By Pastor Benjamin Glaser - Posted at Thoughts From Parson Farms:
Gaining Strength and Peace from the Sabbath Day Worship of the ChurchFor today’s worship help we are going to talk about delight. Delight was a word that showed up in the sermon yesterday from Proverbs 13:4. What does it mean to delight in God, and most especially to delight in His praise? Delight is kind of a funny word to type, to be honest. It makes me think of Tattoo on Fantasy Island exclaiming about the plane, the plane! De-light! De-light! Seriously though what does this word mean? Well to delight in something is to find not just happiness, but to have a deep satisfaction in it. In other words when we delight in a particular person, place, or thing it completes us. We go from being without to then being full. Thinking about this word and the pleasure we are to have in the Lord and His worship changes how we approach Him on the Lord’s Day, or really any other day. We are to be satisfied in Christ because He alone is able to provide us what we need, which is reconciliation with the Lord, a return to what was lost in Adam.
Can there be something worth more praise more than this?
If we learn anything about Christ’s deconstruction of the Pharisees it is that their problem rests squarely in the middle of their chest. Their hearts are far from Him because what they seek on the Sabbath is not to be satisfied in God, but in themselves. By adding man-made pomp and circumstances to liven things up in their lives they actually drive away their souls from being grounded in the sufficiency of the Redeemer. That is part of the reason why they cannot understand or hear what Jesus is saying. They are so focused on their own needs and wants they can’t see that what they really need is standing right in front of their eyes. This is why Jesus rebukes them for searching the Scriptures and coming up empty. It is because they desire not to find delight in what God has said, but they look through the Bible to defend what they want to be the truth. Becoming spiritually hollow they then keep trying to find outward things to fill the hole in their heart. This is what we do when we take our eyes off the one who worship is for and make it about ourselves. When we seek to delight not in what the Lord has provided in His word, but in what we want.
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