The Sweetness of God’s Word

The Sweetness of God's Word

(No. 3197)

A SERMON PUBLISHED ON THURSDAY, MAY 12, 1910.

DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,

AT UPTON CHAPEL, LAMBETH, ON TUESDAY AFTERNOON, MARCH 12, 1867.

"How sweet aire Your Words to my taste! Yes, sweeter than honey to my
mouth!" Psalm 119:103.

IT is delightful to find how exactly the experience of David, under the
Jewish dispensation, tallies with the experience of the saints of God
in these Gospel times. David lived in an age of miracles and many
manifestations. He could have recourse to the Urim and the Thummim, and
the priesthood. He could go up to Zion and listen to the holy songs of
the great assembly. He could converse with the priesthood but still,
the food of his soul was supplied to him from the written Word of God,
just as it is with us. Now that we have no open visions and the Urim,
and the Thummim and the priesthood are altogether departed, we still
feed upon the Word! As that is the food of our souls, so it was the
food of David's soul. Martin Luther says, "I have covenanted with the
Lord that I would neither ask Him for visions, nor for angels, nor for
miracles, but I would be satisfied with His own Word, and if I might
but lay hold upon Scripture by faith, that shall be enough for me." Now
it seems to be so with David here. The honey that gratifies his taste
is not found in angels' visits, or miraculous signs, or officiating
priesthoods, or special Revelations, but in the words of God's mouth
and in the testimonies of Holy Writ. Let us, dear Brothers and Sisters,
prize this Book of God! Be not ambitious, as some are, of seeking new
Revelations, or enquire for the whispers of disembodied spirits, but be
satisfied with this good household bread which God has prepared for His
people! And while others may loathe and dislike it, let us be thankful
for it and acknowledge with gratitude the bread which came down from
Heaven, testifying to us, as it does, of the Lord Jesus, the Word of
Life that lives and abides forever!

I. Notice, first, THE WORD APPRECIATED. This exclamation of David is a
clear proof that he set the highest possible value upon the Word of
God. The evidence is more valuable because the Scripture that David had
was but a slender book compared with this volume which is now before
us. I suppose he had little more than the five Books of Moses, and yet
as he opened that Pentateuch, which was to him complete in itself, he
said, "How sweet are Your Words to my taste!" If that first morsel so
satisfied the Psalmist, surely this fuller and richer feast of heavenly
dainties ought to be yet more gratifying to us! If, when God had but
given him the first dish of the course, and that by no means the best,
his soul was ravished with it–how should you and I rejoice with
unspeakable joy, now that the King has brought on royal dainties and
given us the Revelation of His dear Son! Think a minute. The Pentateuch
is what we would call, nowadays, the historical part of Scripture–and
haven't you frequently heard persons say, "Oh, the sermon was
historical, and the minister read a passage out of the historical part
of the Word"? I have, with great pain, heard persons speak in a very
depreciating manner of the histories of Holy Writ. Now, understand
this–the part of the Word which David loved so much ismainly
historical–and if the mere history of the Word was so sweet, what
ought those holy Evangels and sacred Epistles to be which declare the
mystery of that narrative–which are the honey whereof the Old
Testament is but the comb–which are the treasures of which the Old
Testament is but the casket? Surely we are to be condemned, indeed, who
do not prize the Word now that we have it all!

That Word of God which David so much prized was mainly typical,
shadowy, symbolical. I do not know that he understand it all. I do know
that he understood some of it, for some of his Psalms are so
evangelical that he must have perceived the great Sacrifice of God
foreshadowed in the sacrifices described in the books of Numbers and
Leviticus, or it would not have been possible that he would, in so
marvelous a style, express his faith in the great offering of our Lord
Jesus! I put it to some professors here, do you often read the types at
all? If, now, your Bible was so circumscribed that all was taken from
you but the Pentateuch, would you be able, to say, "Your Word is sweet
to my taste?" Are not many of

us so little educated in God's Word that if we were confined to the
reading of that part of it, we would be obliged to confess it was
unprofitable to us? We could not give a good answer to Philip's
question, "Do you understand what you are reading?" Oh, shame on us
that with so many more Books, and with the Holy Spirit so plenteously
given to guide us into all the Truth of God, we should seem to value at
least half of the Word of God even less than David did!

