Psalm 119:103 – Tasty & Sweet!

How tasty are your words to my lips,
sweet in my mouth.

This verse calls to mind Psalm 19:11. You might consider reading all of Psalm 19 at this point.

I don’t know how you respond to reading, hearing, or discussing scripture. I’ve discovered a wide variety of attitudes toward it over the years. For some, it’s largely boring reading. They’re not quite sure why they should bother. For others it’s a source of a few nice verses that are encouraging, sometimes taken out of context. For many, it’s read as a duty. I’ve met quite a number of people who say they read scripture as a duty, and find that they get very little out of it.

I don’t want to make scripture reading another “work,” something you have to do because God requires it and you might be lost if you don’t read or hear enough. God created a variety of people and knows there are a variety of reactions to reading anything, much less something as varied and complex as the Bible.

There are those who claim that it’s all very simple. These people usually only read the parts that fit into whatever simple scheme they’ve created in their mind.

For me, the Bible is a critical part of life. I don’t have a scheduled daily time for reading it. I turn to it frequently. I use it’s words as part of my thinking about other subjects. I can’t stay away from it. Even while I spent 12 years away from church entirely, I still read it from time to time, and when I did so more on my return, I still had the language skills needed to read in the original languages.

I studied biblical languages because I thought that the Bible was the one place to learn the truth, to come to understand God. I thought that to do that I had to pick my way to an understanding of every detail. Even though I was passionate about the Bible, it also often was tiring, because I found very often that I couldn’t make things are clear as I wanted them to be.

Still I continued to study. I’m a addict. I need my time with the Bible, which is also, for me, time with God. Jody has told me that she recognizes a particular look I get when reading, and that it indicates to hear that I’m spending time with God and enjoying it.

For me, God’s Word is alive and active. God’s word extends well beyond the Bible, because it is by the Word that God created everything. But God’s word provides the structure by which I understand that, a structure presented in the form of words. This literary form is the way in which I understand the Word. There are those whose language is math, or music, or even the mysteries of quantum physics, something I don’t comprehend at all.

My suggestion here is to find the way God can speak to you and spend time in that communication. You may not be a word addict, one who can’t find enough words to satisfy. God will find ways to communicate with you.

I wrote a poem about this, titled What Was It Like?. I can’t get away from words, but I can celebrate those who do. But the message will be there in one form or another.

Where will you feel God today?

(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)