Are You Hungry?

“Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!”—Psalm 34:8a

Are you hungry? I enjoy coming home after a long day. Walking through the door to be greeted by the aroma of home. Wafting through the air is the smell of garlic and onions. My wife is cooking her wonderful spaghetti sauce. My stomach is ready for food; my body relaxes at the thought of a good meal, while my mind treasures the thought of my palette being pleasured by tomato sauce, garlic, meatballs and pasta. Ahh, home cooking is wonderful.

As I have meditated on our verse for today, I think of my earthly appetite. God doesn’t make mistakes. He created us with senses to enjoy His vast and multi-faceted creation. We can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. Five senses that help encapsulate for us the experience of being human. While the senses themselves are good, they are misplaced if not used as a means for understanding the Creator who gave them to us. God gave them to us to experience His creation and then turn back to Him with a spirit of gratitude, thanks, and pleasure. When we dismiss Him as the Giver and Creator and pursue pleasure as the end result without Him then we dishonor Him. Just as a child receiving a present at Christmas turns to delight in present without thanking the one who gave it to him.

The real question for us is this: Does our earthly appetite point us to the Creator? Or, in other words, does our appetite for God surpass our appetite for food? God desires us to taste His goodness. To delight in who He is. To turn every portion of our life over to Him in a spirit of worship and delight.

The problem is that for many of us, we cannot taste and see that the Lord is good, because we are too busy gorging ourselves with the junk food of the world that we are too full to eat at the table of Christ. The food of the world cannot satisfy the cravings of our soul. It will leave us dissatisfied and hungry.

We must get up from the table of the world, take our place at the table of Christ and eat of Him (cf. John 6:54) and Him alone, because only He can truly and completely satisfy. When we taste of our Triune God, the all-satisfying, all-pleasurable joy of who He is and what He has done, we are then, and only then truly satisfied. He is our highest delight, the one who truly and only is able to satisfy the intense hunger within our souls. Amen.