When Delight Means Doxology

But may all who seek you

rejoice and be glad in you;

may those who love your salvation

say continually, “Great is the Lord!"


David's prayer in Psalm 40:16 can absolutely change your life. At first glance it may not stand out. Perhaps, like me, when you've read it before you glossed over the parallelism that makes this verse so special.

Now parallelism is a pretty simple rhetorical device. It is used in poetry of all kinds to connect two different phrases within a single line, always extending (in some way) the thought in the first phrase.1 Verse 16 below is one line with two phrases that are signified by A and B:




The particular type of parallelism is called “synonymous parallelism.” It basically is used by a poet to state the same idea in two different ways. It's not something we should breeze by. Instead read it and reread it. The point is for it to resound in the reader's mind.

So what is David saying in Psalm 40:16? David prays that all who seek God would rejoice and be glad in him. This is the first phrase, that the end of seeking God be joy in God. Now notice how this idea is repeated (and extended) in the second phrase: May all who love your salvation say continually, “Great is the LORD!”

As the phrases correspond, to seek God is parallel to loving his salvation, and to rejoice in God is parallel to praising him. The aim, then, of seeking God and loving his salvation is to rejoice in him and glorify him.




Seeking As Loving

To seek God in this passage means to pursue him. A seeker, according to this verse, is not someone who is merely interested in religious topics. Rather than having reservations about God, the seeker is one who is in passionate pursuit to know him. The seeker is locked in, and keeps yearning for more. Specifically, this work of seeking — of pursuing God — is to love his ways. If you will seek God like David prays, you will cherish the salvation only God can give. If you will know him, you will know him only through his Son (Matthew 11:27).

So there's no such thing as seeking God outside the blood and righteousness of Jesus. To seek him is to revel in and cling to all that he is for us in the gospel. To love his salvation is to be bewildered by what he's done to bring us to himself.


Rejoicing As Glorifying

You can't faithfully seek God, or love his salvation, with any legitimate aim other than to rejoice in him. That is the goal. There are really no other options. Seeking isn't spinning our wheels. There is an end in sight, a real end — when we see Jesus as he is and become perfectly conformed to his image (1 John 3:2), when the dwelling place of God will be with man in a new world (Revelation 21:1–3), when we live and reign with Jesus forever, his name written on our foreheads and his light making the night no more (Revelation 22:3–5). This will be a happy scene. We will rejoice in God. We will be glad in God. And he will be glorified. In fact, they are one in the same.

As the phrases show, rejoicing in God means to praise his name. Joy equals doxology. This kind of gladness in Psalm 40:16 sounds a certain way, like a chorus of rescued voices. It speaks a certain language, like a song from all the nations. And it says a certain thing: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!”

Five Promises for Your Bible Reading and Prayer

Do you consistently seek God in the word and prayer? Or have you tried again and again, become discouraged, and given up? We are deep enough into January that this is the story for many us. Resolutions have began to stall. And even if you do get time with God, is it life-giving? Or is it just going through the motions, reading an assigned passage, praying through your list, and being relieved when it’s over?

It's not too late to make some good changes. So if you are struggling to spend time with God, here are five promises that can help:

1. God is My Exceeding Joy

Send out your light and your truth; let them lead me … Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy. (Psalm 43:3–4)

God promises to be your exceeding joy, not because of what he gives, but because of who he is. When we behold and worship him we have infinitely more joy than we have in anything else.

So why would we rather sleep in than seek God? It’s because we’re not trusting that God is our exceeding joy. So what can we do?

Don’t just grit your teeth and try harder. Do what the psalmist says — ask God to send you his light (the heart-enlightening work of the Spirit) and his truth (the Word of God). Then pray over promises describing God as your joy, like Psalm 43:3–4; Psalm 16:11; Matthew 13:44; and 1 Peter 1:8.

As you do, God will send his light and truth so you see and feel that he really is your exceeding joy. Then, when you see that infinite joy is found in him — you’ll want to spend time with him.

2. Hearing God’s Word Will Increase My Faith

So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. (Romans 10:17)

Many mornings I’m tempted not to seek God because my faith feels weak. But that’s like not going to the doctor because my body feels sick. Just like doctors heal sick bodies, so God strengthens weak faith — as we hear his word.

