Good Morning!
For today’s worship help we are going to talk about delight. What it means 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 whom 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.
This past week in Sabbath School our lesson came from Leviticus 10 and Nadab and Abihu. In that story the problem there was not that the sons of Aaron wanted to give strange fire to Ba’al, it was that they brought to God something He had not asked for. They thought they knew better than He as to how and when He was to be worshipped. The ordinary sacrifices were not sufficient for these men and so they thought to add one more for their own benefit. They did this because they found no satisfaction, no delight in what the LORD provided. Our delight in worship is not in what we do, but in what God has done for us. So whenever we discuss doing things in the time set aside on Sunday morning and evening to worship our first question should not be, “What do we think God would like?”, but “How has God told us to approach Him in worship?”. There is a big difference in those two questions. The latter testifies that Jehovah knows what He requires and what His people need in the service of praise.
Far too often we look to our own work and life to carry the weight of what our spirit needs. This is one of the reasons why in contemporary styles of worship so much time and energy is taken up with lights, pop music, and fancy stage presentations. The attempt is to conjure up the feeling (and being successful for sure) of joy, but the problem is that much like with drugs the high only lasts for a moment. You have to keep ratcheting it up to get that same mood again. All man-derived religion is foolhardy because it looks for peace and comfort in the flesh, rather than in things God has provided. If we are bored because there is not enough going on in the service the problem we have is not with the presentation of it (though most assuredly it can be done poorly), but in the reasons why we are there in the first place. Hearing the word read should be a joyous time because the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth is talking to us. What an amazing blessing it is to have the very testimony of Jehovah before our ears. The same with singing psalms. These are words that men and women have sung for over three thousand years. Think about how awesome it is to sing Psalm 100 the same way David sang it, or Christ sang it, or the early Church. What a pleasure to be able to do this!
Another passage of Holy Scripture that can help us understand better what delighting looks like in real life can be somewhat controversial. Not controversial in a bad way, just that there are two competing schools of thought as to what is actually going on in the text. In my mind in Ezra 3 as the people of God are re-establishing the worship of the LORD in the ruins of Solomon’s Temple the cries that drown out the shouting are tears of immense joy, not of sadness. The older men are not weeping in comparing the new temple with what existed previously before the exile. They are instead thankful beyond measure that after having to hang up their lyres in Babylon (Psalm 137) they are now allowed by God’s mercy to sing praise and offer sacrifice once again. The mere opportunity has left grown men in tears. They are the kind of tears we usually associate with our favorite sports team winning a championship or seeing a beloved actress win the mirror ball on Dancing With the Stars. It’s not just the victory that has you happy, but it makes you instantly reflect on all the work and effort, all the failures and losses that took place in order for this time of great joy to come to pass. The people of God have been in bondage for 70 years. These folks were children the last time they had the chance to be in Jerusalem with their covenant family in the presence of Jehovah. I can hardly contemplate how wondrous an occasion it must have been to be able once again to gather here! While each week in worship can’t (and shouldn’t be expected to) be like this we can learn from their example when it comes to the joy we must have as believers in considering what we get to do every Lord’s Day morning.
Our worship should reflect the old adage about prayer: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplications. We love God and give thanks for His grace unto us in singing, we bring before our Savior all of our needs, and we give praise for the Lord’s goodness unto us in prayer, and we are reminded of how wonderful all this is in the proclamation and reading of His Holy word. We don’t need more than this.
In Sunday morning worship when I say, “let us sing with joy in our heart as those who know the blessings of God” what I mean is as we consider how immense the love that God has for us is it should be reflected in how (as well as what) we lift our voices up to Heaven. If we are standing there with our hands in our pockets or are mumbling through the words are we really praising Christ? I can’t sing worth a dickens, and there is a reason I step back from the microphone, but my singing is not for you, no offence intended. When we sing we are singing to the Lord! Is he not worthy to be praised?
Well, this has gone on long enough and I am sure only a few hardy souls have made it thus far. Good on you. 😉 To close may your delight be in what God has provided, for He knows what His sheep need to be fed with to find peace and comfort in this life.
Here is our reading for the day from Danny Hyde:
https://www.reformation21.org/blog/john-owen-on-delighting-in-worship
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church