By Jon Bloom at: www.desiringgod.org
(…continued) This living soul food is more vital to our ultimate health than bodily food. But learning to eat well for the sake of our body’s well-being has valuable lessons for eating well for our soul’s well-being. And one of those valuable lessons is that our taste preferences can be changed.
Our tastes are conditioned by habits and wrong ways of thinking about food. Like eating healthy food, eating healthy promises requires more work to plan — new habits of discipline that aren’t as convenient and entertaining as junk promises. And if we’ve become conditioned to heavily processed, sugary, empty-carb promises, artificially engineered to be addictive, we may find the taste and texture of true food less enjoyable at first.
But these habit and taste preferences will change as we stick with it and increasingly experience the benefits of substantial, hope-sustaining and deepening benefits.
The only way to break a habit of eating junk food promises is cultivating a taste for rich, nourishing, long-lasting, deeply satisfying, and true promises. It takes eating real food to develop the taste for real food. We must be patient. Old tastes do not diminish and new tastes are not acquired overnight. We might find it helpful to change some bodily food habits at the same time, and let that experience illustrate the spiritual reality. But as we press in, God will meet us and help us “taste and see” that he is good (Psalm 34:8).
“The God of hope” wants us to feast on his promises and be filled “with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit [we] may abound in hope” (Romans 15:13).
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John 6:35…51a — Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty…. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”
Psalm 34:8 — Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.
Romans 15:13 — May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
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O Almighty God, grant that we may ever be found watching and ready for the coming of Thy Son. Save us from undue love of the world, that we may wait with patient hope for the day of the Lord, and so abide in him, that when he shall appear we may not be ashamed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
–Methodist hymnal