Delight thyself also in the Lord. —Psalm 37:4

 

The teaching of these words must seem very surprising to those who are strangers to vital godliness, but to the sincere believer it is only the inculcation of a recognized truth. The life of the believer is here described as a delight in God, and we are thus certified of the great fact that true religion overflows with happiness and joy. Ungodly persons and mere professors never look upon religion as a joyful thing; to them it is service, duty, or necessity, but never pleasure or delight. If they attend to religion at all, it is either that they may gain thereby, or else because they dare not do otherwise. The thought of delight in religion is so strange to most men, that no two words in their language stand further apart than “holiness” and “delight.” But believers who know Christ, understand that delight and faith are so blessedly united, that the gates of hell cannot prevail to separate them. They who love God with all their hearts, find that His ways are ways of pleasantness, and all His paths are peace. Such joys, such brimful delights, such overflowing blessednesses, do the saints discover in their Lord, that so far from serving Him from custom, they would follow Him though all the world cast out His name as evil We fear not God because of any compulsion; our faith is no fetter, our profession is no bondage, we are not dragged to holiness, nor driven to duty. No, our piety is our pleasure, our hope is our happiness, our duty is our delight. Delight and true religion are as allied as root and flower; as indivisible as truth and certainty; they are, in fact, two precious jewels glittering side by side in a setting of gold.(By Charles Spurgeon)

“‘Tis when we taste Thy love,
Our joys divinely grow,
Unspeakable like those above,
And heaven begins below.”

“My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God” (Psalm 42:2).

Solomon conducted an experiment wherein he sought satisfaction from everything “under the sun”. He tried wine, works, wealth, women, and “whatsoever” his eyes desired, yet he concluded that “all was vanity and a vexation of spirit, and—no profit”(SS 2:11). He should have known better! He should have listened to the counsel of the Psalmist who said, “My soul thirsteth for God”—there he would have found satisfaction.

Even so, we would do well to listen to these words written by Alexander Maclaren:

No man is made to be satisfied from himself. For the stilling of our own hearts, for the satisfying of our own nature, for the strengthening and joy of our being, we need to go beyond ourselves, and to fix upon something external to ourselves. We are not independent. None of us can stand by himself. No man carries within him the fountain from which he can draw. If a heart is to be blessed, it must go out of the narrow circle of its own individuality; and if a man’s life is to be strong and happy, he must get the foundation of his strength somewhere else than in his own soul….

We are made, next, to need, not things, but living beings. ‘My soul thirsteth’–for what? An abstraction, a possession, riches, a thing? No! ‘my soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.’ Yes, hearts want hearts. The converse of Christ’s saying is equally true; He said, ‘God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit’; man has a spirit, and man must have Spirit to worship, to lean upon, to live by, or all will be inefficient and unsatisfactory. Oh, lay this to heart, my brother!–no things can satisfy a living soul.

While most of us are greatly encouraged by the thought that God can do anything, it is this very thought that infuriates some people. Let me explain. Better yet, let me give you an example from this article by Pastor Stephen Davey. He wrote:

Philip Yancey tells the story of the Woodson family in his book, Disappointment with God. The Woodsons had two children, Peggie and Joey, both born with cystic fibrosis. They were thin, no matter how much food they ate, and coughed constantly, breathing laboriously. Twice a day Meg pounded their chests to clear out mucus. The children spent several weeks each year in the local hospital, and both grew up knowing they would probably die before reaching adulthood.

Joey, a bright, happy, all-American boy, died at the age of twelve. Peggie defied the odds by surviving several health crises in high school and even lived to experience her college years. To the Woodsons delight, she seemed to grow stronger as the days passed—days filled with desperate prayers from Meg and her husband, but there was no miracle. Peggie died at the age of twenty-three.

