Psalm 119:103 Tasty

If you eat only the same types of food continually, you'll develop a distaste for anything different. People who have been raised on bland foods tend to have little interest in spicy foods. The opposite is just as true, with spicy eaters eschewing bland foods.

The best way to develop a taste for more flavorful foods is to try them. Work your way up to them.

Instead of going straight for the habaneros, try eating foods seasoned lightly with jalapeno. When I was much younger I wasn't at all fond of hot spices. I've slowly tried hotter foods, to the point where I now enjoy eating pickled jalapenos and fried jalapeno-and-cheese poppers, the hotter the better.

For the first fifty years of my life I hated the taste of coffee. Then I experienced a sudden coffee conversion during a mission trip to Mexico. My best friends and my family were all shocked at the seemingly overnight change.

Although it felt like it happened suddenly, my new taste for coffee had taken a gradual and natural progression. I've always loved chocolate and developed a taste for dark chocolates. My favorite is now chocolate bars with 85% cocoa, sprinkled with crumbled cacao bean nibs!

I had also gotten hooked on Arby's Jamocha milkshakes, which is basically a chocolate shake with a hint of coffee flavoring. Today a Jamocha would seem very little like actual coffee, but at the time it was a gateway drug for me, leading me from the bitterest of chocolates to the bitterness of coffee.

I've spent a lot of time over the years around college students, and many of them learned to love coffee when they arrived on campus, but they began with frothy cappuccinos containing about 20% coffee, mixed with sugar and dairy products and assorted flavorings. It takes them a while for their taste to adapt to actual coffee.

How sweet are your words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth!

Psalm 119:103

New believers sometimes experience a similar gradual change in their spiritual taste buds.

Prior to conversion, many people find any talk of spiritual matters distasteful. God-talk makes some uneasy, while it causes others to respond with outright disdain. Those silly Christians and their make-believe God.

But as the Spirit works on their hearts, the God-talk elicits a confusing mix of sorrow and joy. Sorrow as they come to realize the many ways they've been turning away from God. Joy as they discover God has always known them and is waiting for them with open arms.

But even then, the scriptures can take some adjustment. The millenia-old terminology and sentence structures are off-putting, even when translated into modern English. The counter-cultural doctrines elicit shock and even horror among some. If they had a bad experience with religion and church earlier in life, it will take hard work to see through those ingrained legalistic or licentious interpretations and discover the truth of God's love.

And for some it can take a long while to stop seeing reasons why God should hate them, in spite of His repeated promises of grace and mercy and love.

Only by steady devotion to meditating on the Word will they develop not only a taste for the words and ways of the Lord, but a delight in their sweetness.

If you're struggling to develop a taste for the scriptures, build up to it, just like you'd gradually acclimate yourself to coffee or tea or habaneros.

Begin by reading the Gospels. The straightforward stories of Jesus' life are the most welcoming parts of the Bible. Also spend some time in Psalms, which will tug at your heart, and the Proverbs, which will season your mind.

Then move on to the shorter epistles, from Galatians through Philemon, where your mind will be challenged and opened. Eventually you'll move on to discover the more complex flavors of Romans and Corinthians, Isaiah and Jeremiah.

Through it all, remember your goal is to learn to love the words of God, which will deepen your love for God himself.

Psalm 119:102 Student and Teacher

I first saw Roy Weece preach when I was 8 years old and he came to Westside Christian Church to speak at a revival. Over the following 40 years I had many opportunities to meditate on Roy and his teachings.

When I was 8, I was fascinated by his deep voice, his height and posture, and his hair. I wanted to grow up to have his hair. My grandmother's hair had turned white prematurely, and I loved her snowy hair. Roy was the first person I had seen besides her who had hair like that, and it gave me hope that I would inherit my grandma's hair and look like Roy.

Instead, I inherited my uncles' hair - or their lack of hair. But for years I studied on Roy's hair, which always seemed perfectly coiffed.

