Sabbath psalms - Delight in The Lord

Sabbath Psalms – Delight in The Lord

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

There's a scene in the movie "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," when the boy Edmund meets the White Witch for the first time in the land of Narnia. Because it's snowing, he's absolutely freezing, so the witch casts a spell and presents him with a cup of hot chocolate. She then asks him if he would like something to eat. "Could I have some Turkish delight?" he answers. The witch casts another spell and the sweets immediately appear.

I've always been fond of Turkish delights myself. Whenever I go back to Scotland, it's one of the first things that I buy. Fry's, the equivalent of Hershey's in Britain, make the most delicious chocolate covered Turkish delight you can ever imagine. As I'm typing this message, I'm beginning to long for some.

Delight is usually used to describe something that is delicate or luxurious. Even in the Bible, in the 37th Psalm, this is what it means. The old Hebrew word for delight is "a'nag", which means something that is delicate, pliable, and soft. In this context it means to bend to God's will, to conform to His requests, and to humbly accept His commands.

As we go through some critical times, perhaps we can all decide to delight in the Lord and choose to humbly serve Him, rather than give in to fear or despair. If so, then the effects, according to scripture, will be that our petitions and requests, our prayers and desires will be given to us, as we seek to please and delight in the Lord.

Point to ponder: What does God do that makes me delighted in Him?

Prayer: Lord God, reshape our lives and take us into Your hands. Humble our souls and remold our spirits, so that we may delightfully, cheerfully, and faithfully serve You all of our days. In Jesus' Name, we pray. Amen.

John Stuart is a Scottish Presbyterian pastor living in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Short devotion: Wise Words - Ephesians 4:31-32

 

Ephesians 4:31-32 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. (NIV)

 If ever we needed some wise words from God, we sure do need these today.

 There’s too much division and rancor among us, presently. Instead applying grace to restore goodness, we nurse our wrath and spit out our anger. We live in stressful times because we have created them with our suspicion and anxiety, our conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated misgivings. We forget too easily that faith is the remedy to what we fear and that love is how we should show our faith. If we’re too busy complaining about other folks and too focused on maintaining our point of view, we’ll miss the bigger picture that God sees: the diverse beauty of humanity.

 We are all finite beings and only have a certain number of days to live on Earth. As we grow older, we can sometimes mistake our mortality for the end of the world. Even though many generations have come and gone before us, we may delude ourselves into thinking that we’re living in the end times. We’re not – we’re just approaching the end of our own lives which can be hard to accept, so we interpret our existential crisis as being the end of everything we cherish. We find it hard to think that the world will go on without us, so we live in fear and doubt, instead of dwelling on the love and grace of God which are boundless and endure forever. If, instead of fretting, we place our existence into the hands of God, He takes away our futility and makes this life-long journey meaningful which is why God encourages us to ‘be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.’

 Q: What am I afraid of most? How can faith diminish my fear?

 Prayer: Lord Jesus, lead us with Your love and help us to share Your grace. In Your Sacred Name, we pray. Amen.

 

John Stuart is the pastor of Erin Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee.

 Today’s image is John’s latest drawing called “Breakthrough.”