Cultivating a taste for God's Word

"How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter
than honey to my mouth!" Ps 119:103 NIV

The fact that we now enjoy the vegetables we hated
as children indicates that as we mature, we can
cultivate a taste for healthy, life-giving food. And since
the Bible is soul food, you can cultivate a taste for that
too. Eugene Peterson writes: "Christians feed on
Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community
as food nurtures the human body. Christians don't
simply learn or study or use Scripture: we assimilate it,
take it into our lives in…a way that it gets metabolized
into acts of love." Consumer research indicates the
average Bible owner has nine Bibles and is looking for
more. What's wrong with this picture? The
unexpressed secret is that many people find the Bible
boring. This is quite a recent problem-and a serious
one. Ancient Greek, the language of the New
Testament, has no word for boredom. The word didn't
acquire its current meaning in English until the last few
centuries. When we consider the ancient world-no
television, internet, movies, and virtually no books-
we're inclined to think how boring it must have been.
But the ancients weren't bored. We're the generation
that gets bored, because capacity to focus our
attention and delight our minds in prolonged thought
has been diminished b dependency on external
stimuli. We have too many tempting alternatives.
That's why becoming a faithful Bible reader begins as
a discipline, continues as a dutv, and finallv becomes
a delight. "How sweet are your words…sweeter than
honey to my mouth!" And that can be your experience,
too, when it comes to reading God's Word. You just
need to get serious about it.