Taste disorders are a real thing. I know this because the good people at the Department of Health and Human Services told me so. Apparently, a taste disorder can develop because of things like upper respiratory and middle ear infections, head injuries, and exposure to certain chemicals. Through any of those causes, your sense of taste can actually erode over the course of time.

There is, though, another way you can lose your taste for something. This happens when you think something is delicious, but that’s only because you haven’t tried something else that’s truly delicious. Case in point, Totino’s pizza.

I have nothing against Totino’s pizzas; they saved the lives of my wife and I when I was in graduate school. Those were the days when we were making about $200 a year, and fine dining for us was heating up a 97 cent pizza in the oven and then coupling it with a 45 cent box of mac and cheese (I should also mention these were days of heavy carbs). It was delicious. Or at least we thought it was.

And then one day, Jana’s parents came to town, and they didn’t want to eat Totino’s pizza. They took us instead to Ruth’s Criss steakhouse. That was the day my taste buds died. When the next week rolled around, the same pizza and stove top mac and cheese had lost its luster. No longer delicious; no longer satisfying; instead, every bite was a reminder of what we had once upon a time.

This is the taste that ruins your taste buds. And the gospel does the same thing.

The psalmist says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good. How happy is the man who takes refuge in Him!” (Ps. 34:8). This is not just an invitation; it’s a command. It’s a directive from the Lord to belly up to the table of His goodness and eat and drink deeply. But beware those that do sit down – the taste of the goodness of the Lord will ruin your taste buds for everything else.

Ruined taste buds help us understand why the psalmist can also say something as audacious as this: “Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you your heart’s desires” (Ps. 37:4). This is not a promise that God is going to give us everything we want, for implicit in the statement is the assumption that our taste for sin, the things of the world, for our own comforts, and any other paltry substitute has been ruined by the feast of God’s goodness. When we taste and see that the Lord is good, our hearts are no longer satisfied by anything else. The desires of our hearts will be altered, and nothing else besides what only God can give will truly satisfy.

Christians are those whose taste buds have been ruined. Forever. Come back to the table and taste once again.