The Main Reason We Fail to Delight in the Lord
The beginning is a commitment to more time in His Word. More time in prayer. More time in reflective silence as you consider His promises. And, of course, the flipside is also true. That along with making those choices you believe will lead to delight, you also start to make choices to cease delighting in other things.
Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart (Psalm 37:4).
For most of us, this is an aspirational verse. Yes, we have had moments of excitement – even elatement – in the Lord, but is our general posture one of delighting in Him? Probably not. We would like it to be, but the reality is at least a little bit different.
It’s not that God is not “delightful” enough. We know that He is, with all His power, creativity, love, grace, mercy, and everything else. He has brought us into His family, adopted us and given us an eternal inheritance in Jesus. He has ordered our steps with providential love and care. Surely there is more than enough for us to delight in.
So why don’t we?
What if the answer to that question – of why we fail to delight in the Lord – is incredibly simple? What if the main reason we fail to delight in the Lord is because we haven’t tried to do so?
Maybe a little illustration to help.
My parents will tell you that until roughly the age of 18, I did not eat a vegetable unless it was slathered with cheese sauce or wrapped in bacon.
Related Posts:
You Might also like
-
Why You Should Start Praying for Your Neighbor
Written by David T. Crum |
Saturday, January 20, 2024
We pray for our neighbor because we believe that our sole purpose in life is to honor, serve, and love God and to do the same for our neighbor. This does not mean that Christians cannot have strong political opinions or disagreements with people. However, we should center our motives on Christ’s love. Believers should always care for the salvation of others; even those you might disagree with.Prayer is your opportunity to communicate directly with God. We should praise Him, thank Him, and seek His understanding and guidance.
In the Old Testament, David and Daniel both prayed throughout the day (Psalm 55:16-22, Daniel 6:10). Such should be the standard for us.
Prayer should be the focus of our life. J. C. Ryle (1816-1900) shared, “I suggest to you that it is most important to make prayer a regular part of your day… it is essential to your soul’s health to make prayer part of every twenty-four hours in your life. Just as you make time for eating, sleeping and work, so also make time for prayer.”[1]
Jesus taught us to pray for others, including our opposition, in Luke 6:28. Well-known in Christian teachings is the need and requirement to serve, pray, and honor one’s neighbor.
The late George W. Truett (1867-1944) defined the concept of a neighbor:
“Your neighbor is anyone on the face of the Earth who needs you. Maybe he lives next door to you in Dallas; maybe he’s the most distantly removed citizen from you in Dallas, or the most distantly removed citizen from you in the state of Texas, or in America, or maybe he’s on the other side of the world, so bedarkened and benighted and paganized that he doesn’t know there’s such a country as America, much less about you. Very well; wherever in all the world there’s anybody who needs you and me, there’s our neighbor.” [2]
Jesus set the standard with His remarks on “loving your neighbor.”
Read More
Related Posts: -
4 Ways Jesus Fulfills Every Old Testament Promise
Written by Jason S. DeRouchie |
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
God’s promises are often associated with life or death and conditioned on whether his covenant partner obeys….Representing Abraham and Israel, Jesus actively obeyed and secured Old Testament promises for all who are in him.Four Ways Jesus Makes Every Promise “Yes”
When Jesus fulfills the Old Testament Law and Prophets, he is actualizing what Scripture anticipated and achieving what God promised and predicted (Matt. 5:17; 11:13; Luke 16:16; 24:44). Truly every promise in Scripture is “Yes” in Christ (2 Cor. 1:20), and in him God secures every blessing for believers (Gal. 3:14; Eph. 1:3).
Yet Jesus fulfills the Old Testament’s promises in more than one way, and this means Christians cannot approach Old Testament promises all in the same manner. Believers must claim Scripture’s promises using a salvation-historical framework that has Jesus at the center. Christ is the lens that clarifies and focuses the lasting significance of all God’s promises for us.
With a firm grasp of the progress of salvation history, this accessible guide helps Christians interpret the Old Testament, see how it testifies to Jesus, believe that Jesus secured every divine promise, and understand how Moses’s law still matters.
1. Christ maintains some Old Testament promises with no extension.
Christ maintains certain promises without extending them to further beneficiaries. Many of these are explicit restoration promises that include a vision of a global salvation after Israel’s exile. Consider, for example, Daniel’s prediction: “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12:2). Alluding to this passage, Jesus associated this same resurrection with his second coming: “An hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear [the Son of Man’s] voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment” (John 5:28–29; cf. John 11:11, 25; 1 Cor. 15:51–52).
