05/21/2019
The painful feeling of hunger insures that we will not neglect the nutritional needs of our body. The desire for intimacy with our spouse is a yearning that insures our love for one another will deepen, and that the species will be perpetuated, and just as certainly, the sweet taste of God’s love draws us to an abiding relationship... and our salvation. Have you tasted the sweetness of God’s love, felt the yearning for a deeper relationship with Jesus, and hungered for His Word? Day by day our spirit should long for that familiar smell and taste... for an increase of faith.
“if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
1 Peter 2:3 ESV
As a boy I would come home from school, or playing in the neighborhood, and as I approached the front door of my house, I would begin to smell what my mother was preparing for dinner. Just the aroma would cause me to begin salivating, and would bring on an intense feeling of hunger within me. I would quicken my step, and as I ran through the front door I would hear the old familiar mantra... “take off your shoes, and wash your hands! Dinner is almost ready!”
Memories of our mother’s kitchens are lasting ones, and there are certain foods and smells that years later can instantly take us back there. The joining of the fragrance, taste, and love that surrounded them gained in intensity due to our familiarity with them. We knew that one, such as the smell of cookies, meant the taste and love were there also. We might have thought that the smell of a certain new food was good, but once we had tasted it, and experienced its delicious flavor, our reaction to the mere smell of it would have a dramatic impact on our senses. It is the difference between saying “That smells good Mom, what is it?” and shouting “Oh Boy! We are having spaghetti tonight!” As you raced through the door! Our faith is like that... the aroma of church, the taste of communion, the love of Jesus Christ as He looks down from the cross. In my youth, nothing would do until I had a mouth full of my mother’s cooking, and today, nothing will do until I am filled with the Holy Spirit, and the presence of Jesus and God.
“Oh believer, do not rest until you have full assurance of your position in Jesus. Let nothing satisfy you until, by the infallible witness of the Holy Spirit bearing witness with your own spirit, you are confident that you are a child of God.” - Charles Spurgeon
The sweet taste of God’s goodness, it heightens our response to the wafting aroma of His distant presence, and raises our expectation of His love when we are at last seated together at the Table. This deep and abiding relationship between our sensory perception, our mental expectations, and our bodily reaction, all feed on one another and thrill our souls as we worship. Any one of them will bring us immediately home to the kitchen of our faith...
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Psalms 23:6 ESV
Nourishing our bodies, satisfying our personal relationships, and feeding our spirituality; they all bring us back to that place we call home... that place where we want to dwell forever. They also cause us to go to great extremes to obtain them. What would we give for a taste of our mother’s cooking, a night of ecstasy with our spouse, or with the rushing of the Holy Spirit as it lifts us towards heaven?
“O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”
Psalms 63:1 ESV
“Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
Psalms 73:25-26 ESV
Poets fill volumes writing of mothers, fathers, lovers, and love, and the Bible is brimming with it too... if nothing else the Word of God is a love story between God and man. We begin with aroma as we approach...
“And Aaron shall burn fragrant incense on it. Every morning when he dresses the lamps he shall burn it, and when Aaron sets up the lamps at twilight, he shall burn it, a regular incense offering before the Lord throughout your generations.”
Exodus 30:7-8 ESV
Then we experience the relationship...
“Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack! The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.”
Psalms 34:8-10 ESV
And finally the meal; our quickening in God through Christ...
“But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.”
Romans 8:10-11 ESV
Do you seek out your faith with the intensity of a starving man? Do you long to abide in God with the overwhelming desire of a bride or groom approaching consummation? Do you feel a love for God as complete as His for you as Christ hung upon the cross? Seeking out our own salvation should have this urgency and intensity about it. We should yearn for it like a child in his mother’s kitchen, and leave no stone unturned, or effort unexpended as if a desperate man searching for the key to his lover’s heart.
So ask yourself, how fragrant is God’s presence to me today? How good is His taste upon my tongue? How perfect is my relationship and love for Him, and Jesus?
Prayer:
Father, I thank you for the incense that billows from before your throne and lets me know you are near. I thank you for the sweet taste of sacrifice that was made that I might be redeemed, but Holy Father I thank you most for your goodness, mercy, and grace that are the meat of my salvation... the blood and the flesh of Christ... the Lamb of God who seals your love for me, and leads me to your table. Holy, Holy, Holy, are you my God, who fills my senses, and nourished me body and soul. Praised be your name for only by your beckoning call can I come to dine with you. Glorious are you Father, and never ending is your love for me. Lead me home to your house Gracious Father, and seat me at your kitchen table as your child.
“Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man! For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.”
Psalms 107:8-9 ESV
Rich Forbes