Ask God for New Taste Buds
Why we struggle to delight in Scripture, and how Psalms 1 and 2 teach us to enter a life of prayer.
Scripture: Psalm 1:1-2; Psalm 2:12. Adapted from a sermon preached February 12, 2023.
Most of us want to pray more than we do. We want to open the Bible and find it sweet, and instead we find it slow. We know the psalmist said, “How sweet are your words to my taste” (Psalm 119:103), and we quietly wonder why our own experience so rarely matches his. The problem, I have come to believe, is not mainly discipline. It is desire. And desire can be changed.
Think of the Psalms as a garden of prayer: 150 poems, five books, many hands, and a bloom for every season of the soul. Whatever you carry in, there is a psalm for it. But no one enjoys a garden they never enter, and the Psalms tell us exactly where the gate is. Psalms 1 and 2 are the archway, and they name the two things we carry through it: the Word of God, and the Son of God.
Enter with the Word
Psalm 1 blesses the one “whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night.” Delight is the word that trips us. How do you delight in something you have to talk yourself into reading?
You ask God to change your palate.
When my son Gabriel was small, everything was chicken nuggets. Then one day he tried a hamburger and his whole face lit up: “This is so good!” We told him we had been offering him hamburgers for years. “Yeah,” he said, “but now I love them.” Something had clicked. His taste buds had changed.
We are not so different. Our hearts have been trained to crave what the world serves, and they have to be retrained to crave the goodness of God. A recent survey found that only about one in ten Americans reads the Bible daily, and even the wish to read it is declining. Our appetites are always moving. The only question is whether they are moving toward the Word or away from it. So the psalmist prays not for more willpower but for new senses: “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law” (Psalm 119:18). That is a prayer God loves to answer. And for those born of his Spirit, he is not only beside us as we read. He is within us.
Enter with Christ
If Psalm 1 hands us the Word, Psalm 2 hands us the Son. The nations rage, but the psalm turns toward promise: God will establish his kingdom with Christ as King, and “blessed are all who take refuge in him” (Psalm 2:12). We come into the garden of prayer not to unload our burdens and leave, but to seek the One who holds our life.
So the honest question is whether we want him above everything else. There is a line I return to when my focus slips: “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:25-26). Every day there is a quiet war over desire. I get hungry, tired, distracted. But set beside the fellowship of God, those other cravings fade. This is why I keep praying for new taste buds: so that I would want Christ more than the life the world keeps telling me to chase.
We never leave
Prayer, in the end, is not a room we visit but the air we learn to breathe. “Pray without ceasing,” Paul writes, “in everything give thanks” (1 Thessalonians 5:17-18). We bring anxiety into the garden and leave with peace; we bring fear and leave with courage; we bring indifference and leave with compassion. The book that opens with an archway closes, in Psalm 150, with a whole life at home in the garden: praise.
So ask him for the new palate. Then walk in, and do not hurry out.