Jesus noted that the Old Testament indicates that the Messiah’s resurrection would precede and generate our own: “Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:46–47; cf. 1 Cor 15:3–5).1
The resurrection from the dead and eternal judgment are two of “the elementary doctrine[s] of Christ” (Heb. 6:1–2). Christians should claim the promise of resurrection in Daniel 12:2 as our own. We do so, however, recognizing that we will only rise because Christ was first raised. “Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. . . . Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ” (1 Cor. 15:20, 23). As Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live” (John 11:25; cf. Rom. 6:5). This resurrection has an already-but-not-yet dimension, as the redeemed saints from both the Old and New Testament epochs benefit from it. Jesus maintains the Old Testament promise without altering those profiting from it.
2. Christ maintains some Old Testament promises with extension.
When Christ fulfills some Old Testament promises, he extends the promise to all parties related to him. For example, consider how the Messiah’s promised mission gets extended to the church. Isaiah portrayed the coming royal deliverer as speaking in first person and declaring that Yahweh called him from the womb, named him “Israel,” and told him that his mission as God’s servant was to save some from the people of Israel and the rest of the nations:
It is too light a thing that you should be my servantto raise up the tribes of Jacoband to bring back the preserved of Israel;I will make you as a light for the nations,that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.(Isa. 49:6 cf. Isa. 49:1, 3)2
By this act God would fulfill his earlier promises to Abraham (Gen. 12:3; 22:18; cf. Isa. 51:1–4; 54:1–3).
Paul saw Jesus as the most immediate referent to Isaiah’s servant-person, for he said he was “saying nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would come to pass: that the Christ must suffer and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to our people and to the Gentiles” (Acts 26:22–23). Yet Paul also saw the Old Testament promises reaching further to the mission of all who are in Christ:
Read More
Related Posts: -
On Baby Grands and Expensive Hymnals
Christians must continue to pursue the highest and best, even in the presence of dire need. No period of undisturbed tranquility is just over the horizon, the arrival of which will then permit a Golden Age of pursuing the best that has been thought or written. The time for beauty, higher learning, and the pursuit of excellence is now, whether we are in Monaco or Monrovia. If we, in the name of wartime-lifestyle-gospel-centred-radical-whatever-you-call-it, eschew beautiful instruments and quality hymnals, all that will happen is we will sing inferior songs on inferior instruments.
“Why this waste?” said the greediest member of the Twelve. Judas’s supposed concern with helping the poor and for efficient use of ministry finances was really a facade for his unvarnished envy. Judas wanted money, and like every jealous soul, disliked money being spent lavishly on someone else.
The sentiment that it is frivolous waste to spend money on anything except dire need is popular among some Christians. It’s an easy sentiment to have, even a lazy one, perhaps. What could be a better use of money than giving it to those who have the least, right? And what could be a more wasteful use of money than spending more on those who already have enough, correct? Such “automatic-entitlement” functions rather like the Left’s politics of victimization. Find a race, gender, or “sexual orientation” that has been supposedly oppressed, and such a group automatically receives the unassailable position of victim, requiring special treatment, and requiring no defense of its now-privileged status. The same Leftist sentimentalism often brews within Christianity, and bubbles out when spending is on anything except extreme need.
My church is not wealthy, relative to some others in the city. Our monthly budget is exactly half of some of our sister churches not far from us. Of course, that same budget is several times larger than some of the other churches we know and fellowship with. That’s simply life, and as anyone who understands biblical economics knows, inequality is not injustice.
But given our middle-sized budget, what justification is there for spending a considerable amount of the hard-earned and saved money of our church on a very expensive musical instrument, and on hard-cover hymnals? How could we do this, amidst a sea of poverty? “Why this waste?” one might opine. Why not a few guitars and a simple Powerpoint projection?
One of the best answers comes from C.S. Lewis, in his essay “Learning in War-time.” Lewis faced a similar criticism during World War 2. What was the point of having scholars study medieval literature or Anglo-Saxon linguistics when there were Nazis bombing European cities? Wasn’t this an almost literal enactment of fiddling while Rome burned?
Read More
Related Posts: