How's your appetite?

Open wide your mouth and I will fill it. Psalm 81:10

Have you ever tried to spoonfeed a baby whose mouth remains clamped tight shut?

I think most parents will be able say, perhaps with a sigh, “Oh yes!” It’s an experience which is likely to be (a) maddeningly frustrating, (b) rather messy and (c) ending in tears (and that’s not just you).

All that’s a long time ago now for me, but I still think of it every time I read this verse in Psalm 81 – God inviting his people (I think it’s an invitation rather than a command) to feast on him: “Open wide your mouth and I will fill it”. Don’t be like that baby! No, be like those hungry birds in the nest, their open beaks stretching up for food.

The psalm looks back to the “exodus”, the time God delivered his people Israel from their captivity in Egypt. It starts in a mood of noisy celebration (verses 1-3). Then it recalls some of those distant events (verses 4-7). And then it becomes a plea from God that the people would be always loyal to him and him alone (verses 8-10a). And then… this invitation (verse 10b).

For the rest of the psalm the mood is sombre, starting with a sad “but” in verse 11: “But my people would not listen to me…” – a loving complaint of God against his people.

God is disappointed: his people will not allow him to do for them what he longs to do to make them happy.

The challenge these words pose for us is about receptivity: how receptive, how open, are we to what God wants to give us? What sort of spiritual appetite do we have? Are we, like Israel so long ago, a disappointment to him?

It’s not just about knowing God or believing in him, but about enjoying him.

Spiritual appetite can take various forms. Two in particular come to mind.

First, a hunger for God’s word.

When Jesus was tempted by the devil (Matthew 4) he went without food for forty days. Rather unnecessarily (I always think) Matthew adds that “he was hungry”. You bet he was! And so the temptation to “tell these stones to become bread” must have been massive. But what does Jesus do? Quoting from Deuteronomy 8:3 he replies: “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”.

Yes, we need bread, food. Of course. But God is a God who speaks, and why would he speak unless he wants us to listen? Why would he cause his word to be written down and preserved from generation to generation unless he expects us to read it? (I’m not forgetting that many of God’s people may not be able to read, even today: thank God, then, if his word is made available to them through those who are called to teach and preach.)

What about us? Do we take the reading of the scriptures seriously? Do we aim for familiarity with the whole Bible, both testaments, and not just the favourite and well-known bits?

I would love to know more about  the Christians of Berea. They barely figure in the Bible – you’ll find them only in Acts 17. They were Jews, so no doubt familiar with the Old Testament through attendance at the synagogue. But Luke tells us that they received the gospel message “with great eagerness, and examined the scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (verses 10-12).

During this time of “lockdown”, if we find that we have more time on our hands than usual, how about modelling ourselves on the Bereans? Why not get our teeth into some part of the Bible that perhaps we are not too familiar with?

The second kind of spiritual appetite is a hunger for God’s holiness.

In his sermon on the mount Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matthew 5:6).

To have a good command of scripture is a great thing. But of course it means precisely nothing if it doesn’t have the effect of making us new people – “righteous” people.

There’s a lot that could be said about that word “righteousness”. It’s certainly nothing to do with “self-righteousness”, and it’s far more than simply “being good”. In essence it is the purity and holiness that can be ours through faith in Jesus and through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. It’s the quality of character that arises from enjoying a relationship with God himself. It’s all about simple trust and glad obedience. For me the word “Christlikeness” is about as close as we can get.

And we are called to “hunger and thirst” for it. What, I wonder, is our response to that?

Let’s go back to Psalm 81. It ends with a wonderful promise for those who will indeed “open wide our mouths” – we will be “fed with the finest of wheat; with honey from the rock…”

God is a loving, generous God. Let’s not be slow to enjoy his generosity!

Loving Father, thank you for the gift of your word. Please, through your Holy Spirit, sharpen my appetite for it, and may it produce a harvest of pure, Christlike righteousness in my everyday life. Amen.