MY PLEASURE
Psalms 40:6-8 NKJV
6 Sacrifice and offering You did not desire;
My ears You have opened.
Burnt offering and sin offering You did not require.
7 Then I said, "Behold, I come;
In the scroll of the book it is written of me.
8 I delight to do Your will, O my God,
And Your law is within my heart."
David operated as a king and a prophet under the Old Covenant. We see some of his prophetic words in the Psalms. David will be praising God or expressing his heart, and then, right in the middle of the psalm are words that speak of Jesus. Verses six and seven are a great example of this. We interrupt this psalm of praise to bring you a prophetic word about the Messiah. These verses are later quoted in the book of Hebrews, talking directly about Jesus. Remember that Jesus was not born with a foreknowledge of who He was. He found Himself in the Scriptures. This is why on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:27, Jesus explained to the two travelers who He was from the Scriptures, beginning at Moses and all the prophets.
Verse eight was the verse that stood out to me. And this verse certainly applied to Jesus. Jesus delighted to do God's will. And God's Word was definitely in His heart. Jesus lived in the perfect will of God all His days. Jesus told the disciples, in John 4:34, that doing the will of God was food to him. Doing God's will fed and nourished His soul. And we know Jesus had God's Word in His heart. As a young Jewish boy growing up, He was taught the Scriptures. He knew the Scriptures and would often quote them. Jesus told the Pharisees that they were in error, not knowing the Scriptures or God's power. So Jesus was a picture of verse eight.
And verse eight can apply to us as well. Have you ever told the Lord that you delight to do His will? This is actually a great place to profess your faith. Don't check with your feelings; this is a heart thing. From my heart, I delight to do Your will, O my God. If the Lord appeared to you in a vision and asked you if you delighted to do His will, what would you say? I might say something like, 'I want to get there, Lord. I want doing Your will to be the delight of my heart.' Just as they say, 'my pleasure' at Chick-fil-A, we can say, 'my pleasure' to doing the will of God.
And one of the best ways to get to the place of delight is to have God's Word in our heart. The Psalmist says in Psalms 1:2 that his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law, he meditates day and night. We have to know the will of God to delight in doing His will. We can't separate God's Word from His will. It is not hard to have God's Word in our hearts if we delight in God's Word. Because when we delight, we meditate, think about, and creatively apply God's Word to our lives. The challenge has been when we have approached God's Word as a duty, not as a delight. But if we believe God's Word is alive and powerful and can change our lives for the better, delighting will not be nearly as difficult.
A great goal as we wrap up 2025 and look forward to the next year is to begin to profess that we delight to do God's will, and we are storing God's Word in our hearts. This will produce big benefits, with no side effects. But full disclosure, it will come with a cost: time, focus, and fleshly desires. But we'll be following Jesus, and I can't think of anything better for us in the days ahead.
PRAYER
I delight to do Your will, O my God, and Your Word is in my heart!