Early this week, I read from two DAWG guides back to back. The first was from Charles Spurgeon reminding me and us, as men, to “Delight” in God. Immediately after reading and thinking more deeply about what that looks like in my life, I read John Piper talking about how God “Delights” in us, His sons! It was not lost on me that, in God’s Providence, I’d read these two things back to back and was reminded how God is very present with us and intimately engaged with us as we do our DAWG…so ALL the realities we experience in our DAWG are gifts from our Good, Good Father! More than that, I was being reminded of God’s desire for me to experience delight in my walk with Him and I can only do that to the degree I know and experience His delight in me. As that happens, WE ARE GRACE ENERGIZED to lead well in our family, our work, and in our walk with other believers and our neighbors!
I hope you’ll read and think about what these two men have to share with us, not as preachers but as brothers and sons like you and me, sharing what God was saying to them in their DAWG. For brevity, I have edited their writing but if you desire to read them in their fullness, I have attached a link to each.
Spurgeon shares-Delight thyself also in the Lord…Psalm 37:4
The life of the believer is here described as a delight in God, characterized by an overflow of happiness and joy. As believers who know Christ, we understand that delight and faith are so blessedly united, that They who love God with all their hearts, find that the ways of God are highways of pleasantness and favor, And all her paths are peace…Proverbs 3:17
Piper shares-The Lord will again take delight in prospering you…Deuteronomy 30:9
God does not bless us begrudgingly. There is a kind of eagerness about the goodness of God. He does not wait for us to come to him. He seeks us out, because it is his pleasure to do us good. God is not waiting for us; He is pursuing us. Psalm 23:6…Surely goodness and mercy shall pursue me all the days of my life!
God loves to show mercy. He is not hesitant or indecisive or tentative in his desires to do good to His sons.
His anger must be released by a stiff safety lock, but his mercy has a hair trigger.
That’s what He meant when He came down on Mount Sinai and said to Moses, The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love…Exodus 34:6. It’s what he meant when he said in Jeremiah 9:24…I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.
God is infinitely energetic with absolutely unbounded and unending enthusiasm for the fulfillment of his delights.
This is hard for us to comprehend, because of busyness, tiredness, mixed emotions, boredom…We are like little geysers that gurgle and sputter and pop erratically. But God is like a great Niagara Falls — you look at 186,000 tons of water crashing over the precipice every minute, and think: Surely this can’t keep going at this force year after year after year. Yet it does.
That’s the way God is about doing us good. He never grows weary of it. It never gets boring to him. The Niagara of his grace has no end…..Piper
Delight and Doing life with God go hand in hand, both are Grace energized to fuel us as men to live “Boldly” together in these days…Kelley
