Without a strong connection with your Creator, the suffering is real. Nothing can offer ongoing relief for your inner angst, but reconciliation with God.

Taste tests are popular ways of promoting food or drink products. In a taste test, a company goes beyond merely talking about its products and instead offers samples for people to taste.

Trying to describe the taste of something to someone who has never tasted it, is very hard to do. That’s why ice cream and yogurt shops give you samples on tiny spoons.

Perhaps it is time that we go beyond religion and theology, and begin to offer people a theism taste test. (Theism is belief in the existence of a Supreme Being.) The Bible puts it this way: “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Psalm 34:8).

The Salvation Army and some other Christian denominations have a tradition of offering people a taste test at the end of worship meetings. We invite people to come to the “altar” or “mercy seat” and to experience (taste) God for themselves. However, in much of what we do during the the rest of church meetings, we try to explain God theologically to people’s minds.

Perhaps we can create more opportunities for people to actually “taste and see that the Lord is good.” But how?

1) Make sure that you have tasted God for yourself and aren’t just basing your belief in Him (your theism) on head knowledge and/or on your religious background. It’s hard to promote something that you, yourself, aren’t tasting and enjoying.

2) Offer to pray for someone on the spot. When you pray a spontaneous, heart-felt prayer over a person, he/she can get an actual taste of God’s presence. Many times I’ve seen tears run down people’s faces as I have prayed with them.

3) Encourage people to read the Bible for themselves and to obey it. Let them share something with you that they got from their own Bible reading.

4) Encourage people to listen to what God is saying in their heart and then to say and/or do what He tells them. Ask them to share with you something they have heard from God. If they realize that they haven’t heard anything from God, then offer to listen to God with them and then share with them what God tells you for them.

5) Taste and experience God in a Christ led support group based on 1 Corinthians 14:26. Learn more about the theism taste test and Christ-led support groups at this link. If you are ever in Nashville, visit the Christ-led support group that meets at The Salvation Army, 225 Berry St., 37207 on Sundays @ 10:45 am.