Audience of One

Joy and sin

Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4)

Why do Christians sin? The answer is, because we desire to. We want to. I mean, obviously there’s a sense in which we don’t want to do it – as Paul says in Romans 7:15, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate”. For Christians, there’s always a reluctance to sin, as Paul says earlier in Romans: “We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?”. But when we sin, we’ve been fooled by sin within us (what Paul calls our flesh) into thinking it’s good for us – that it’s the best thing to do. Our flesh “convinces the mind that the sinful act is somehow ‘good’ for the soul, so that our affections hunger for it, and our will chooses it” (my paraphrase of Kris Lundgaard). We sin because our flesh desires it.

The psalmist above instructs us to delight ourselves in the Lord, so that he gives us the desires of our heart. That’s the prosperity gospel, surely? We delight ourselves in God, and so he gives me that large mansion with the state-of-the-art recording studio in the basement. Well, not exactly. God doesn’t give us the object of our desires; he gives us the desires themselves.

Try and separate the two in your mind. In the above example, I desire to live in a large, technologically equipped mansion. The mansion is the object of my desire. If I were to obtain such a mansion, I would obtain what I desired, and so the desire itself would cease to exist. So the mansion, and the desire for the mansion are two different things.

We are told to delight ourselves in the Lord, and the result is that he will give us the desires themselves, not the object of our current desires. So if I delight myself in the Lord, he won’t necessarily give me the mansion, but he will give me new desires – a desire to serve him, a desire to follow him in all that I do.

If I want to fight sin, I have to look to God for my joy. I have to delight myself in him, or put it another way, to find my delight and joy in him, rather than looking elsewhere. The more we look to God for our joy, the more sin’s attractions dim and fade. And the more we stop sinning and live God’s way, the more we experience life the way it should be – life depending on our awesome creator God, lived to his glory. It’s there we find our eternal joy.

Matthew @ 13:51, January 30, 2008 to Discussions | Comments (0)