Skip to main content

Delight

             Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4)

Delight: please (someone) greatly

 

How does a person delight in anything? Yes, I’m trying to put delight on the table so we can examine it. This leads to two more questions. How do we recognize delight? How do we sustain it?

Last night, I watched an episode of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett as the famed detective. I’m also listening to The Scandal in Bohemia on CD. Three things for which Holmes is renowned are his passion for mysteries and puzzles, his logical mind, and his use of cocaine to endure the times in which his mind is not occupied. I like Brett’s interpretation of Holmes, but last night, I noticed that when problems or ideas were introduced, he expanded like a sponge soaking up water. He lit up. He paid attention. It was almost as if the robot came suddenly to life or like a child reaching for something new. Even if the child were incapable of speech, everything about him says, “Gimme! Gimme!   Gimme!”

The sponge and child illustrations generate a little of the sponge and child responses in me. These work for me as pictures of delight. This, then, is the picture of how we are to respond to the Lord, but let me be clear. The delight is in the Lord. My mother worked in a store, and I recall (or imagine) myself jumping up from behind the stove with, “Did you bring me anything?” If she had, what short-term delight I would have experienced would have been with the thing, not her.

Another picture of delight is the idea of choices. There are people in my park who play pickleball for hours on end. Sometimes, they almost seem offended that the park owner doesn’t put up a multi-million dollar facility just for pickleball. They would pick pickleball over most other things if given a choice between pickleball and some other activity.

To delight ourselves in the Lord involves opening up toward, drawing in, and (at least in a sense) attempting to possess Him.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The List

              Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,   through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance;   perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5)           Think about it. We have been justified. At least, we could be justified if we stopped insisting that our justification be based on our merits. We have peace with God, or could have peace if we stopped throwing temper tantrums. We have gained access into grace i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Meditations of the Heart

  May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. (Psalm19:14)           As I started writing this post, I noted that the meditations of my heart are all over the mental landscape, from a hub where eight superhighways come together to a lunar or nuclear landscape. Do you see my error? The moment I read the word meditation , I think about thoughts. But what’s described here is the meditations of our hearts ; our wills.           While the meditations of our minds may be all over the place, the meditations of our wills tend to be a little more stable by the time we are adults. We no longer tend to want to pursue the ten separate careers we did in any given day as children. Part of this is humble acceptance of reality. We come to understand that we can’t do it all. I think another part of it is disappointmen...
Post a Comment
Read more

Listen To Him

              The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your fellow Israelites. You must listen to him . (Deuteronomy 18:15)           Today, we switch from Jesus’ claims of “I am” to prophecies made about Him. My Bible platform is starting in Deuteronomy. I’d start in Genesis, where we would learn that the one who would save us would be a descendant of Eve (Genesis 3:15), of Noah (by default), Abram and Sara(Genesis 12:1-3). Isaac (Genesis 17:19), Jacob (Genesis 25:23), Judah (Genesis 29:8), and David (II Samuel 7:12-16). There were also references to a new covenant (Jer. 31:31-34; Ezek. 36:22-32). In addition, there were prophecies about when and where the prophet/Messiah would be born and what would happen to him.           Of course, naysayers will claim that Jesus’ life was retrofitted or reverse enginee...
Post a Comment
Read more