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New Delight

If it's important to hate sin, it's even more important to love righteousness. The love of God involves not only being repulsed by the idea of disobedience; it means being attracted by the opposite idea: the idea of obedience. Living within our Father's love must come to be, among other things, delightful.

In Ephesians 4, Paul discussed the two sides of godliness. Whereas we used to take delight in disobedience, "you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus" (vv.20,21). So we must "put off, concerning [our] former conduct, the old man" (v.22). But that is only half the battle. On the positive and more important side, we must "be renewed in the spirit of [our] mind" (v.23). We must make the choice to "put on the new man" (v.24).

If we've been satisfying our desires in unlawful ways for a long time, it will not be easy to learn a new set of delights. It can be done, though, and making the commitment to do so is the first step. If we want to be people who take deep delight in pleasing God, we must get past our what ifs, our maybes, and our yes buts and make an actual commitment to be renewed in our thinking.

The good that awaits us is so much more joyful than the counterfeit pleasures we've been accustomed to, our main regret will be that we didn't delight in God sooner. We'll scold ourselves for having been so foolish for so long. What were we thinking?

Counterfeits can be quite convincing, it's true. The things we used to enjoy were really enjoyable, or we wouldn't have spent so much time with them. But whatever pleasures may have come from satisfying ourselves unlawfully, the lawful satisfaction of those same desires is so much deeper and more genuine that the comparison defies description. The "new delight" we can have in God is the real thing. It's what we were made for. It's everything we've dreamed of and then some. And the main thing about it is that it centers on God Himself. He, finally, is all we really desire.