasted anything.
So let me ask you, quietly.
Which verb has your faith been running on?
He chose the least arguable verb there is
The psalm is one that gets quoted on cards, and the line has gone smooth from handling, and I want to slow it down to the speed of the word itself.
David is writing after an episode where he escaped by pretending to be mad, which is not a dignified story and he does not tidy it.
And in the middle of it he says this.
Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him.Psalm 34:8
Two senses. Taste first, then sight.
Psalm 34 reaches for the most bodily verb available rather than any of the careful ones, and the Spirit who inspired it did not hand a thinking person a thinking word, so nearness has never been something a mind could arrive at on its own.
Now notice why taste is such a strange choice, and this is the part that took me a long time.
Taste is the one sense you cannot use at a distance. You can see something across a valley. You can hear something in the next room. You cannot taste anything that is not already in contact with you.
He did not pick a metaphor of observation. He picked the one that requires the thing to have arrived.
And I want to be careful here, in the way this house always is.
I am not telling you thinking is the problem. It is not, and a faith that has stopped thinking goes bad quickly and in ways that hurt people. Your nineteen years are not a detour and I would not have you undo one of them.
I am saying the psalm names a second thing, and it is not a more advanced version of the first thing.
Psalm 34 puts taste before see, in that order, and the Spirit has been near enough to be tasted for the whole nineteen years, so what you are missing was never further up the same road you have been walking.
You have been considering a Person who has been within reach the entire time.
Now the move, and it is a change of sense rather than a change of view.
Use a different verb once.
You are not being asked to stop thinking, or to distrust your mind, or to swap rigor for feeling. That trade is a bad one and I would not offer it to you.
You are being asked to notice that the psalm names two things and you have been doing one of them beautifully for nineteen years.
Psalm 34 says taste and see, in that order, and the Spirit has been near enough for the first of those the entire time, so the thing you are missing is not further along the road you are already on. It is a different door in the same house.
Consider Him tomorrow. Tonight, taste something.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you can hear yourself. Know what holds them up. This authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King. And you speak under His will, never over it. However He answers, and in whatever way He comes, the outcome is His.
- Considering, you are careful and true and you are not tasting. Psalm 34 says taste and see, in that order, and it reaches for the one sense that cannot be used at any distance at all.
- Assumption that nearness is further up the road I am already on, you have kept me walking for nineteen years, and in the name of Jesus I set you aside. The Spirit has been near enough to be tasted for every one of those years.
- Lord, Psalm 34 puts taste before see and it was written by a man who had just escaped by pretending to be mad, so You were never asking for dignity. I am eating the end of a loaf on a wall in the cold, and every one of the nineteen years still stands.
Psalm 34:8
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