A great portion of the Pentateuch is taken up with precepts, and I may
say of some of them that they are grievous. Those commandments which
are binding upon us are not grievous. Some of the commands of Leviticus
and Deuteronomy are so complex and so entrenched upon the whole
domestic life of a man that they were a yoke of bondage, according to
Peter, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear. Yet, that
wondrous 20th Chapter of Exodus with its Ten Commandments, and all the
long list of the precepts of the Ceremonial Law which you may, perhaps,
account wearisome to read, David says were sweet to his taste, sweeter
than honey to his mouth! What? Did he so love to hear His heavenly
Father speak that it did not much matter to him what He said as long as
He did but speak, for the music of His voice was gladdening in its
every tone to him? Now that you and I know that all the bondage of the
Ceremonial Law is gone, that nothing remains of it but blessing to our
souls–and now that we are not under the Law, but under Grace–and have
become inheritors of rich and precious and unspeakably great promises,
how is it that we fall so far short and do not, I fear, love the Word
of God to anything like the degree that David loved it?

David here speaks of all God's Words, without making any distinction
concerning some one of them. So long as it was God's Word, it was sweet
to him, whatever form it might take. Alas, this is not true of all
professors. With an unwise partiality, they pronounce some of God's
Words very sweet, but other portions of God's Truth are rather sour and
unsavory to their palates. There are persons of a certain class who
delight in the Doctrines of Grace. Therein they are to be commended,
for which of us do not delight in them if we know our interest in them?
The Covenant and the great Truths of God which grow out of the
Covenant–these are unspeakably precious things and are rightly enough
the subjects of joy to all Believers who understand them! Yet certain
of these persons will be as angry as though you had touched them with a
hot iron if you should bring a precept anywhere near them–and if you
insist upon anything being the duty of a Believer, the very words seem
to sting them like a whip–they cannot endure it! If you speak of the
"holiness without which no man shall see the Lord," and speak of it as
a holiness which is worked in us by God the Holy Spirit and as a
holiness of mind and thought and action–a personal holiness which is
to be seen in the daily life–they are offended. They can say, "How
sweet are Your doctrinal Words to my taste, but not Your precepts,
Lord! Those I do not love. Those I call legal. If your servants
minister them, I say they are gendering bondage and I go away from
them, and leave them to Arminians, or duty-faith men or something of
that kind–for I love half Your Word and only half of it." Alas, there
are not a few of that class to be found here and there. And there are
some who go on the other side! They love God's Word in the precepts of
it, or the promises, but not the Doctrines. If a Doctrine is preached,
they say it is dangerous–too high– it will elevate some of God's
servants to presumption! It will tempt them to think lightly of moral
distinctions! It will lead them to walk carelessly because they know
they are safe in Christ! Thus they, too, only love half of the Truth of
God, and not the whole of it. But, my dear Brothers and Sisters, I hope
you are of the same mind as David. If God shall give you a promise, you
will taste it, like a wafer of honey, and feed on it. And if He shall
give you a precept, you will not stop to look at it, and say, "Lord, I
don't like this as well as the promise," but you will receive that and
feed upon that also! And when the Lord shall be pleased afterwards to
give you some revelation with regard to your inward experience, or to
your fellowship with His dear Son, you welcome it with joy because you
love any Truth and every Truth as long as you know it to be the Truth
of God's own Word!

It is a blessed sign of Grace in the heart when God's Words are sweet
to us as a whole–when we love the Truth of God, not cast into a system
or a shape, but as we find it in God's Word. I believe that no man who
has yet lived has ever proposed a system of theology which comprises
all the Truth of God's Word. If such a system had been possible, the
discovery of it would have been made for us by God, Himself–certainly
it would if it had been desirable and useful for our profit and
holiness. But it has not pleased God to give us a body of divinity–let
us receive it as He has given it, each Truth in its own
proportion–each Doctrine in harmony with its fellow–each precept
carefully carried out into practice and each promise to be believed
and, by-and-by, received. Let the Truth of God, and the whole Truth of
God, be sweet to our taste! "How sweet are Your words!" There seems to
be an emphasis on the pronoun, "How sweet are Your words!" O my God, if
the Words are Yours, they are sweet to me! Had they come to me from the
Prophet and I had perceived them to be merely the words of man, I might
then have estimated them at their own weight, without reference to

their authority. But when my Father speaks–when the Spirit lives and
breathes in the Truth to which I listen–when Jesus Christ, Himself,
draws near to me in the preaching of the Gospel–then it is that the
Word becomes sweet to my taste! Beloved, let us not be satisfied with
the truth unless we can also feel it to be God's Truth! Let us ask the
Lord to enable us, when we open this Book, to feel that we are not
reading it as we read a common book–truths put there by some means,
unimportant to us how–but let us recollect that we are reading the
Truth of God put there by an Inspired pen! That we have there God's
Truth such as He would have us receive–such as He thought it worth His
while to write and to preserve to all ages for our instruction.

