What the Blessed Person Delights In

Psalm 1:2

Instead, his delight is in the Lord’s instruction, and he meditates on it day and night. (Psalm 1:2 CSB)
God spoke these same words to Joshua after Moses’ death; This book of instruction MUST NOT depart from your mouth; you are to meditate on it day and night so that you may CAREFULLY OBSERVE everything written in it. For then YOU WILL prosper and succeed in whatever you do. (Joshua 1:8 CSB – emphasis added)
This isn’t God giving us rigid rules and regulations for us to keep; it’s an invitation into a life-giving relationship with the One who made you in His image. Happiness doesn’t come from just merely obeying God’s Word, happiness comes when we delight in His Word, the lamp for our feet and the light on our path.
King David calls us to meditate on the Lord’s instruction. Often, when we think about meditation, we have a visual picture of sitting on the ground, legs crossed, hands on our knees, eyes closed, while we hum or chant. The idea behind this kind of meditation is to empty our minds. The meditation that David writes about is a meditation where we seek to fill our minds. Richard Foster writes about the two Hebrew words to describe meditation, “These words have various meanings: listening to God’s word, reflecting on God’s works, rehearsing God’s deeds, ruminating on God’s law, and more. In each case there is a stress upon changed behavior as a result of our encounter with the living God.”
Think about this; Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which means House of Bread. Jesus was also laid to rest in a manger, a feeding trough. John records the words of Jesus, “I am the bread of life,” Jesus told them. “No one who comes to me will ever be hungry …” What if we were to approach mediation as more than just filling our minds and saw it as feasting? Where the world tells us to empty ourselves through meditation, God calls us to fill ourselves through the feasting on His Word which we can do through meditating and memorizing His Word. And that brings us delight as we are filled to overflowing as we grow in the life-giving relationship God invites us into.

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