Week of 1/20-1/26: Develops - Songs for New Hearts

Day One: Psalm 1:1-6 How happy is the man who does not follow the advice of the wicked or take the path of sinners or join a group of mockers! Instead, his delight is in the LORD’s instruction, and he meditates on it day and night. He is like a tree planted beside streams of water that bears its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers. The wicked are not like this; instead, they are like chaff that the wind blows away. Therefore the wicked will not survive the judgment, and sinners will not be in the community of the righteous. For the LORD watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to ruin.

I HAVE A TENDENCY TO TALK more about how healthy I eat than I do actually eat healthy. For some reason I think that if I talk about being healthy and eating healthy then I will magically eat healthier things. This obviously is not true. The truth is I like to eat, and, more specifically, I like to eat sweet things. It doesn’t really matter what the particular sweet thing is as long as it has some form of sugar. It’s my delight. I talk a good game about how being healthy is my delight but my late night runs to the cookie cabinet tell a different story.

We are good at talking about what our delight is. In other words, we are trying to convince ourselves and others what is important to us, but our actions always tell the truer story. We are good at telling people that God’s Word is our delight and that reading it is very important to us, but the problem is that our actions, or lack thereof, tell the truer story. We don’t really delight in God’s Word because we are too busy actually delighting in lesser things.

The Psalmist was not just a “talker” about delighting in God’s Word. He actually did delight in it and His actions told the full story. He meditated on it day and night. We seem to struggle to spend five minutes in the Word a day. How do we cultivate our delighting in the Word? It’s not unlike a decision we have to make about food: as good as apple pie may be, an apple is always better.

PAUSE AND REFLECT

▷▷What does it mean to delight in God’s word?

▷▷Do you delight in God’s word, or just say that you do?

▷▷How can you delight in God’s word today?