About two years ago I lost my ability to taste sweetness for about a month, a condition with the medical name ‘hypoguesia’. It was quite odd to put sugar on my tongue and experience tasteless gritty grains which slowly dissolved, or to taste only the slightly earthy floweriness of clover honey with no sweetness at all. The only commercially manufactured biscuits I could tolerate were gingernuts because at least they had enough flavour to cover the taste of preservatives which is unmasked when sweetness is eliminated. Even chocolate completely lost its appeal!
One of the worst things about not my inability to taste sweetness was that I was still left with the sour, acidic taste in my mouth which is the common aftertaste from eating anything sweet. So I got the sourness but not the sweetness, not nice.
The gospel is like that too. Prior to my conversion I encountered the gospel on several occasions and frankly it left me cold. My reaction to Christianity was distinctly hostile, I considered the church to have done considerable damage to the progress of science historically and to be irrelevant to my life. I certainly tasted sourness, but had no hint of sweetness aside from one incident which has stuck in my mind for 25 years:
I happened to find myself as an unwilling participant of a youthgroup event (because I was keen on one of the female members of said youthgroup). As they did a Bible study on Joshua’s stroll around Jericho, I recall thinking to myself that while I could not believe in God, it was obviously comforting to have such a belief.
Perhaps God was already beginning His work in my heart. It was about four years later that I finally tasted the gospel as sweetness to my soul, accompanied by a hunger for the Bible — I wanted to know all I could about God and Jesus and was convinced that the only source of such knowledge was in the Book God wrote.
So take this as an encouragement to persist in living and telling the gospel. Some of those who react to it with sourness may become completely changed by it once God gives them the ability to taste its sweetness.
O Taste and see that the LORD is good!
Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!
(Psalm 34:8)
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Image of monkey poking out tongue: iStock