As I grew older I was more focused on Roy's personality. His confidence and courage and commitment to evangelism was an inspiration to me. As an introvert I often was too timid to speak up for myself. Studying his way of approaching people and situations helped me to develop greater confidence.

I also began to study his ways of teaching and preaching. My analytical, outline-oriented mind was impressed with his preaching outlines, always with their cleverly crafted section headings. His goal was that by memorizing his outlines, we might better remember the content.

The longer I meditated on his style of teaching, I came to realize it wasn't the outlines that made his teaching so powerful. It was the stories. All preachers tell stories, but Roy's were not anecdotes designed to elicit a chuckle or illustrate a point. His stories were about the way Roy and others had lived out those teachings in real world situations, always focused on God's mission.

Through decades of studying on Roy's teachings I learned that outlines and the depth of content behind them are important. But demonstrating the real life application of that content carries more lasting weight.

During the later years, when I was around Roy more often and ministered alongside him, I meditated on Roy's character. I learned what made him tick, the things he enjoyed, the inner motivations that drove him. I meditated on his faults and on his faith.

I was meditating on Roy as a person, rather than as an ideal with perfect hair and brilliant teaching.

I have not departed from your laws,
for you yourself have taught me.

Psalm 119:102

The greatest benefit I've received from meditating on the Word has come from meditating on the teacher behind the Word.

I study the Word to deepen and heighten my awe at His majesty. The greater my understanding of His splendor, the higher I set the bar for my personal spiritual growth.

As I meditate on the scriptures, I focus on God's character. I dive deep into His priorities. I bathe in the understanding of what He loves and hates and desires. I catalog the ways He exhibits the fruit of His Spirit.

I meditate on the Heart of God so I might become a man after God's own heart.

I examine the way God teaches His people. His commands and laws are vital, but He tends to teach His people to understand and live out those laws by leading them to experiences that stretch them to new ways of being His chosen people. He walks beside us and trains our eyes to see people who need Him, trains our feet in eagerness to move toward people in need, and trains our hands to lift up those who have fallen.

By meditating on God the teacher, I'm continually growing in my understanding of God's teachings.

Psalm 119:101 Knowing the Road

There's a street in my hometown of Columbia, MO, called Carter Lane. It's basically just an access road, what some would call a frontage road, It runs parallel to one of the city's primary arteries, South Providence Road.

Most of the local people who read this are probably thinking they didn't know the name of that road, or that it even exists. It's so insignificant, the few businesses actually along that road have Providence Road as their address, not Carter Lane.

I barely knew Carter Lane existed until I began seeing it on my rideshare destinations over and over. I've lived in Columbia for nearly my entire life since I was eight, but I never knew how many people live on the streets leading off Carter Lane. There are several apartment complexes, plus numerous neighborhoods of duplexes and single-family homes.

Those Carter Lane neighborhoods are among the most confusing neighborhoods I drive to.

The last connecting street off the north end of Carter Lane is Campusview Drive. There's an apartment complex at the very beginning of that drive called Campus View Apartments, with 173 units. Bumped up against that complex is Boulder Springs, a 208 unit apartment complex. Further down Campus View Drive are hundreds more houses and duplexes.

The machine intelligence that powers the rideshare app GPS has trouble figuring out the difference between those neighborhoods. Whenever they send me to the Campus View area, I know there's a good chance it's going to take me to the wrong neighborhood or the wrong building.

The regular passengers in those neighborhoods have become aware of this problem. The smart ones will send me a text while I'm on the way, with very specific instructions on how to find them.

One college student called me when I was hopelessly lost and asked if the annoying speed bumps I was driving over were single speed bumps or double speed bumps. If it's not the double ones, she said, you're in the wrong neighborhood.

I'm getting better at it. I'm learning to take a close look at the instructions and compare that to the pin on the map that identifies where the passenger (or the passenger's phone) is located. I've learned to navigate around the complicated neighborhoods through trial and error. And I'm even taking notes on the things I'm learning about that neighborhood and others.

