Friday
I said to the LORD, “You are my Lord; apart from you I have no good thing.” – Psalm 16:2
What does it mean to say that apart from God you have no good thing? It means that to come to the point in your life where you understand that everything without God is pathetically inferior to God without everything. As C. S. Lewis puts it, “he who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only” Can you truly affirm that in your heart: “Lord, I have no other good besides You”?
I am more and more convinced that God really gets a bad. The name “devil” means “slanderer” and from day one Satan has engaged in an aggressive campaign to slander God. His original temptation to Eve suggested that God was withholding something good by forbidding Adam and Eve from eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The temptation also suggested that the first couple would find true satisfaction by sinning.
The devil has used that same strategy again and again: “God is opposed to your enjoyment of life. Following God is no fun. You are going to have to give up pleasure and happiness if you want to get serious about your faith. Sin will bring you true pleasure.” But the truth of the Bible is that sin may bring short-term pleasure, but it always brings long-term misery and pain. Submitting to God may bring short-term difficulty and pain, but it always results in lasting joy and pleasure. And so the core of the Christian life is to seek lasting joy and pleasure in God.
I have set the LORD always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure, because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One see decay. You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand. – Psalm 16:8-11
Psalm 16 is about experiencing joy and pleasure in God. The scholarly German commentator, Franz Delitzsch, wrote of Psalm 16, “There reigns in the whole Psalm, a settled calm, an inward joy, and a joyous confidence, which is certain that everything that it can desire for the present and for the future it possesses in its God.”
The Westminster Shorter Catechism begins with this question, “What is the chief end of man?” Answer: “To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” Pastor John Piper has thoughtfully improved on that by altering it to, “The chief end of man is to glorify God BY enjoying him forever”. As Piper often explains, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.”
Psalm 34:8 invites us, “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” It’s an invitation to enjoy God!
One of the most profound things that I have read about this (outside of the Bible) comes from C.S. Lewis’ essay “The Weight of Glory”.
“If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Jeff Frazier
Posts
1 comment:
Yes I do! But all too often I fall to the pleasures of this Earth and not to the pleasures of God. Then I feel guilty and need more pleasures of the Earth to make me feel better. But of course that makes me feel guilty and I need more of the Earth pleasures, etc.
Post a Comment