Monday, September 27, 2010

Delighting in God: Introduction

Delighting in God is the characteristic of a Christian. If you do not delight in God as a Christian then what do you have? I recently preached a message at "Preacher Prep" (A student run weekly meeting where guys get to preach to a group for practice) and the main point of that message was that delighting in God leads to counting this world as nothing, and hating the sin that you commit. I preached from Philippians 3:1-12.

In this first post I would like to introduce the idea of delighting in God as a Scriptural theme, and key to living the Christian life.

(1) Joy has its roots in delight.

The Christian life has another characteristic that is very closely related to delight, and is actually a natural outflowing of delighting in God. This is joy. We as Christians have a reason to be joyful! What is that reason! We were saved from the depth and misery of our sin by a God we hated and called to be part of His family! (Titus 3:3-7). Salvation is the gospel, and the gospel is the root of all that we do and feel. Salvation should cause us to have joy! We should be full of joy. If we understand our sin, then the reality of the gospel of Jesus Christ really sinks in and causes joy to overflow!

(2) Delight in the thing that gives us great joy!

If we are happy about something, or something makes us happy, then we as normal logical human beings are drawn to taking delight in that thing. As human beings we are all searching for something to take joy in. Whether it be in cars, money, pleasure, work, comfort....anything, we all want something to take joy in. Then the next logical step is that we desire that thing. The object of our delight then becomes something that we desire!

(3) What if the thing that gives us the most joy, and the thing we delight in was actually a person, and that person is the Triune God of our salvation!

As Christians the most pleasurable, joyful person in our lives is Jesus Christ whom God sent to reveal Himself to us and to save us from the muck and mire of our sin. This gives us the greatest amount of joy! We must take delight in this joy that has been given to us. I look at my life and I see such failure in this area....such coldness. The Christian life is not about zeal, or service, or fun, or fellowship, or preaching, or teaching, it certainly includes all those and many of those have eternal effects and God has ordained them as good and necessary, but the Christian life at its core is not about those things, it is about delighting in the God that saved you and falling on your face in view of His surpassing greatness and your surpassing lostness and knowing that God has saved you. This is delight in God! The joy found in that is inexpressable! (1 Peter 1) Take joy in God and in God alone. He is our joy and He is our life. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength!

Let us delight in our God, the saving, loving, just God.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngSq7mABZGE&feature=channel

Sunday, September 26, 2010

My Purpose

In this blog I hope to address three areas in my life as a Bible College Student.

(1) How to deal with the overwhelming tendency to become cold to biblical truth, and the gospel as we study them here.
-I hope to show what aspects of life as a student cause that to happen.
-Then I hope to show how I am learning to cope with that and stay saturated and have my joy in the gospel.

(2) I wish post topics I desire to talk about and personal reflections on life, theology, ministry, and encouraging thoughts. This will be the fun part of this!

(3) How to apply what were learning in the classroom, right now in my life.

I pray that this would be an encouragement to read, and if not I will be encouraged just by writing it. Thanks!

Michael Brooks