Weak faith is like a weak battery. But God’s word is a battery charger. So when your faith is weak, open his word, and plug in your weak faith. God promises that as you do that — he will recharge you.

3. God’s Word is the Only Perfect Source of Guidance

Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. (Psalm 119:105)

The world is like a pitch-black cave in which we can’t see anything. But God has given us the high-powered flashlight of his word.

  So if we head into our day without pondering God’s word, it’s like stumbling through a cave without turning on the flashlight.

But starting the day in God’s Word is like turning on the flashlight — so we can see the crevice to avoid, the rock to duck under, the turn we want to take. Don't head into your day without turning on the flashlight.

4. When You Pray, God Will Answer

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. (Matthew 7:7)

One reason we don’t pray is because we believe Satan’s lie that prayer does nothing. But that’s not what Jesus taught (Matthew 7:7).

Jesus promises that every time we pray God will answer. He will either do exactly what we ask, or something even better, which he would not have done had we not prayed.

So if I start the day praying about my heart, marriage, children, work, ministry — God will do things in my heart, marriage, children, work, and ministry that he would not have done had I not prayed. Trust Jesus’ promise about prayer — and pray.

 5. This Is the One Thing Which Will Not Be Taken Away

“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41–42)

Martha had busied herself in the kitchen, while Mary sat at Jesus’s feet, listening to his word. And Jesus said Mary had made the right choice, because she had chosen the one thing which could not be taken from her.

Everything else can be taken from you. But time with Jesus will never be taken from you — because the heart you nurture for Jesus now will bring you increased joy in him forever. And ever. And ever.

So if you haven’t spent time with God, and you are tempted with the newspaper, Facebook, or a phone call — stop. Ask yourself: what will bring me joy that will never be taken away?

Then set everything else aside to join Mary at Jesus’s feet, listening to his word.

Tomorrow Morning

The alarm goes off.

I’m tired. Maybe just a little more sleep. But wait. . .

• God is inviting me to exceeding joy.

His word will strengthen my weak faith.

His word will shine light on the darkness around me.

When I pray, God will work.

This is the one thing that can’t be taken from me.

I think I’ll get up.

God is Merciful Not to Tell Us Everything

There is more mercy than we realize when God chooses not to tell us everything. When the disciples were with Jesus on the Mount of Olives just before his ascension to the Father, one of them asked a question that must have been on everyone’s mind: “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6).

It had been a long wait. 2,000 years had passed since Abraham had been promised a seed that would bless all the families of the earth. It had been 1,500 years since Moses foretold that a great prophet would arise to lead the people and 1,000 years had gone by since David had been promised an eternal heir to his throne.

Now, after Jesus's glorious, triumphal resurrection they finally understood why the King had to suffer and die before the kingdom could really come. Jesus was the sacrificial Lamb of God whose death would atone for all the sins of all his people for all time.

It all made glorious sense.

So the stage looked set. Having conquered death, this King was invincible. What threat was the Sanhedrin or Herod or Pilate or Caesar? Surely the time had come for the long-awaited King to assume his earthly reign, right?

Jesus’ answer: It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth (Acts 1:7-8).

In other words, “Now is not the time. And you don’t need to know when it will be. But for now, I have work for you to do.”

Can you imagine how the disciples might have felt if the Lord had explained to them that he would not assume his earthly reign for another 2,000-plus years, during which the Church would gradually and with great struggle and sacrifice spread around the world? 2,000 years?

God is merciful not to tell us everything. He tells us enough to sustain us if we trust him. But often it does not feel like enough. We really think we would like to know more.

In her book, The Hiding Place, Corrie Ten Boom recalls a time when, as a young girl, she was returning home on the train with her father after accompanying him to purchase parts for his watch-making business. She asked him to explain how children are conceived. Her father stood up and took out the suitcase he had brought along:

"Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?" he said. I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning. "It's too heavy," I said. "Yes," he said. "And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It's the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you."

God is also a wise Father who knows when knowledge is too heavy for us. He is not being deceptive when he does not give us the full explanation. He is carrying our burdens (1 Peter 5:7). If we think our burdens are heavy, we should see the ones he’s carrying. The burdens he gives to us to carry are light (Matthew 11:30).

