Think about your life, Christian, and ask the question, “Where is my delight?” In What do you find the deepest joy, the greatest fulfillment? Where is your heart full? What can you not live without?
We have become, in so many cases, a people who have replaced what should be our delight with something far less. Hear that, and think it through. This is not a preacher beating you up and just calling you bad. No, this is a fellow believer calling you to not lose the thing that can, if you will go there, fill your heart with delight. You want this. You want joy. You want delight. But it does not come from where many think.
Psalm 119:20, 24
20 My soul is consumed with longing
for your rules at all times.
24 Your testimonies are my delight;
they are my counselors.
David writes of his delight, his deep longing, in a way that does not fit many of us today. David delights in God’s rules and his testimonies. What is that? David delights in the word of God. If we wish to please the Lord, we too will delight in God’s word as David did.
What I want us to note, however, is not merely that David delighted in Scripture, but in what kind of things overjoy his soul. David delights in the rules of God. David delights in the law of God. Do you? Think about this with honesty. Many today delight in promises of blessing and sweet words of comfort. Good, and well we should. But do we also delight when God tells us his rules, his standards, his ways.
The modern tendency is to be embarrassed by the rules of God. We think we are being grace-oriented or gospel-centered, but really, we hide from the laws and commands of God because such is not popular in our world. When God has a law about marriage, gender, or sexuality, we do not let the world know we delight in God’s law. Instead, many either attempt to explain it away, or accept it with a blush the way that many of us wink and shrug at a friend when an uncle does something odd an unexplainable. Yeah, he’s part of the family, but you know, we’re not all really like that.
But, dear Christian friends, we are to delight in the law of God. We are to rejoice in his ways and his standards. We are to be overwhelmed by the fact that God would tell us who he is and what pleases him. We are to be thrilled to get under his lordship and submit to his word.
Perhaps you and I need to pray and ask God to make us delight in his word. We need to ask him to help us love, not only the promise of heaven or the sweetness of grace. We need to love his standards of purity, his structure for the church, his call for morality. We need to find our hearts thrilled when we see what God is like as we watch his salvation and his justice demonstrated in the word. Let us learn to love God by loving, delighting in, rejoicing in his law, his testimony, his rules, his word.
Pastor Travis Peterson 