Savoring God Fully
If you are new with us, we often take the summer months to walk through the Psalms. We’ve been referring to them this summer as Melodies of Encouragement. In the Psalms, we find people dealing with the real issues of human life to the fullest and being fully honest with God about those issues. But then they find real encouragement and hope in what God has done for them and the world. Today’s text is no different.
One thing that you may know about me if we’ve had at least a few conversations is that I love to share restaurants or new foods with people. I enjoy discovering somewhere or something that is really good and passing it on to people. It helps scratch this hospitality itch that God has wired me to have. Now one thing that I hate is when someone says that a place or food that we suggested isn’t good when they didn’t experience it fully or correctly. (ordered takeout, got something the place doesn’t specialize in, no seafood/only had filet o fish)
And as I studied Psalm 34 this week, I realized that many people interact with God in similar ways. They expect things that He didn’t promise, they only interact with Him or the church inconsistently with no follow-through, etc. This leads both Christians to lead lives where they are always somewhat dissatisfied with God and it leads skeptics to reject Him outright, because they are actually interacting with a false or incomplete version of who God is.
Today’s text will give us 4 ways to insure that we get the most out of a relationship and experience with God.
Big Idea: God is not meant to be experienced piecemeal; He is best served and savored whole heartedly.
1 I will bless the Lord at all times;
his praise will always be on my lips.
2 I will boast in the Lord;
the humble will hear and be glad.
3 Proclaim the Lord’s greatness with me;
let us exalt his name together.
David gives us a declaration of intent here. He pledges to worship God at all times. It makes sense that this kind of worship would follow a life that is fully experiencing God. It leads us to a place of gratitude like Louis preached about last week. Let’s look at an interesting contrast in verse 2.
We see mention of boasting in the Lord but it is the humble that do this and are gladdened by it. So those who live for God fully are defined by a boasting humility, but the boasting is only in the Lord.
So that gives us our first step: Practice true humility by boasting in the Lord.
These 2 ideas that appear to be contradictory work perfectly when they are aimed in the right direction. We can live truly humble lives because we know that God is worthy of all true worship. God doesn’t need to defer any of the praise that we give to Him because there is no one above Him or even on the same level. This certainly guards us from the sin of pride when we understand our place below who God is. But it also keeps us away from false humility or being down in the dumps about ourselves. True biblical humility is much more about having an incredibly high view of God than a sinking low view of ourselves.
We also see a communal element here with the boasts of one believer encouraging others and that we are called to exalt the Lord’s name together.
I sought the Lord, and he answered me
and rescued me from all my fears.
5 Those who look to him are radiant with joy;
their faces will never be ashamed.
6 This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him
and saved him from all his troubles.
7 The angel of the Lord encamps
around those who fear him, and rescues them.
David gives his reason for his dedicated worship: God has continually provided for and rescued him. Context of Concerning David, when he pretended to be insane in the presence of Abimelech (Achish), who drove him out, and he departed. 1 Samuel 21
Gives us Step 2: Call out to God with your needs and recognize his hand in providing for them.
David addresses key existential questions of humanity here. Is there a higher power/god greater than us? Is this God able to understand/communicate with us? Does God care about our issues? Is God close enough or powerful enough to deal with them? The Bible answers all these questions with a definitive, yes. 1 Peter 5:7 “Cast your anxieties on God, because He cares for you.”
Acts 17:27-28 27 He did this so that they might seek God, and perhaps they might reach out and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28 For in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’
It’s clear that repeatedly calling out to God, trusting Him with our needs, and seeing Him provide for those needs would lead us to the same place of constant praise that David proclaimed in vs. 1-2. This clearly requires the humility to admit our need but it also means that we have to open up our eyes to all the ways that God is at work in our lives. (He doesn’t just send us a statement each week broken up by line item)
We do this by being in His word regularly to know how He operates, by being in community with other believers (pain and need make us feel alone/exclusive, community opens our eyes to other stories), and by getting better at communicating with God through time in prayer. Doing these things inconsistently (or rarely to not at all) and expecting to feel satisfied with your relationship with God is like ordering the same thing from a restaurant once a year and thinking that you know how the rest of the food is.
The ultimate expression of this is accepting the Gospel.
8 Taste and see that the Lord is good.
How happy is the person who takes refuge in him!
9 You who are his holy ones, fear the Lord,
for those who fear him lack nothing.
10 Young lions lack food and go hungry,
but those who seek the Lord
will not lack any good thing.
