The inability to taste is a terrible experience. I remember it distinctly as a symptom of the Covid virus. Gone were the rich, aromatic notes in that morning cup of coffee; all that was left was the sensation of heat and the effect of caffeine. Gone were the sharp, distinct flavors of the egg-and-bacon breakfast sandwich, though the stomach was satisfied. Food and drink remained necessary, but consuming them was so, well, joyless.
How often do we pick up our Bibles with the same sort of drudgery? We know we need God’s words to live, but as we chew, we find no flavor. What once warmed and satisfied our hearts now seems more like the bread in the Gibeonite’s sacks, “dry and crumbly” (Joshua 9:12).
The operative word in the previous sentence is seems. Lack of taste for the word reveals far more about us than it does the word of God. “Those for whom prophetic doctrine is tasteless,” warned John Calvin, “ought to be thought of as lacking taste buds” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.8.2). Lacking a taste for the hearty bread of God, we seek to satisfy ourselves with the empty calories offered by a deceitful world. And when once a taste for worldly fare is acquired, joy in the triune God grows strangely dim.
The struggle to be satisfied in God is part and parcel of daily life for believers. “By nature,” writes John Piper, “we get more pleasure from God’s gifts than from himself” (When I Don’t Desire God, 9). As those who have been corrupted by father Adam’s sin we are, all of us, prone to “forsake the one true God for prodigious trifles” (Institutes, 1.5.11). So how do we fight for joy in God? In his mercy, he has given us ample means, and the first and foremost of these is his own word to us in Holy Scripture.
Fountain of All Joy
Why does God’s word play such a crucial role in our fight for joy? Before we answer, we actually have to start by asking a different question: Where does joy come from? Ultimately, joy comes not from reading a book, nor from meditation, nor from prayer, nor from this article. It has a very specific source.
The psalmist writes, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. . . . God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:25–26). And elsewhere, “In your presence there is fullness of joy” (Psalm 16:11). There is one, and only one, source of joy: the eternal and perfect God, who dwells forever in the felicity of triune love. From his fullness alone can we be satisfied because he made us (oh, glorious truth!) to be satisfied in him. “Whom have I in heaven but you?”
It is worth pausing here to ask ourselves, Do I believe this? Do I really believe that in himself God is replete and that he created all things out of the superabundance of his own inner life? Do I trust the testimony of the beloved apostle when he writes, “God is love” (1 John 4:8)? If we do not believe that the only source of true joy is God himself, then the gospel, while it may taste sweet from time to time, will be just one among a host of delicacies spread before us. We may rejoice in God, but only as the provider of other joys.
The daily struggle for joy in God is a fight of faith. We strive against the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the enemy of our souls to cling to God as the one who has life and joy in himself and freely offers them to us in the Son. And one of the crucial ways we fight is by opening his word.
‘Seek My Face’
We are daily presented with fresh opportunities to pursue God as our greatest treasure. In his mercy and kindness, he commands us, “Seek my face” (Psalm 27:8). And he has not withheld from us the means to do so.
Holy Scripture is the revealed word of God. It is the principal means he has given to us to seek him and to hear his voice. Piper writes, “The fundamental reason that the word of God is essential to joy in God is that God reveals himself mainly by his word” (When I Don’t Desire God, 95). We do not seek our God in mindless meditation, emptying ourselves of thoughts and ideas. Christians do meditate as a means to seek God, but we do so by filling our minds and thoughts with his word, carefully following the shafts of revealed light up to the Source.
And what — or better, who — do we see as our eyes are filled with heavenly light? We see him who is “the radiance of the glory of God,” our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ (Hebrews 1:3). God the Father calls us to seek him by his Spirit in his Son. Jesus made this plain when he said, “No one comes to Father except through me. . . . Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:6, 9).
When we open the word of God, we behold by faith the Word of God. In beholding the Word of God, we gaze upon the glory of God. In gazing upon the glory of God, we are filled (as Anselm writes) with “the blessedness for which [we were] made” (Proslogion 1) — fellowship with the Father through the Son in the Spirit.
