Welcome to Delight in Grace, the teaching ministry of Rich Powell, pastor of Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. In Psalm 37, 3 through 4, we find five life habits that God calls us to, followed by the promise that God will give us the desires of our hearts. That's a lot to pack into two verses.
What are the five habits? And if you follow them, will God give you whatever your heart desires? Let's listen as Pastor Rich unpacks these two verses in a message titled, Living by Faith, Faithfulness. This is part four of a message first preached on January 27, 2019 at Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. To hear the whole message, visit www.delightingrace.com. Oh, I hope I can make it.
No, you just get there, boom, and there it goes. The fruit of faithfulness. Pursue it and practice it. This word faithfulness, Isaiah 33 says this, The Lord will be the stability of your times. Stability.
How many of you would like more stability in your lives? Faithfulness is the key. Faithfulness is the key. That's living by faith. Faithfulness means steadfastness, firmness, security, truth, as opposed to drift. Kylan Dalitch, the German commentators, say it very, very succinctly.
And here's how they put it. Diligently cultivate the virtue of faithfulness. Diligently cultivate the virtue of faithfulness.
Do you know how much this rubs against the culture the culture that we live in? In a tremendous way. You want to stick out? Practice faithfulness. You will. Now some say, we're talking about faith, and so many people say, you know, living by faith is hard. And I struggle with that. When Jesus said, Come to me, all you who are weary and heavily laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me. For my yoke is? What does Jesus say?
My yoke is what? And my burden is? So why is living by faith hard? I'll tell you why living by faith is hard, because we're battling the flesh. To the degree that you're listening to the flesh, your faith is hard.
Let me use the illustration I was just using with regard to faithfulness. You plan to run a marathon. It's crazy, I know. But you plan, I love the cars that have the sticker on the back that says 0.0.
It's so funny. But you plan to run a marathon. And the marathon's coming up. It's two weeks away. It's one week away. It's a day away. You wake up, you're consuming donuts, bacon and eggs. You're just consuming it to the hilt, right? And the morning of the marathon wakes up and you get out there ready to, because you are so pumped and you are just so believing in yourself. And you start running the marathon. How's it going?
By mile two, how's it going? It's what? It's hard.
Why? How about playing the violin or the piano or the flute or the drums? And you want to, I envy Cynthia and Tim.
Oh my goodness. If only I could wail like that while I was worshiping. But I don't play the drums. But if I get down there and say, I'm going to play the drums.
For me, playing an instrument like that would be hard unless what? Faithfulness. Faithfulness. None of these people over here just decided one day to get up and say, I'm just going to play this instrument.
None of them did that, did they? Faith is hard in the same way that running a marathon or playing the violin is hard to the person who will not practice faithfully. Faithfulness. Again, as Cal and Delich say, diligently cultivate the virtue of faithfulness. Imperative number five, delight yourself in the Lord. Delight yourself in the Lord.
And you hear the word delight and immediately you're thinking of an emotion, right? Don't start there. That's not where you go to start. It's not I'm in right, out right, up right, down right, happy all the time.
You remember singing that? That's not what it is. Don't begin with the emotion. Begin where? With understanding.
Begin with understanding. To delight means to luxuriate yourself. To luxuriate yourself. You cannot luxuriate yourself.
You cannot delight if you don't know what riches you have. There's too many Christians walking around today who do not know what they have and who they are in Christ. They think faith is just simply a list of things you're supposed to do and not do. That's Pharisaism. That's hard. That's a drudgery. That's not faith.
God didn't call us to that. There are many, too many people today who luxuriate in wealth they do not have or a wealth that they cannot keep. Listen.
You want to know what wealth you have? You listen to these words. You need to consume his self-disclosure. How many of you are treating the Bible just simply as a reference book? Oh, I see.
I got this issue. Oh, what does the Bible say about that? God help us if that's how we treat this. You want to be faithful? You want to cultivate faithfulness? You want to delight in the Lord?