One night, sometime later, Philip Yancey came across a letter Meg had written to him after Peggie’s death. Part of that letter read:

I find myself wanting to tell you something of how Peggie died. I don’t know why except that I need to talk about it and I have run out of people to tell. I was sitting beside her bed a few days before her death, when suddenly she began screaming. I will never forget those shrill, piercing screams. Nurses raced into the room from every direction and surrounded her with their love. Eventually, their words and touches soothed her, though as time went on and the screaming continued, they could not comfort her. Nurses can only stay on that floor so long—God, who could have helped, looked down on a young woman devoted to Him, quite willing to die for Him to give Him glory, and it seemed He decided to sit on His hands and let her death top the horror charts.

One of the greatest frustrations we face during a trial is knowing that: God could rescue us; He could restore us; He could heal us; He could give us that much-longed-for baby; He could provide that much-needed job—all with one stroke of His omnipotent finger. Yet sometimes, He chooses not to. Why?

Is He, like Mrs. Woodson wrote, “sitting on His divine hands?” Absolutely not!

Paul reminds the suffering believers in Philippians 3:20-21, that “our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself.” This is a powerful thought for a Christian who is suffering through any trial, great or small. It is as if Paul is shouting, “Remember believer! This is not the end, but merely the rugged path which leads us to the beginning!”

What a powerful hope we have in Christ. He may not promise freedom from our sorrows here on earth, but His hands are at work. He has promised us that hardships and sorrow are temporary . . . the prize that awaits us is eternal.

—Meditate on the fact that God is in complete control of your life, even though you may not understand what He’s doing. Then pray for the willingness to accept whatever trial He brings you, whether or not you ever receive an explanation for it.

When you can’t understand God’s ways–trust His Word!

And Enoch walked with God, and he was not; for God took him.–Genesis 5:24

Children can sometimes be great teachers. They use their imagination and tend to believe whatever the Bible says, regardless of how far fetched it seems. That was certainly true of the little girl in this story told by Jack Graham:

There was a little girl who loved going to church on Sunday and learning new Bible stories. As her family was on the way home after church one day, her mom looked at her and said, “So what did you learn in Sunday school today?”

She told her mom, “I learned that Enoch was walking with God one day and they walked and walked. But it was getting late, so God turned to Enoch and said, ‘Enoch, we’re closer to my house than we are your house. Why don’t you just come on home with me?’”

Well, I don’t know exactly how it happened. But in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, Enoch who had been walking with God so faithfully for all of those years was suddenly and supernaturally in the presence of the Lord.

This story is a small picture of what will happen to the Church at the end of the age before the great judgment comes. It’s called the rapture, when Christ shall come in a moment and in a twinkling of an eye, and we’ll be caught up immediately into his presence (1 Thessalonians 4:17).

That supernatural event is the next event scheduled on God’s prophetic calendar. One day—maybe today—BOOM! We’ll be gone as God spares us from his wrath because we are in Christ!

As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.–1 Peter 4:10

I don’t know who John Ellerton is, and I’m not going to do a Goggle search to find out. Nor do I know where or when I got this article. I simply found it in some notes I jotted down a good while ago. What I do know is that Mr. Ellerton knows something we all ought to know. Here it is:

GIVE yourselves anew to God and to God’s service, and He will give you the desire and the power to open your treasures; to give to Him, it may be wealth, it may be time, it may be personal service, it may be life itself. In His store there is a place for all, for the tears of the penitent, the barley loaves of the child, the two mites of the widow, the savings of the Philippians’ “deep poverty,” as well as for Mary’s ointment, for the land of Barnabas, for the gold and incense and myrrh of these Eastern sages. And if the vision of Christ be before his eyes, and the love of Christ be in his heart, the man of wealth will give his large offering, the man of learning his dear-bought knowledge, the man of business his hard-earned leisure, for the glory of God, for the benefit of his fellow-men, for the Church or for the poor; to feed the hungry, or to teach the ignorant, to help the struggling, or to guide the erring; and each gift will be welcomed by Him who gave Himself for us all, and who asks in return for ourselves as a living sacrifice to Him.

What he says is true. We all ought to give something and there is something for all to give. To put it bluntly, we all should give all, to Him who gave all for us. Is that not our “reasonable service”? (Romans 12:1).