11 Come, children, listen to me;
I will teach you the fear of the Lord.
12 Who is someone who desires life,
loving a long life to enjoy what is good?
13 Keep your tongue from evil
and your lips from deceitful speech.
14 Turn away from evil and do what is good;
seek peace and pursue it.
David goes from his personal faith to an evangelistic faith. When we truly love something and see the benefits of it, we try to get other people to enjoy it too. Our faith should be no different. This is why we end every service with the idea that you are sent out to world. We have something incredible in God and others can have Him too.
He gives us step 3: Don’t sample the Goodness of God, fully savor it.
Connection between vs 8 and 11, they both see what God is like and then dig deeper when we find that He is good and worthy of going all in. The most evocative example is the idea of tasting and seeing that God is good. (Callback to Adam and Eve, tasting the forbidden fruit) We have to understand what it meant by taste here, though. As a father of a 3-year-old, I am very familiar with trying to get Reid to take just one bite of something on his plate. But I don’t really just want him to take one bite do, I? No, I want him to take that one bite, then realize that it’s good and eat the rest of it. Many people treat God like he can be worshipped like the Sam’s or Costco free samples. You can walk around and take a little taste one (or if you’re sneaky, two) times and that will be satisfying. But that’s not what Sam’s or Costco are trying to get you to do. They want you to taste the sample, maybe talk to the nice person serving and describing it, and then pick up a box of the food, take it home, and hopefully come back to buy it again and again.
It is clear that many people who end up either rejecting God or being dissatisfied with their relationship with God are stuck Sampling God when they should be Savoring God. David is telling us to go all in God, because He is worthy of it and you won’t be disappointed with what you find. He mentions the fear of the Lord multiple times. I find it interesting that this follows verses 4-7 where David talks about God saving him from troubles where we know that he feared for his life. We’ve all experienced fear to some degree, great fear is all consuming, it can’t be ignored. It’s like David is telling us to trade the negative fear of our lives without God for the positive, all-consuming fear and reverence for God as our Savior and Lord.
This extends even to holiness issues or restrictions of some of our behaviors in order to fully savor and follow God. Vs. 10 tells us to actively seek the Lord (work on it), Vs. 13-14 tells us to keep our tongues and lips from evil and to turn away from evil to pursue peace. So as you dig deeper into your faith or you share your faith with people who do not yet believe in Jesus, know that you will encounter habits and lifestyles that the Gospel will require you to change or drop all together. That can be a painful process, but our continual taste of God’s goodness makes it worth it.
Illustration: students’ faith costing them for the first time (rejecting what others are doing and temptations) and/or Nik Ripken leading people to faith in places of persecution
For the sake of time, we are going to just quickly reference vs. 15-20. They are essentially a repeat of vs. 4-7 but have shifted from David’s experience of calling out to God and being rescued to a promise that that will also happen for other believers in God. That we can trust God to hear us and act for our benefit like He did for David. These verses aren’t all rosy, though. They don’t promise that the Christian life will be difficulty free. In fact vs 19 tells us that the righteous have “many adversaries” but that God delivers us from them. Following God doesn’t remove all difficulty from our lives, but it does give us hope and assurance that God will do something about it. We’ll close out today looking at vs. 21-22
21 Evil brings death to the wicked,
and those who hate the righteous will be punished.
22 The Lord redeems the life of his servants,
and all who take refuge in him will not be punished.
Step 4: Recognize that for all people, God is either a Gracious Savior or a Punishing Judge.
That’s kind of a scary dichotomy to state, but we need to be honest about it. If we are going to fully savor following God, we need to be clear on what the alternative is. This psalm mentions human or worldly trials or adversaries that God helps the believer overcome. But we need to recognize without the work of Jesus in the Gospel, we are the adversaries of God continually rebelling against Him. Romans 5:8 “while we were still sinners”
This is why the truth of the Gospel, that God actively sent Jesus to live the perfect life that we couldn’t and frankly didn’t want to live on our behalf and to die the sacrificial death that we fully deserved on our behalf, should continually blow our minds lead us to savor God more and more with our lives.
The point of this passage is more concerned about pointing you toward that goodness of God that you are missing out on than to point you away from the punishment that sin deserves. This same God who is deserving of all praise chose to graciously save and provide for those who call on Him. You can do that today. It may take you a while to fully understand the God that you are calling to and to follow Him for all He is worth. But you have to start somewhere. And recognizing your need for a savior is a good place to start.