I'm meditating on the road map of Columbia.

I have kept my feet from every evil path 
so that I might obey your word.

Psalm 119:101

People talk about trial and error a lot, but for most people it's just a lot of haphazard trying and plenty of making errors. Only accidentally do they learn lessons for their trial and error.

The way to turn trial and error into trial and transformation is to intentionally see mistakes as an opportunity to learn. And that requires meditation.

Meditate on the teaching, rebuking, correction, and training provided in God's Word.

Meditate on the experiences you've had - today, over the past week, the past year, and throughout your life.

Meditate on your mistakes and your successes.

Meditate on how your experiences have transformed you, for better or worse.

Blend your meditation on your trial and error with your meditation on God's Word, allowing the scriptures to inform your experience and your experience to inform your understanding of the scriptures.

Meditate on the 1 road as you travel through life.

Psalm 119:100 Functional Lead

I'm not a functional lead.

The actual functional lead is someone who has more technical knowledge of Oracle Peoplesoft programming than I do. She knows more things about the "guts" of the program than I ever will.

But even she has to frequently defer to the programming specialists in the IT department, the people who are educated as programmers. They're able to actually dig into the code and fix problems or enhance performance deep in the system.

And yet there are many things I understand better than any of those people do about how the system actually functions on a daily basis in the particular institution where I work.

The first day the hospital went live with Peoplesoft, a friend in IT called me. As the person who managed the servers, he was alarmed at the massive spike in the load being put on his machines. He didn't understand why the hospital needed to run the receiving process hundreds of time a day, including spurts when the process was being run every minute or two.

Because I spent over twenty years working on the hospital receiving dock, I was able to help him understand the need. Day after day of rushing to process medical supplies so I could deliver them to the medical people who needed them to care for patients had given me more than head knowledge. It gave me intimate, personal understanding.

When the people in those patient-care departments call me and ask why their personal list of favorite items no longer functions properly, I don't even have to pause to think of the answer. I've been building items in computerized inventory databases for over 30 years, and I've personally entered every piece of information regarding about 70% of the items in our current database. I spend part of every day updating item records when the information changes.

My experience physically handling hospital supplies on the receiving dock enables me to understand the information I'm entering into the item master database. The combined physical and technical experience helps me to answer the requisitioner's questions quickly, accurately, and in a way that makes sense for their needs.

My supervisor has told me she dreads the day I retire. It's not because I'm some sort of genius. It's because I have decades of experiential knowledge stored in my brain. Someone else can be hired who has their own knowledge base and their own accumulated experiences. And I've accumulated hundreds of documents of detailed notes about the things I know. But they won't have my personal knowledge of the history of why we buy this particular product instead of that one, based on issues that arose and decisions that were made 20 years ago.

Deep understanding requires more than knowledge. It comes only by living within the framework of that knowledge day after day, over a long period of time.

I have more understanding than the elders,
for I obey your precepts.

Psalm 119:100

True meditation begins in the Word but continues in the world. Only by obeying - by intentionally living out each day within the framework of God's revelation - can anyone achieve deep understanding of God's ways.

It's great to study everything the Bible says about grace and mercy, memorizing verses, assembling them into a systematic framework of theology, and even teaching others to understand those teachings. Greater still is struggling through life as a sinner, learning to rely wholly on His grace and mercy. Full understanding comes by not only learning to accept and embrace grace personally, but by stretching out of your comfort zone to extend that same grace and mercy toward others, accepting and embracing people who are imperfect.

I know people who can expound extemporaneously for hours about the scriptural doctrines of baptism, and yet they lack full understanding because they have precious little experience in actually planting seeds that lead to people asking the question, "What must I do to be saved?" What's the point of knowing the detailed answer to the question if you never put yourself in the position to be asked the question?

I don't want to settle for being a scholar of the Word. I want to understand the Word by obeying it.