The Psalmist is not content to say, "God's Word is sweet, and sweeter
than honey," but, "How sweet are Your Words to my taste! Yes, sweeter
than honey to my mouth!" After all, the blessedness of the Word is a
matter to be ascertained by personal experience. Let others choose this
philosophy and that form of thought. Let then gad abroad after the
beauties of poetry, or dote upon the charms of oratory–my palate shall
be satisfied with Your Word, O God, and my soul shall find an excess of
sweetness in the things which come from Your mouth into my mouth!

The Word of God, then, while in itself certainly most sweet, and all
the sweeter when we recognize it as coming from God, will only be sweet
to us in proportion as we are able to receive it and to feed upon it.
Every man must in this case feed for himself. There can be no proxy
here. I wonder not at those who think lightly of God's Word,
notwithstanding the rapturous admiration they have heard expressed by
others, for unless they have tasted it, and felt and handled it, they
still must be strangers to its unspeakable sweetness!

II. Now we shall notice, in the second place, THIS TASTE GRATIFIED.

If we can join in the words of David here, how grateful we ought to be,
for there was a time when we had no such taste for God's Word! A few
years ago, God's Word was so far from being sweet to us that we thought
it the driest book that was ever written. It is not so now. We were
then dead in trespasses and sins–and what is honey in a dead man's
mouth? But we are alive unto God now by Jesus Christ, being quickened
by the Spirit. Remember, my Brothers and Sisters, how Divine Grace has
made you to differ from the most of men. Many who see the dainties of
God's Word pass them by. Like those poor hungry children that we have
seen standing outside a shop where the savory meat is just within the
window–they can see it and smell it–but they cannot eat it. Many of
our hearers have sense enough to perceive that there is something in
the Bible that is very satisfying and nourishing. They see it with
their eyes, but, like the unbelieving lord in the city of Samaria, they
taste not of it themselves. Yes, and there are some who are so far
gone–and we were like that once–that they have no wish to taste, for
their palate has become so depraved that they feed upon ashes, a
deceived heart turning them aside! Like the raven which has no longing
for the clean feeding of the dove, they are content with the carrion of
the world. Like the swine, they are satisfied with the husks and they
pine not to be fed with the children's bread. Such were some of
us–utterly disregarding the Word, or seeing it to be a good thing, but
not able to gain it, or else accounting it to be a mere deception,
turning from it to the joys of earth as if theycould satisfy the soul!
Oh, blessed change, Divine renewal, which has passed upon us, that now
the Word should be sweet!

I remember well the time when I had spiritual life and yet God's Word
was not sweet to me. When God first gives us a spiritual taste, He does
not make His Word sweet, but rather, if I may so say, salt or bitter.
The first taste of the true Word of God I ever got was like Jeremiah's
draught of wormwood. It seemed to break my teeth as with gravel stones.
It was none other than this, "The soul that sins, it shall die." Did
you ever have that in your mouth and have to turn it over and over
again as a bitter morsel that you could not swallow? And when at last
it did seem to be swallowed, it was like wormwood in your soul and
bitterness filled every part and portion of your being, for you felt
yourself a sinner, all undone, lost and ruined! Oh, it was a blessed
thing when standing at the foot of the Cross, and calling upon the name
of the Lord, you could wash your mouth clear of those bitter aloes of
repentance and conviction of sin with the cup of consolation–the cup
of salvation! After that first bitter draught which purged the mouth so
Divinely and made it ready to receive the sweetness of the Word, then
it was that on one happy day, looking up and seeing the flowing of the
precious blood, you perceived your mouth to be filled with honey,
instead of vinegar, for you saw the vinegar transferred to Christ and
the gall and the wormwood given to Him, while you drank of the "wines
on the lees," yes, "the wines on the lees, well refined."

