We Must Learn to Taste

By: American Decency Staff

God doesn’t play fair.

Much to my parents’ concern, I hadn’t been to church for a long time. And yet here I was, in my first term at university, sliding into a pew at St Ebbe’s Church in Oxford.

This, I can promise you, was not the result of any pious yearning on my part. Rather, it was because the congregation counted among its number a particularly lovely second-year student of modern languages.

Where earnest parental pleading had failed, she had proved to be rather more convincing.

Stop Reading the Bible

Incidentally, or so it seemed, it was at St Ebbe’s that I met Tony. Knowing that he was the student worker at the church, I politely agreed to meet him for a coffee one afternoon in his study.

It was underwhelming. We looked at a few paragraphs of the Bible together. Then he asked me to explain to him what I’d just read, because apparently even a person in his position can lack basic comprehension skills. Then he asked me how he could be praying for me. Finally, he wondered if I’d like to do it all over again next week. Presumably he was very lonely indeed, so I said yes, and the routine continued throughout the winter, and into the spring.

That six-month stretch turned out to be the pivotal moment of my life. During those meetings, Tony taught me to stop reading the Bible. Or rather, he taught me to stop merely reading the Bible. He encouraged me to act on what I was reading. Trust it. Obey it. Put it into practice. Live it out, so that I would discover, in my own experience, that God’s word was good. Even when (perhaps especially when) it cut across my deepest and most cherished desires and convictions.

This, I discovered, is what it meant to “taste and see that the Lᴏʀᴅ is good.”

Read More: http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/we-must-learn-to-taste

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