GOD’S WORD FOR JULY 26 ~ ~ Psalm 40:8 ~ ~ “I delight to do Your will, O my God, And Your law is within my heart.”
Continuing with “The Pleasures of God” by John Piper
The point I have been laboring to clarify here is that God’s pleasure in obedience is good news because that obedience that pleases him is the obedience OF FAITH. Another way to put it would be to say that God is happy with our obedience when our obedience is the overflow of our happiness with God.
God is delighted with our obedience when it is the fruit of our delight in him. Our obedience Our is God’s pleasure when it proves that God is our treasure.
In other words, the command to obey is the command to be happy with God. The commandments of god are only as hard to obey as the promises of God are hard to believe. The Word of God is only as hard to obey as the beauty of God is hard to cherish.
(Again, it all comes back to taking the time and effort to get to know God, which inevitably makes us love Him more and more, and that makes us want to obey Him. It’s a beautiful progression).
God’s pleasure in obedience extends into the public sphere of life too. I want to relate God’s pleasure to the issues of public justice. In the last three chapters we have been moving from the inside to the outside of life. God rejoices over those who HOPE in his love. God takes pleasure in the PRAYERS of the upright. God delights in OBEDIENCE more than in sacrifice. You can see the movement here from inner to outer experience. HOPE is deepest within. Then it expresses itself more or less openly in PRAYER. Then this prayerful reliance on God gives rise to OBEDIENCE.
But so far we have not stressed the public, or secular dimension of this obedience. You might call this the business part of your life. It includes things like filling up your gas tank and buying antiques and punching a time card, or paying your taxes.
Does God take delight in the way you do things at the store or office or shop or the kitchen? Is any wrong behavior in these nonreligious areas so significant that God would even call them an abomination?
With this concern we have moved out just about as far as we can go; from hope to prayer to general obedience to specific forms of obedience in the nonreligious, business part of life. But there is one more step we could take, and I want to take. We could ask, does God have any delight in the behavior of non-Christian people in the non-religious areas of life? What sort of action does God delight in here? Why does he?
Answers tomorrow.