Since that day, our taste has been satisfied more and more, for it has
been a growing taste. It has been educated. We can now discern between
things that differ. On our conversion, almost everything was sweet.
There was a good deal of false doctrine put into the cup, yet we
swallowed it all, for to a hungry man, even a bitter thing is sweet!
But now our

palate has been disciplined to discern between things that differ. But
all the education, if it is worth anything, comes to this–that God's
Word daily becomes more sweet and man's word daily becomes more bitter
to us. Our soul is taught more and more of Divine things and we see
more and more of the preciousness of the Truth of God as it is in
Jesus. Every Christian who has a spiritual taste will tell you that his
taste is gratified with every Word of God because he sees something in
the Word which glorifies God. My dear Brothers and Sisters, whenever
you hear a sermon in which our God is spoken well of and His Glory is
set before you, are you not happy? Do you not go from the place of
worship and say, "Thank God I was there! God was in the midst of the
temple. The Word of God was preached and my heart is satisfied"? And,
on the other hand, whenever you hear a sermon in which man is magnified
and the nobility of human nature is held up and God is put anywhere or
nowhere, how do you feel about that? I am certain that you say, "That
word which only glorifies such a poor fallen creature as man, my soul
abhors."

God's Word honors His dear Son! I am sure I shall touch one string in
your hearts when I say if the preacher shall discourse of Christ–if he
shall ring the silver bell of the Savior's precious name and lift up
His Cross, and tell you all the power of His blood, the love of His
heart, the shame of His death, the glory of His Resurrection, the
prevalence of His plea before the Throne and the certainty of His
ultimate victory over all His foes–your lips will seem as though you
had some dainty on your palate and you will go home, and say–

"The King Himself came near

To feast His saints today!" How often, before you have left the place,
have you been willing to sing with Watts–

"My willing soul would stay

In such a frame as this!"

But suppose you listen to a sermon in which Jesus Christ is
notglorified–doubts thrown upon His Deity–insinuations made about the
power of His blood–the substitutionary Sacrifice twisted into a misty
problem–whether an Atonement or not an Atonement, you could not
tell–how do you feel then? Why, anything which touches Christ touches
the apple of your eye! You say to the preacher, "Your oratory may be
ever so fine, but I cannot eat at your table. You may lay silver knives
and forks, and spread many a precious thing before me, but your meat is
poison! I cannot feed if you do not glorify Christ." O Lord, this is
the reason why Your Word is so sweet to the palate of Your children–it
glorifies Your dear Son and they delight to see Him honored among the
sons of men!

God's Word is sweet, too, when it proves the Presence and discovers the
influence of the Holy Spirit. If you hear a sermon in which the Spirit
is worshipped and glory is given to Him as one Person in the blessed
Trinity, the Word is then sweet to your taste! It is a mark of the
child of God that he reverences and esteems that Spirit by whom he is
sanctified. If the preaching is never about the Spirit of God–if He is
systematically ignored till we can almost say, "We knew not even
whether there was a Holy Spirit"–I do not wonder that barrenness and
leanness should come into the souls of those who frequent such a
ministry! The Word of God is communicated by the Holy Spirit and by the
same Spirit it must be ministered to us. Even after His Resurrection,
it was through the Holy Spirit that Christ gave commandments unto His
Apostles. As it was given, so it must be received, not in words, only,
but in power and demonstration of the Spirit– and so shall it be sweet
to your taste!

Moreover, God's Word is always pure and holy. It is shocking if there
is anything in the preaching that tends to make light of sin. Whenever
I read a theological treatise, I can tell it is unsound if it trifles
with the guilt of sin, the claims ofjustice, or the supremacy of the
Divine Law. Under the pretence of magnifying Grace, some will dare to
say that such-and-such a sin is not what it is thought to be, or not so
heinous in God's people as it would be in others! They speak of sin in
God's people as if it were only a spot, instead of a mortal disease.
Oh, we have known some use expressions in the pulpit not only flippant
and vulgar, but verging on the impure! That is enough to make the child
of God feel like a sensitive plant when it is touched–he shrivels up.
You never find anything like that in God's Word! There are some things
in our common version which do not suit the common ear, and should not
be there, because they are not necessary to a faithful rendering of the
original–but there is nothing that will ever touch the delicacy of the
child of God. The pure in heart can say, "How sweet is Your Word to my
taste, because there is nothing there that can shock my sanctified
judgment or lead me to find fault with it because of its dealing
triflingly with sin."

