Your words were found, and I ate them. Your words became a delight to me and the joy of my heart, for I bear your name, Lord God of Armies. [Jeremiah 15:16 (CSB)]
“Son of man,” he said to me, “feed your stomach and fill your belly with this scroll I am giving you.” So I ate it, and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth. [Ezekiel 3:3 (CSB)]
Back in 1919, pharmacist W.K. Buckley created a concoction to treat coughs, colds, and bronchitis called Buckley’s Original Mixture. Buckley’s elixir was tremendously effective but its flavor was horrid. Nevertheless, their nasty tasting blend of things like menthol, camphor, Canadian balsam, and pine needle oil is still being sold more than 100 years later. The mixture’s longevity is due as much to the company’s straightforward and humorous “awful taste” ad campaign as it is to its reputed efficacy. With the slogan, “It tastes awful. And it works!” Buckley’s is described by consumers as “the worst tasting, foulest smelling, yet most effective cough remedy.” Apparently, it is. Despite ads admitting, “People swear by it. And at it,” consumers continue to endure Buckley’s ghastly flavor. Never having used Buckley’s (and not about to try), this is not an endorsement!
While nowhere as unpleasant tasting as Buckley’s Mixture, many Christians tend to treat imbibing in God’s word as they might taking a dose of it or some other nasty tasting medication: hard to swallow and consumed only out of necessity! While Scripture’s writers sometimes likened God’s word to food or wrote of its taste, they never described it as “drinking turpentine and transmission fluid mixed together, with a hint of menthol and petroleum” as do some of Buckley’s customers!
While the Bible can be said to be “good for what ails you” and “just what the doctor ordered,” reading Scripture isn’t like taking a dose of Buckley’s or castor oil. God’s word never should be treated as a horrible-tasting medicine—something taken only when absolutely necessary. Peter likened God’s word to milk while Paul and the writer of Hebrews compared it to both milk and solid food (like meat). Job reported treasuring God’s words more than his daily food and Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Apostle John all wrote of eating God’s word. And, unlike those who consumed Buckley’s, there were no complaints about its foul taste. In fact, Jeremiah found God’s words a delight and the joy of his heart while Ezekiel and John said they were “sweet as honey” in their mouths. In fact, Psalms 19 and 119 refer to God’s words as even “sweeter” than honey!
When God fed the hungry Israelites in the Sinai desert, His provision included more than earthly food. Along with manna, He gave them something beautiful with which nourish their very souls—His Word! When Israel arrived in the Promised Land, the manna stopped but God’s voice didn’t; He provided mankind with a feast from Genesis through Revelation—and that feast remains with us today. As Moses told the Israelites and Jesus repeated to His followers, “Man must not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
While God’s Word has been described as “sweet as honey” in one’s mouth, unlike cotton candy and sugary sodas, there’s more to it than a sweet taste. Rather than empty calories, God’s words were described by Charles Spurgeon as, “full of substance—they are spirit, they are life, they are to be fed upon by the spiritually hungry!” Remembering that God spoke all of creation into existence with His Word, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that God’s Word is what sustains us, as well! Fortunately, the words of Scripture are sweeter and much easier to consume than Buckley’s disagreeable mixture!
The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts. [A.W. Tozer]
Found in almost every Roman Catholic church (and some Protestant and Orthodox ones), are the Stations of the Cross—a series of fourteen icons or carvings on the walls—each of which depict a moment in the Passion of Christ. Created to help people contemplate the events leading up to Christ’s crucifixion, they start with His death sentence from Pilate and end with His dead and battered body being laid in the tomb. Because Good Friday and Jesus’ death aren’t the end of the story, some churches have begun adding the resurrected Christ as a 15th station.
As I pondered my goals for this year’s Lenten practice, I remembered Alica Britt Chole’s suggestion to “consider Lent as less of a project and more of a sojourn.” While we often encounter the word ”sojourn” in Scripture, it’s not a word typically used today. Although the basic meaning of gûr, the Hebrew word translated at sojourn, is to “live, settle, dwell,” gûr usually included the sense of it being a temporary or transient stay. Typically, a sojourner was someone living outside their clan or a noncitizen in a strange place. Because of famine, Israel sojourned in Egypt for 430 years and, because of their disobedience, they sojourned forty years in the desert before entering the Promised Land. It is Jesus’ 40-day sojourn in the wilderness before entering His public ministry that is remembered in Lent.
“How was work today?” asked the wife in the Born Loser comic strip (drawn by Chip Sansom). Her husband answered, “Horrendous!” adding, “It feels so good that it’s over, I’m almost glad it happened!” Having had times when my prayer was simply, “Lord, just get me through this!” I understand. Sometimes, life seems so challenging and exhausting that we’re willing to settle for merely getting through it. That, dear friend, is setting the bar far too low. God has better plans for us than just getting by and none of us are born losers.
Joe Btfsplk was a character in Al Capp’s Lil’ Abner comic strip. With a last name that sounds likes what’s known as a “raspberry” or “Bronx cheer,” the poor man had a dark cloud of perpetual bad luck hanging over his head. Btfsplk no longer appears in the comics but I think his dark cloud of misfortune has settled over the head of a dear friend I’ll call JB (in honor of Capp’s luckless character). Since JB’s retirement, if something could go wrong, it has and, as soon as one challenge resolves, another one appears. When I saw the photos from his most recent mishap, JB looked as if he’d been tossed around in a giant rock tumbler filled with broken glass and boulders.
Several years ago, two friends joined the ranks of widowhood within a week of one another. Because her husband surrendered to cancer several months earlier by stopping all treatment, one woman was not surprised when she joined the club. The other woman, however, went to bed a wife and awoke the next morning to find herself a widow. Despite his looking the picture of health, her husband, having suffered a fatal stroke while she slept, lay dead on the kitchen floor.
Devotions of the Heart 