Crave Pure Spiritual Milk

^{Last night at church our pastor spoke on the words from 1 Peter 2:1-3.  That scripture says:}

 Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.  Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.

This scripture really challenged me.  I read it and re-read it.  I had to ask myself, do I really crave God's word?  Do I seek out opportunities to delve into it and seek to find subtle nuances that were hidden to me before?  I honestly had to answer, no.  I read the Bible.  I remember some scripture (some, not a lot), and the major stories of the Word, but I don't read it to seek something new from it always. 

God's word to us should be a craving.  Why?  It is our direct link to what God has commanded us to do, how He has illustrated for us to conduct our lives and mostly because it was sent for us to know Him better by.  When you think about how a baby needs milk, how they don't stop fussing until they get their need met, you must then compare yourself with that same urgency.  Do you merely read God's word to read it?  Or do you read it because you crave it? 

I seek to develop a craving for God's word.  Brother Dan gave us a really good start at developing a craving for that "pure spiritual milk".  The first step was to rid yourself of all these that were mentioned in the scripture.  Like a child, if you are full with bad stuff (in a child's case, junk food) you won't be hungry for the healthy good stuff.  We need to rid ourselves of sin and the love of it to be able to have room for God's word.

The second step, read it!  Get in there and dig in.  God reminded me during this sermon (as He often does) of something I already knew, but hadn't put the two together.  Researchers say that in order to get a toddler/child to like a new food, they must try it between 6-15 times (Read about it here).  So if it takes a child that many times to develop a taste for something so basic as food, how many more times must I read God's Word before it surpasses habit and reaches a necessity? 

Thank you God for using Bro. Dan once again to tell me something that I needed to hear.