‘Your Face, Lord, Do I Seek’
God made us to rejoice in him. And he has given us his word as the principal means to that joy. But how do we actually wield Scripture in our fight for joy? The psalmist responds to the Lord’s command “Seek my face” with “Your face, Lord, do I seek” (Psalm 27:8). How do we follow him in his pursuit? I’ll draw your attention to two aspects of faithful seeking that bring us back to where this article started: tasty food.
Seek by Fasting
God calls us to delight in him by fasting from this world.
Many are the delicacies offered to us by the world. The confectioners are hard at work, ever seeking to delight our senses and satiate our bellies. They want to fill us with goodies that, though tasty in the eating, will turn to ash in the stomach and leave us feeling bloated and sick. The pleasures of the world — anything and everything that promises to yield lasting happiness apart from God — amount to nothing but vanity.
If we are to have taste buds for what is true, we must fast from such delicacies and train ourselves to enjoy wholesome food. Fasting, in this sense, doesn’t mean we forsake all earthly goods, only that we learn to enjoy them properly as gifts received from the Father of lights.
So, how do we fast? By taking seriously how Jesus refutes the devil’s tasty temptation: “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matthew 4:4). We need to carefully consider what makes up our steady diet and ask if we’ve developed tastes for that which leaves us empty. We can test whether or not we’ve acquired a taste for the ephemeral by asking a few diagnostic questions.
What grabs your attention when you first wake up? Are you more eager to read emails or check what people said about your most recent post than you are to kneel in prayer with God’s word open before you?
What rhythms punctuate your days and weeks? Is your everyday life marked more by the demands of a busy schedule or by a repeated turning to hear the Lord?
What most informs the way you think and speak of the events of your life and the wider world? Do you primarily refract them through the lens of the latest political changes or most recent trends? Or do you consider them in light of the One who orders all things according to his good and sovereign will?
The list could go on and on. The fight for right fasting is won not in a single day nor, unfortunately, in the present life. We must, like a sommelier, carefully train our taste buds to “test everything; hold fast what is good [and] abstain from every form of evil” (1 Thessalonians 5:21–22).
Seek by Feasting
God also calls us to delight in him by feasting on his word.
God frequently refers to his word in terms of food. Man lives not by bread alone (Deuteronomy 8:5). “Your words were found, and I ate them, and [they] became to me a joy and the delight of my heart” (Jeremiah 15:16). Peter likens the word to “pure spiritual milk” (1 Peter 2:2), the author of Hebrews compares “the word of righteousness” to “solid food” (Hebrews 5:12–14), and David writes, “The law of the Lord is . . . sweeter . . . than honey and drippings of the honeycomb” (Psalm 19:10). Food is for eating. Good food is for feasting. And God wants us to feast on his word.
How do we feast? We feast by attentively reading his word. Attentiveness requires putting away distractions, soaking without hurrying, and attending carefully to what God says.
We feast by meditating on and memorizing his word, learning to speak and think with the grain of Scripture and hold fast the myriad promises made.
We feast by praying his word, speaking back to God in our own varied situations his very words, aiming to conform our will to his.
We feast by sharing what he shows us of himself in his word with others, inviting them to try a bite of what we have enjoyed.
We feast by hearing his word taught, humbly submitting ourselves to those whom he has appointed to lay the table for us.
We feast by singing his word, joining with the saints and angels as we address one another “in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all [our] heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 5:19–20).
Come, Eat
In one of his final appearances to the disciples before he ascended to heaven, Jesus cooked a meal and invited them to come and eat (John 21:12). He has done the same for us, but instead of a few fish on the beach, he has spread an unimaginable feast, putting before us the finest delicacies of his glory and calling us to banquet at his table.
So, come daily to eat and drink your fill. Feast on the food of his word, and find that he alone truly satisfies.