God is very patient and merciful with us. Someday, when we are older and stronger, he will let us carry more of the burden of knowledge. But until then let us happily keep letting him carry our burdens.

Maundy Thursday

From Desiring God:

The Maundy in Maundy Thursday comes from the Latin root mandatum, or commandment, taken from Jesus’ words in John 13:34:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.

Just prior to speaking these words, Jesus knelt down to wash the disciples’ feet, a model of love for the disciples. But Maundy Thursday celebrates more than a new mandate of sacrificial love, it points to a sacrifice of eternal significance.

Slaves and Foot Washing

For the sandal-wearing disciples, washing feet was a common cultural practice. It was proper hospitality to offer your guests a basin of water for their feet. But guests were usually expected to wash their own feet. Washing the dirt off someone else’s feet was a task reserved for only the lowest ranking Gentile servants, and Jewish slaves were often exempted from this duty. In a household without slaves, everyone washed his or her own feet.¹

Yet Jesus willingly dropped to his knees in the position of this extra-lowly slave to wash the disciples’ feet in John 13:1–20. The disciples were immediately shocked, and it seems, embarrassed by this act of humility. But their surprise should be no surprise to us. "There is no instance in either Jewish or Greco-Roman sources of a superior washing the feet of an inferior."² And this was the Creator of the universe on his knees washing the dirt from the callused feet of his followers!

When Simon Peter refused to have his feet washed, Jesus said, “What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand” (John 13:7). Whatever the meaning of the foot washing, it was not immediately evident to the disciples. The washing provided an example of love towards one another (John 13:12–17), but it also forecasted something.

Hold that thought for one moment.

Slaves and Crucifixion

If foot washing was the task of the lowest slave, public crucifixion was a unique threat to the slave class. With few exceptions, Roman citizens and the upper classes were spared from crucifixion. Slaves were especially vulnerable.

Crucifixion was a public tool to discourage dishonesty, retaliation, and rebellion among the slave class.³ In 71 B.C., after a slave rebellion was suppressed in Spartacus, over 6,000 slaves were crucified together along the Via Appia between Capua and Rome.⁴ In other instances, if one slave was caught breaking the law, the entire slave community within a single household could be rounded up and crucified together, irrespective of individual guilt.⁵

So while the brutal punishment of crucifixion was used for dangerous criminals and for political insurrectionists (of which Jesus was accused), it was especially used to intimidate the slave class.⁶ Public crucifixions kept slaves in line. So much so that crucifixion eventually became known by a convenient circumlocution, “the slaves’ punishment."

Slavery and crucifixion merged in the social consciousness, writes one author:

It is hardly an accident that crucifixion, the most dishonorable form of public humiliation that socially conscious Roman elites could employ in their efforts to punish and discourage rebellion among the lower classes, was so closely associated with slavery, the lowest class in the stratified social world of Roman antiquity. The juxtaposition of the two ideas — σταυρός [cross] and δούλος [slave] — served to compound the social stigma associated with both slavery and crucifixion in the ancient world and thereby to reinforce in the public arena the social hierarchy that served the interests of the dominant culture.⁶

Back to Maundy Thursday

When we look again at Jesus’ humble act of foot washing, we see why the disciples were unable to immediately grasp the significance of the act. Jesus lowered himself into the position of a lowly slave, he served like a slave, he washed the disciples’ feet like a lowest-of-the-low slave, because ultimately he was preparing to die the dehumanizing death of a slave. In essence this is the connection made in Philippians 2:5–8.

As he washed out dirt from between the disciples’ toes, Jesus performed a parable of the cross. The disciples could not see the the symbolic anticipation, not here, not now. The full explanation for why Jesus washed their feet would only become clear after the substitutionary atonement of the Savior on Good Friday. Then they would look back and understand the act of deep humility in the cross that brought us a once-for-all, head-to-toe, cleansing from our sin.

On Maundy Thursday Jesus dropped to his knees to scrub away every ethnic and economic hierarchy from the church. He upset cultural norms. He now calls us to go low in foot-washing-like service to one another. But most importantly we are reminded that the Son of Man came to earth as a slave to serve us, to be crushed for us, to free us from our own slavery to sin that leads to eternal death, and to open the way for us to enjoy and delight in God’s presence now and forever (Matthew 20:28; Psalm 16:11).