THE BEST BREAD
I ate a crusty piece of plain bread the other day — without butter, jam, or any accouterments. It wasn’t even raisin or garlic or seven-grain bread. Yet as I gave it an uncharacteristically perseverant and methodical chew, I was slowly satisfied with the unpretentious pleasure of carbohydrates transformed into simple sugars. As the mouthful of mainstay fare took on a delightful flavor, I suddenly realized how much I’ve been affected by today’s pandering society of instant gratification: I’m usually too hurried to catch this flavor! My swallow reflex has been trained to fire early due to long habits of bolting down my meals, and hence the humbler food gets taken out of tasting range and is subsequently branded as unpalatable, or bland at best. We prefer flavors to burst forth immediately: we have no patience for thorough mastication, and one result of that is poor digestion.
There is a spiritual application in this. Could it be that we are so accustomed to highly processed, fluffy, pre-packaged spiritual meals that we don’t have the patience to chew the simple Bread of Life, or to personally meditate, and mull over the Scriptures until the sweetness emerges, and thus we have no stomach for simple and wholesome soul-nourishment? Has the desire for quick results dwarfed our capacity to follow a prolonged train of thought, and follow the links in a well-made golden chain of well-reasoned truth? Do we find pre-packaged, ready-made sermon sandwiches more appealing than sitting down to study and understand the Bible for ourselves?
Many of us don’t have the perseverance to stick to a job, whether intellectual or physical, when the work is slow and arduous. We are seldom content to do painstaking work with no sign of proximate reward. To read books is a laborious chore unless they have the consistency of whipped cream, or at least enough sugar or spice to keep me swallowing. But there is a very good reason that Jesus called himself the bread of life: not the whip cream, not the bread and butter, not the bread and jam, not even the toasted raisin-bread (John 6:48)! Isn’t it time we learned to “Taste and see that the Lord is good” on his terms? (Psalms 34:8). Let’s take adequate time with the Word and process every bite. Let’s make Jeremiah’s experience ours and be transformed by a personal ingestion and digestion of the Pure Word of God:
There is a spiritual application in this. Could it be that we are so accustomed to highly processed, fluffy, pre-packaged spiritual meals that we don’t have the patience to chew the simple Bread of Life, or to personally meditate, and mull over the Scriptures until the sweetness emerges, and thus we have no stomach for simple and wholesome soul-nourishment? Has the desire for quick results dwarfed our capacity to follow a prolonged train of thought, and follow the links in a well-made golden chain of well-reasoned truth? Do we find pre-packaged, ready-made sermon sandwiches more appealing than sitting down to study and understand the Bible for ourselves?
Many of us don’t have the perseverance to stick to a job, whether intellectual or physical, when the work is slow and arduous. We are seldom content to do painstaking work with no sign of proximate reward. To read books is a laborious chore unless they have the consistency of whipped cream, or at least enough sugar or spice to keep me swallowing. But there is a very good reason that Jesus called himself the bread of life: not the whip cream, not the bread and butter, not the bread and jam, not even the toasted raisin-bread (John 6:48)! Isn’t it time we learned to “Taste and see that the Lord is good” on his terms? (Psalms 34:8). Let’s take adequate time with the Word and process every bite. Let’s make Jeremiah’s experience ours and be transformed by a personal ingestion and digestion of the Pure Word of God:
“Thy words were found and I did eat them, and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart, for I am called by thy name, oh Lord God of hosts.” Jeremiah 15:16
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