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 · Psalm 119:18 · Adapted from a sermon preached February 12, 2023.
Most people want to pray more than they actually do. They want to open the Bible and find it sweet, and instead find it slow. The psalmist could say, how sweet are your words to my taste (Psalm 119:103), and most readers quietly wonder why their own experience so rarely matches his. The usual diagnosis is that the trouble is discipline, a lack of grit and routine. But the usual diagnosis is wrong. The trouble is not mainly discipline. It is desire, and desire is the one thing willpower cannot manufacture and the one thing God can change. Psalms 1 and 2 stand as the archway into the whole book of prayer, and they name what a person carries through it: the Word of God, and the Son of God.
The problem is desire, not discipline
Psalm 1 blesses the one whose delight is in the law of the Lord, who meditates on it day and night. Delight is the word that trips everyone, because no one can delight in something he has to talk himself into opening. This is exactly where the discipline diagnosis breaks down. A person can force himself to read by sheer resolve for a while, but forced reading of a book one does not love is a candle that burns out fast, and the failure then gets misread as a failure of discipline when it was really a failure of appetite. Consider a small child for whom everything is chicken nuggets, who tries a hamburger one day and lights up, this is so good, and when told he had been offered hamburgers for years answers, yes, but now I love them. Something clicked. The taste buds changed. Human hearts are no different. They have been trained to crave what the world serves and have to be retrained to crave the goodness of God, and no amount of scolding retrains an appetite. That is why the psalmist does not pray for more willpower. He prays for new senses: open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law (Psalm 119:18). That is a prayer God delights to answer, and for those born of his Spirit he is not only beside the reader but within.
Enter with Christ
If Psalm 1 hands over the Word, Psalm 2 hands over 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). A person comes into the garden of prayer not to unload his burdens and leave, but to seek the One who holds his life. So the honest question is whether a person wants him above everything else, and there is a line to return to when 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, waged by hunger and tiredness and distraction, and set beside the fellowship of God the other cravings thin out. That is the reason to keep praying for new taste buds, to want Christ more than the life the world keeps advertising.
Prayer is the air, not a room
Prayer, in the end, is not a room to visit but the air a person learns to breathe. Pray without ceasing, Paul writes, in everything give thanks (1 Thessalonians 5:17-18). Anxiety goes into the garden and peace comes out; fear goes in and courage comes out; indifference goes in and compassion comes out. The book that opens with an archway closes, in Psalm 150, with an entire life at home in the garden, which is praise. So the first move is not to try harder. It is to ask for the new palate, and then to walk in and not hurry out. Discipline will follow desire, but desire has to be given, and God gives it to those who ask.