The Word of God will always be sweet to the Christian because it so
completely quickens him to every good thing when it comes in contact
with him. I am sure, Brothers and Sisters, when you hear the Word of
God faithfully preached, or read it with devout appreciation, you rise
up like giants refreshed with new wine! What would we do if it were not
for

the quickening which this book sometimes gives us? I must confess that
I sometimes seem to spring up as from a bed of sloth, quickened and
filled with more energy than I ever had before when I have been touched
with a single promise, or the power of a single precept! I have heard
of the dead member of an animal–perhaps the dead foot of a frog–being
touched with the galvanic wire of the battery, and as soon as the
galvanism flows into it, the limb has been animated by the energy. Now,
we do not receive a galvanic energy from the Word of God, but we get
real life from it by which we, whose souls seem to be dead, suddenly
start up with a Divine Power! To be lethargic in heavenly things must
always be unpleasant to the Christian. That which makes a man serve God
with the fullest liberty and the greatest excellence is being quickened
with the Word of God–therefore the Word of God must be always sweet to
his taste! III. And now, thirdly, see here THE SWEETNESS EXTOLLED.

David does not tell us how sweet God's Words are. He gives us a note of
exclamation, the word, "How!" and there he leaves it, as though he had
tried to fathom the depth in vain and could only say, like the Apostle,
"O, the depth!" "How sweet are Your Words to my taste!" He tried,
however, to give us some gauge when he gave us a comparison–"Yes,
sweeter than honey to my mouth." And that shall be the keynote which I
will try to strike. Why is this Word of God to us sweeter than honey?

Honey is reputed to be the sweetest of all earthly things, yet you will
discover that the Word of God is sweeter than that. Let me speak
experimentally. It is a happy thing to be successful in the work of God
and to win souls. I think that is the sweetest of all earthly
enjoyments. I have sometimes seen 20 or 30 persons in a day, most of
whom have found peace under my own ministry. Well, that is sweet, isn't
it? But I am distinctly aware that the Word of God is sweeter, for when
I have felt happy over my success, I have felt happier by far over some
precious promise or some delightful Doctrine of Inspiration. I have
thought I heard the Master say to me, when I had brought souls to Him,
what He said to the disciples when they worked miracles, "Rejoice not
in this; but rather rejoice because your names are written in Heaven."
The thought of my election, or of my redemption, or of the Glory of
Christ, or of the faithfulness of God has been distinctly sweeter than
the former sweetness which I had. There are things in the world that
are very white. Some good housewives have made the linen look so
delicately white that they have supposed that nothing could be whiter!
And then there has come a fall of snow and, in contrast, the fairest
and whitest damask has seemed dark! So, the joy of winning souls, the
joy of domestic love, the joy of having served God has been like the
damask of the housewife–but get a promise of God's Word, and in
comparison that will be like the snow which is whiter still! All the
sweetness you can get from earthly joy will be exceeded by the
sweetness of an applied promise from the Word of God. It is "sweeter
than honey."

The Word is sweeter than honey because it will sweeten every kind of
bitter, and there are many sorts of bitter which honey will not take
out of your mouth. You may feel the honey striving with the bitter, and
the effect will be a singular combination of flavor more horrible than
the bitter itself. It is never so with God's Word. Let a man have his
mouth full of bitter poverty, or the more bitter draught of scandal and
contempt–ah, let his mouth be full of the last bitter draught of
death–and if he gets the Words of God sent home to his soul, death,
itself, shall be swallowed up in victory! In the pleasure he shall lose
the smart! In the Divine Words of God to his spirit he shall scarcely
know that there is such a thing as pain or grief, or even death, for
all these things shall be gain to him when his faith gets full hold
upon the oath and Covenant of the ever-living God!

