Pastor's Pen
by Buzz Dahlen
If you know me at all, you know that I enjoy eating meat.  It doesn’t really matter what kind, as long as it is meat.  I enjoy everything meaty.  Beef, pork, chicken, turkey, anything I can sink my teeth into.  Many find it interesting that, growing up in the Seattle area; I don’t enjoy fish all that much.  I don’t know why that is except that maybe the four summers I spent working in a salmon cannery in Alaska may have has something to do with it.  But I do not think that I could ever get tired of eating meat.
I remember when I was young, I think I was in third grade, I had a love for meat, but I had no desire to eat liver.  I’m not sure why it was that I didn’t like liver.  I don’t think I had ever tried liver.  I think that I must have seen something on TV.  There must have been some program where someone refused to eat liver and so I formed my opinion based on that.  I can remember, back in third grade, my mom letting me know that we were having liver for dinner.  I had never even seen liver before, but I was not going to have any part in it.  I ate everything else that was on the table that evening, but never gave the liver a second look.  During the meal my mom asked, aren’t you even going to taste it?  My reply was, I don’t need to taste it… I left the table unsatisfied and still hungry.  When dinner was over and everything had been put away, my mom informed me that it was not liver that had been served that night, but in fact it was steak.  I felt cheated out of a good meat experience.
Too often faith is like that.  Too often people think they know what Christianity is like.  They think that they know what a personal relationship with Jesus is like.  They think they know and want nothing to do with Him or Christianity.  There are many people who are walking around hungry.  Hungry for love, hungry for forgiveness, hungry for acceptance hungry for peace, hungry for joy, hungry for all of the things that are available in a relationship with Jesus, but because they think they know what it tastes like.  It’s to you to whom the Psalmist writes:  Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.  
I know that there are many things that at one time in your life you thought, you did not like or even that you would never eat.  But sometime you tried it and found that you now like it.  I can think of all sorts of things like that.  Most of them are in the vegetable family.  But there was cottage cheese.  No way could my mom get me to even try it.  Now I enjoy cottage cheese.  I can even eat it right out of the container. 
It never ceases to amaze me what a person is willing to eat when they are motivated.  We have all seen movies and heard the stories about people stranded on a deserted island and the things they would eat to survive.  And we won’t even talk about Fear Factor…
Well God wants you to taste and see that the Lord is good.  A relationship with God cannot be experienced just by watching or listening.  One must get into it, pursue it, and taste it, before you can truly know what it is like.  Like a banana, you have to peel it to experience it.  Too many people settle for the religion, which is more like the peeling, and never experience the relationship that God wants to have with them, in Christ.
To quote my mother, “How do you know until you try?”  I invite you to try a relationship with Jesus Christ, today.  I encourage you to invite Jesus into your life.  I challenge you to ask God to reveal Himself to you, by giving your life to Him.  You can do it, it is easy, a simple prayer will do.  “Lord Jesus, I give my life to You, come into my heart.”  Jesus says to you; “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”  He wants a relationship with you, today… go ahead, try it, you’ll like it.

Cottonwood, Idaho 83522

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