Delight Yourself in the Lord

Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart (Psalm 37:4)

This scripture is both a command and a promise. To obey the command I must know God, to receive the promise I must know myself. Today I will focus on the command. How do I “Delight myself in the Lord”? In order to delight in anything I must focus my attention on it and behold all that is good about it. In the case of a material object, I behold it with one or more of my five senses. For example I delight in a peace of chocolate by popping it into my mouth and savoring it with my taste buds. But what about an object (or a person such as God) that might not appear to any of my five senses?

God has made himself known in two ways – by His creation and by His word the Bible. So I come to know about God when my understanding moves me beyond what I perceive in the world to the Creator of the world, and beyond what I read in the Bible to the One who inspired it. But does knowing about God necessarily result in delighting myself in Him? No, learning about God is comparable to reading an ad about the delightfulness of Hershey chocolate. I can’t delight myself in the peace of chocolate until I pop it into my mouth and savor it. Similarly I can’t delight myself in God until I receive Him into my heart and look for his hand in my life. God says, “ I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” (Ezek.36:26-27) In other words, God says He will give you a heart that delights in following Him. That is how I obey the command to “Delight myself in the Lord.” My next post will focus on the promise, “he will give you the desires of your heart.”

True Wisdom

John Calvin said that true wisdom consists of 2 parts: 1) knowledge of God, and 2) knowledge of ourselves. For many months I have been seeking a better understanding of that second part and finding it difficult to formulate my thoughts in writing. As I read what other Christian writers are saying on the subject I find different points of view, or is it just differences in emphasis? Perhaps the difficulty I am experiencing is not just in me but is characteristic of our postmodern culture, in which secular psychology has dominated thinking about ourselves and our relationships with others, and has even infiltrated Christian thinking about ourselves. Since I am just an ordinary Christian with a layman’s knowledge of the Bible I would not be so bold as to try to critique the other writers I have been reading. After all, they have degrees in Biblical theology, Christian counseling, and other Christian disciplines. I do not! The writers I have been focusing on are John Piper, Edward T. Welch, and Neil T. Anderson. I have found them all helpful. But I need to think through the issues for myself, so I will take the plunge in my next post, which will be a meditation on Psalm 37:4: “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” That scripture is both a command and a promise. To obey the command I must know God; to receive the promise, I must know myself.