It is sweeter than honey, because God's Truth never cloys. You cannot
eat much honey. If you want to like it, only eat a little of it, for if
you eat much, you will soon come to think, 'What a weariness it is!" It
cloys upon the palate. Not so God's Word! You may suck as you will, but
you shall never have too much out of the breast of Scriptures. Here you
can come and drop your bucket every morning and night, but you shall
never draw too much from this well, whose cool depths supply an
ever-crystal stream! Oh, come to the banquet, you hungry ones, and
never think to rise from that table, but sit there till your souls
shall be taken away to a table yet more richly furnished! Feast on with
appetites whose edges are always keen. It fell to this lot of one of
our missionaries, in translating the Word of God into a very difficult
language, to have to read one passage over a hundred times–a very
laborious process, if anything would exhaust the sweetness of the
Word–but he said that after the hundredth time, he began to understand
it. He felt, then, as if he was just beginning to read it! This is a
pasture where the grass grows the faster the more the sheep eat of it.
This is a mine where the gold increases the deeper your researches
become. You may keep on eating of the Word year after year, but still
you will never get tired of it! I suppose the most of us would not like
to have the same thing for dinner every day. And if we are confined to
one form of diet, we get weary of it. There are some of you who knew
the Lord when you were 11 or twelve, and some at 15 or twenty, and I
perceive that years have passed over your heads till you have got to be
50 or six-ty–but do you want a new Gospel now? Would you like to have
another form of Doctrine, another system of theology, another Cross to
trust to, or something in lieu of the Atonement by the precious blood?
"Oh, no," I think I hear you say, "the longer we live, the more we are
fastened to the old faith! The deeper we study, the heavier our trials,
the faster we cleave to Christ–

"'Should all the forms that men devise Assault my faith with
treacherous art, I'd call them vanity and lies And bind the Gospel to
my heart.'"

And, verily, the Word of God puts the mouth in taste. Some things are
sweet in the mouth if the mouth is sweet, but if the palate is out of
taste, you cannot get the flavor of them. But the Word of God cleans
the mouth for you and though a man of God may find himself as much out
of sorts as he can be, if he needs to get his mouth in proper order for
feasting on the Word of God, he need not go anywhere else but to the
Word, itself! The idea of preparing ourselves for Christ is not a
Gospel idea. The idea of preparing our minds for the Gospel by thinking
about something else always seems to me unnatural. If your minds are
inactive, go and read a good stirring part of God's Word and that will
prepare you for another part–for the Word will act first as a tonic to
give an appetite and will afterwards be a food upon which that appetite
can be satisfied!

Yet honey, with all its sweetness, may be forgotten. But the Word of
God, if we once know its sweetness, will abide with us forever. Let
your child eat honey to its heart's content, yet the flavor of it will
not be in his mouth in a week's time. So, too, have some of us retained
the flavor of the honey we got 15 years ago. "Ah," says David, "I will
remember You from the land of Jordan, and of the Hermonites, from the
hill Mizar." I do not know how many years that was, but some of us can
remember times of communion and refreshing from the Presence of the
Lord ten, fifteen, or, perhaps, 40 years ago! When Christ spread His
flavor upon your soul, no sweetness was so sweet and you have the sense
of it now! You like to talk of those seasons of delight, and you
think–

"Did Jesus once upon me shine? Then Jesus is forever mine!" Thus you
get back the sweetness of the honey and the recollection of what you
once knew of it.

I gather, from what I know of God's Word, that all we know of it is
very little. When we get to Heaven, I imagine it will be among our
surprises to find what fools we are. When young men go to college, they
think they know a great deal. And after the first year, they think they
don't know as much as they did. I recollect hearing my grandfather say
that in the second year he was at college, he thought he was a fool.
And in the third year he knew he was, and then the tutor thought he
might get out. That is one of the things that we shall find out in
Heaven–"Oh, what a fool I was! I thought I knew everything." Those of
us who preach to others will be of the same mind as Rutherford, who
says that the poorest child who has once passed the veil and come into
the immortal state, knows more of heavenly things than the most learned
divine who has lived for 60 years to teach others the way of salvation.
What we get in the wilderness is only just one bunch from Eshcol–we
have not come into the valley where all the clusters grow. They have
got us a little balm, and a little oil, and a few almonds from the
land, but the land itself flows with milk and honey. "Since we have
tasted of the grapes," we sometimes long to go–

"Where our dear Lord, the vineyard keeps, And all the clusters grow."

But it is amazing how little we know about it–how little sweetness we
ever enjoy! And yet, little as it is, it is so sweet that it makes us
hold up our hands and say with amazement, "How sweet are Your Words to
my taste! Yes, sweeter than honey to my mouth!"

