Delight!

Is it rational to feel delight in a world so full of grimness? Absolutely. Charlie at AnotherThink tells you why.

...why does my life seem so delightless at times? Why do I become discouraged?

Perhaps it's a matter of focus.

When I take my focus off of loving God, knowing God, hearing God, trusting God, walking with God, my delight evaporates. If delight is the fruit of God's love, it can only grow when my heart and soul are fully rooted in God, when I am living intentionally so as to draw sustenance from God.

When times are hard, I lose that focus. Jesus himself knew this and challenged the people in the Sermon on the Mount to rejoice even when they were facing the most difficult circumstances. (Matthew 5:12). Why? Because our delight in the midst of chaos testifies more eloquently than words to our belief that there is more to it than this. There is a place where justice prevails, where peace reigns, where evil has been vanquished, where love is unfettered.

We rejoice because God lives, his Word is true and he is at work redeeming the lives of men and women, including you, including me.

If I take delight in my heavenly Father, it is not an act of blind denial of the dark realities of the world around me. Rather, it is a statement of faith in the greater reality of God's redeeming presence in my life and in the daily events of the world I live in. Delight suggests confidence in God's sovereignty, in God's goodness.

Today, I will take delight in the Lord.

Read the whole thing!

Then consider the comfort and power that comes to people when they follow Jesus Christ:

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,

‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:31-39)