1 Peter 2:1-6: in context

Peter urges his readers to put away all malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander, and then gives a vivid image for growth: like newborn babies, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. Come to Christ, he says, the living stone, rejected by men but chosen and precious to God; and you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood.

The image Peter uses for spiritual growth is a hungry newborn: like newborn babies, long for the pure spiritual milk. A baby craves milk with an urgent, instinctive hunger, and it is by that milk that it grows. So, Peter says, we are to crave the pure spiritual nourishment of God's word, and it is by feeding on it that we grow. Spiritual growth is not automatic, nor is it a matter merely of effort; it comes, as a baby's growth comes, through nourishment, through feeding regularly and hungrily on the word of God. This puts a searching question to us about our appetite. A healthy baby hungers for milk; and a healthy soul hungers for God's word. If we have little appetite for Scripture, if we can go long stretches without feeding on it and feel no hunger, something is amiss, as it would be with a baby that did not want to eat. Peter connects the appetite to two things. First, to having tasted that the Lord is good: those who have truly tasted God's goodness develop a hunger for more of him through his word, as one who has tasted good food craves it again. And second, to putting away the malice, envy, and hypocrisy that spoil the appetite; a heart full of these has little room to hunger for the pure milk of the word. The counsel, then, is to cultivate the appetite: to put away what dulls it, and to feed regularly and hungrily on the word, that we may grow. Job said he treasured God's words more than his necessary food; the psalmist found them sweeter than honey. To grow spiritually, we must feed spiritually, craving the pure milk of the word as a newborn craves its milk, and by it growing up into the salvation Peter describes. The question is whether we hunger for the word as the means of our growth, or have let our appetite for it fade.

Do I hunger for the word of God as a newborn hungers for milk, feeding on it regularly as the nourishment by which I grow, or has my appetite for it faded, and can I cultivate that hunger, putting away the malice and envy that dull it, and feeding on the word by which, having tasted that the Lord is good, I am meant to grow?