Hereby our growth in Grace may be ascertained. Is God's Word very sweet
to me this day? Is it like honey to my mouth? Very many of God's
children cannot say this. They can say it as a general rule, but not,
perhaps, at the very moment of their present experience. It is a pretty
sure sign of growth in spiritual life if God's Word is more sweet to us
than it used to be. The sweetness of some parts of God's Word we can
only know by being placed in circumstances where we shall understand
the application of such-and-such a promise to our case. The man who
never has any sickness, who has no losses in business–whose course is
always one even stream–cannot, I am sure, understand some of the
promises that are especially meant for the tried people of God. You
cannot see the stars in the daytime, but I am told that if you went
down

a well, even in the daytime, you could see them from there. God often
takes His people down the well of affliction and then they can see the
stars of the promises. Some of the promises are written in invisible
ink–and if you hold the parchment up to the fire of affliction, they
will become visible–but till then, the page will be as if they were
never written there at all. Now, take this promise, "When you walk
through the fire, you shall not be burned; neither shall the flame
kindle upon you." Why, you who never went through fires and flames can
never know the meaning of that promise! "I will never leave you, nor
forsake you," has often brought comfort to the tried and the
persecuted. And the man that has been brought low in pecuniary matters,
how often has he fed upon this promise, "Bread shall be given him; his
waters shall be sure: his place of defense shall be the munitions of
rocks." If you were never slandered, you never drank wine out of this
bottle, "No weapon that is formed against you shall prosper; and every
tongue that shall rise against you in judgment you shall condemn." I am
sure, if you feel the sweetness of God's Word, the secret of it is that
you have experienced something or other of trial, outside or within,
which has distinctly brought to your soul the sweetness which otherwise
you could not have known.

That experience which does not make you prize God's Word is good for
nothing. A great deal of the experience of a Christian is not Christian
experience. He experiences it as a sinner and an offender against God.
But that which is Christian experience always has this for its
result–that it leads to a deeper prizing of the Word of God and a
higher estimate of the preciousness of it. If you now have a very keen
sense of the sweetness of God's Word, you have grown in confidence.
Were anybody to say to me, "Honey is not sweet," I could not be very
clear about it. Perhaps I could not argue upon the subject. But
supposing there were a dish of honey here, and I just took a spoonful
of it, I would say, "You tell me that honey is not sweet? Why, my dear
man, I have got some in my mouth." I should scorn to argue upon it
because I had the honey still in my mouth as an internal evidence and,
therefore, argument would be too poor to be used in the case. I should
laugh in his face when I had once got the sweetness of it on my palate.
So it is with you. No infidel or skeptical remark can have any power
over your mind if you are at the present moment in the conscious
enjoyment of the comfort and sweetness of God's Word! If you feel that
it cheers you in the dark, what a fool he must be who says that it does
not give you light! Why, the man can have no toleration from you if he
says it does not strengthen when you feel the strength

of it!

It is a sign that you have grown in spiritual health when the Word of
God is sweet to you. I remember my father saying to us children at
home, when we did not like our food, that he had been to the Union
House and the boys and girls always liked their breakfast there because
they were hungry, and, he said, "If you had to go without, it would do
you good." Sometimes, children of God get worldly and then they have no
appetite for God's Word. They say, "We do not profit under Mr.
So-and-So." The truth is, we do not profit under the Bible, itself, and
should not profit under the Apostle Paul or under the Lord Jesus
Christ, for we have spoiled our appetites! But when our appetite is
healthy, we can come to the Scripture and not care much how it is
carved. We would rather the preacher would carve it well, but some
people must have it served up always in such dainty style–it must have
little bits of poetry, like parsley to garnish the dish, and so on, and
if a rough hand should bring them meat, they say, "No, we cannot feed
in this style." But if you have been in the field at work for God and
have got an appetite, and the blood is circulating in your veins, then
you can feast upon it till your soul rises up and says, "I thank You,
Lord, for this, my food, and that You have made it sweet to my taste. I
will tell my fellow Christians the delights that I have received in
searching Your Word, that they may come and feed at the same table
where I have been so daintily fed."

May God the Holy Spirit make this the experience of every day to each
one of us, for Jesus' sake! Amen.