Delight Thyself Also In The Lord
Michael A. Druckenmiller Sr. 2019-07-27
Psalm 37:4 states: Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. [KJV]
The Amplified Bible says it this way: Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He will give you the desires and secret petitions of your heart.
A lot of folks look at the ending of the verse, not the beginning. They look at this verse as a means to an end not a result of true delight.
Just what is it, to “delight”?
I am reminded of a secular song, whose inspiration was a menu item at a café, whose chorus sings: “Skyrockets in flight, afternoon delight…” And, while this song is sensual in nature, it captures beautifully the concept of “delighting” in someone or something.
I asked the question on Facebook the other day, how can you tell if you are delighting in the Lord?
Well to compare I asked: “Have you ever had a friend that when you saw them your heart leapt with joy? And, you look forward to seeing them with great anticipation?”
We often get sermonized about leaving our first love, and we immediately reject any such notion. After all for many of us, love is commitment and our commitment to Our Lord has never diminished. In fact our willingness to die for the Faith remains intact without reservations.
But, is how we feel now about Jesus the same as when we first believed?
Or, more directly, is how we delight in Jesus the same way we delighted in our soul mates when we first realized they loved us enough to spend a lifetime with us?
Consider that most of us no longer delight ourselves in the Lord. We have resorted to a Worship Rote which is neither in Spirit nor in Truth.
We’ve allowed the rote of our traditions to become our commitment, replacing the ecstasy of Heart Worship with our traditions of Rote Worship.
All Rote Worship can bring is the Legal Presence of The Holy Spirit, while Heart Worship brings the Manifest Presence, the “in our literal midst’s”, Spirit of Jesus.
And, remember the law kills (because it is insufficient to bring [resurrection] life) but, the Spirit brings Life and that abundantly.
I have gotten a lot of grief over “clinging to the past”, I won’t go into the rebuttal to that criticism at this time.
Because I remember that one of the marked attributes of the Jesus People Movement was their delight in Jesus.
I remember that one of the marked attributes of the Youth Revival on Guam was their delight in Jesus.
If there was a gathering or a Bible study anywhere on the island they were there, and they were there with an exuberance and expectation that I simply have not seen since.
For a short time, I was part of the Tamuning Charismatic Fellowship. For the most part these were Roman Catholics who had been freed into the freedom of the Holy Spirit and when they met, there was an expectation, an exuberance to be in Jesus’ Presence. And, at least once there was such a manifestation of His Presence that no man could minister, but Jesus did.
I remember the early days of Faith Assembly of God when they were on Royal Road and Lee Hendrix was leading worship and the Glory of Jesus would be so pronounced that people would be prostrated all over the sanctuary and out in the foyer.
And, people want me to settle for less, to forget the past????
No! I will delight myself in My Lord!
Isaiah 58:14 gives us a promise, a promise of both what we will get if we delight in Jesus and how to get back to delighting…
Amazingly, these are the same things spoken to the church in Laodicea, that we should do again the first works.
The 13th verse reads, If you turn away your foot from [traveling unduly on] the Sabbath, from doing your own pleasure on My holy day, and call the Sabbath a [spiritual] delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable, and honor Him and it, not going your own way or seeking or finding your own pleasure or speaking with your own [idle] words,
How often we consider going to Sunday Morning Services as a “duty”. And,
Sunday School? Who has time for that? But, please don’t ask me to come to a
prayer meeting.
Well, the last one I can
understand as most prayer meetings tend to have become an orchestrated rote
endeavor with distracting music in the background, rather than a blessed
opportunity to spend time with our True Love and make our requests known to Him
who died for us.
I invite you to consider whether you truly delight yourself in Jesus or if you are just going through the motions of commitment love.
Only you can say for sure. But first you might want to examine yourself to see if you really and truly are “In The Faith”.
Because if you aren’t a new creation in Christ Jesus, if your thinking hasn’t been redeemed, if your attitudes towards the things of the world has not changed, you might not be!