You want to live by faith? You need to consume his self-disclosure. The riches of his grace.
To delight in the Lord means to take pleasure in him, to enjoy God. I mean, you remember Colin Lavoie? He was here for about 13 years, moved to the United States. He was here for about 13 years, moved up from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He came to Christ in a very performance-oriented church, pretty rigid performance-oriented church. And when he first came here, he came to grace. And then he became, eventually, he became the leader of the Bible study discussion at Panera on Thursday mornings.
The men get together for a Bible study discussion. And he would listen on Sunday morning intently with a view towards leading the discussion. And he dedicated Tuesday to creating the discussion guide for Thursday morning at Panera.
And when he was here, Colin grew by leaps and bounds. The transformation in his life was phenomenal, and most of it was in his attitude. And by his testimony, he said this. He says, you know, when I first came to grace, had you asked me, do you enjoy God? He said, no, I don't enjoy God.
I do it because I'm supposed to. But now that he has moved to Pennsylvania, before he left, his testimony here was, you know, you ask me now, I can say, yes, I enjoy God. Do you? Do you know the goodness of God? Do you enjoy Him? You see, this requires knowing God for who He is. Way too many of us are worshiping the God of our imagination, or we're worshiping the God of what the church says He is. But do you know God according to who He says He is?
If you do, you will enjoy Him. It is an objective reality. It's an objective reality of who He is and what He has done. And you need to understand it. You need to commit to it.
You need to take action upon it. And delighting in God is the same thing as what Paul says to the Corinthians. The inward man is being renewed day by day. That's delighting in God.
Fretting robs us of this. So those are the five imperatives. I've got one minute left to tell you about the great promise that comes at the end of this.
Because this is where we like to jump to first, isn't it? Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. In our selfishness, we jump to that. God wants to give me the desires of my heart. Yes, but what comes before that? The five imperatives we just talked about. If you develop the habit of faithfulness in those five imperatives we just talked about, then Proverbs 37.4b will be yours to live and enjoy.
And don't put the cart before the horse. He will give you the desires of your heart. Listen to this phrase, okay? God blesses faithfulness. God blesses faithfulness.
Sometimes things get hard in life and we think we need to throw in the towel. But living by faith is living in the outflow of your delight in God. Do this faithfully, even in hard times.
Why? Because He is your highest good and your deepest satisfaction. He is what your heart deeply longs for. Now, here's the way that we can turn this around and look at this statement in scripture from the flesh.
You might say something like, God will give me what my heart is set on, therefore I will delight in Him. That's turning it around. That's living according to the flesh. That's self-serving. And if that's how you view this verse, then you have turned to God into a mythological demigod. And that's not who He is.
That's not who He is at all. But instead, what this verse is promoting and leading us to is to the understanding that my Creator, Redeemer, is the object of my desire. And so my most earnest petitions, my deepest wants, my highest aspirations, my deepest wants, my highest aspirations, shall be satisfied in Him. Listen, God knows your deepest desires better than you do.
Did you know that? And here it is. This is what I want you to hang on to. Okay, this is the promise. Those five imperatives leads to this promise. God delights to give you the desires that are formed by your delight in Him. God delights to give you the desires, your desires, that are formed by your delight in Him. Go back to those five imperatives. Psalm 73, whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. You see, folks, that's living by faith. And that's a whole lot better than fretting, don't you think? We have no reason to fret. Well, we have reason, but we don't have a good excuse to.
No good excuse to fret. I want you to meditate on these truths, these five imperatives. Will you resolve in your heart by having learned and heard from God today from His Word, from His self-disclosure, looking at these five imperatives that lead up to what you have learned, lead up to one promise from God? One promise from God. You ready to do this? Thanks for joining us here at Delight in Grace. You've been listening to Rich Powell, the lead pastor at Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. The Delight in Grace mission is to help you know that God designed you to realize your highest good and your deepest satisfaction in Him, the one who is infinitely good. We hope you'll join us again on weekdays at 10 a.m.
