Sole Delight

“O God, rid my heart of all that isn’t Christ,

And cause me to find my sole delight in You.”

Delight. I like how www.dictionary.com, defines it:

1. a high degree of pleasure or enjoyment; joy; rapture: She takes great delight in her job.

2. something that gives great pleasure: The dance was a delight to see.

–verb (used with object)

3. to give great pleasure, satisfaction, or enjoyment to; please highly: The show delighted everyone.

–verb (used without object)

4. to have great pleasure; take pleasure (fol. by in or an infinitive): She delights in going for long walks in the country.

I love the breadth of this definition: pleasure, enjoyment, joy, rapture, satisfaction. All wrapped up in this single word. It doesn’t seem to leave out any human desire. It is a list of all that we long for, all that drives us. We are wired, it would seem, to look for delight. I don’t expect much argument here. Whatever it is that delights me, give me more, and more, and more of it!

But, hold on a second. Sole delight?? As if there is only one thing I should delight in? How dull can that be? And if I only delighted in one thing, I wouldn’t be very well-rounded, would I? (Well, unless that “one thing” was Extreme Chocolate Moose Tracks Ice Cream. Then I’d be a bit too well rounded. In fact, now that you mention it…)

Well, actually, there’s a difference between “Sole Delight” and delighting in only one thing. At least, the way I’m using the words. What I mean by “sole delight” is that one thing through which and for which I delight in other things.

For most people (and I have certainly been counted among the most) delight – that is my personal delight – is it’s own goal. Or, to put it another way, I take delight in whatever makes me feel good. If I believe that something will make me happy, or give me pleasure, or displace my sorrow and replace it with joy, I will pursue that thing. That can be something as simple as a bowl of my favorite ice cream (see above), or grand as a mountain view, as beautiful or as the face of a smiling child, or as seemingly altruistic as shoveling my neighbor’s walk. (Please, Barry, if you read this, don’t stop shoveling my walk!) If they are done because they make me feel good, they are done for the sole delight of, well, My Self Delight.

My Self Delight, then, becomes the standard against which I measure all other delights. That is, the desirability of a given experience is determined by how it makes me feel. Now, If I have a fairly well developed deferred gratification pattern, I may be able to find a less than pleasing experience to be desirable if I can look down the road a few minutes, a few days, or even a few years, and see that this experience will, eventually, make me happy. For example, I may find the unpleasantness of spending some of my money on a pretty girl if I expect that, eventually, she will return my wooings with her affections, and thus make me feel good. Or I can face the long hours of study if I can see that, eventually, I will earn that diploma or degree, and I will feel very good about it. Or I can stay in an odious job if I know that, at the end of the week, I’ll get a paycheck which I can spend on things that will make me feel good.

But there’s a problem with that. Because, when I measure the desirability of all things against the standard of My Self Delight, I attest to the fact that My Self Delight, my feeling good, is the most important thing in my life. It becomes my object of worship. It becomes my god.

And, as a Christian, that is a serious problem. As a Christian, I know that my object of worship, my god, must be none other than the one and only true God, Himself. Yet my desire for delight has led me to the wrong place. How do I fix that?

Some years ago, when I began to comprehend this concept, I came to realize that My Self Delight was really a delight in many things – anything in that would make me feel good. Fortunately, I had a degree of common sense that said not everything that makes me feel good for the moment will make me feel good in the long run, and not everything that will make me feel good in the long run will make me feel good for the moment. Nonetheless, there were many things in which I delighted, because there were many things that made me feel good. I had many delights, many affections.

But I was beginning to see that this was a problem. My delights, my affections, were leading me to the deadly end of self-worship. I needed to turn the whole thing around. I needed to get rid of the goal of self-centered living and start over with the right goal – God-centered living. But to do that, I had to check my long list of delights as the door, and I had to establish a new ultimate, singular delight – one that didn’t answer the question, “Will this make me feel good?” but rather the ultimate question, “Will this lead me closer to the heart and face of God?”

In other words, I had to replace My Self Delight for a new Sole Delight – a delight only in those things that pleased Him, glorified Him, and drew me closer to the One and Only who is truly worthy of delight: God Himself.

The question was: Was I willing to let go of those affections? They were so deep, so ingrained in me, and so many of them were so “right,” that I struggled to let them go. So, God gave me a simple prayer: O God, rid my heart of all that isn’t Christ, and cause me to find my sole delight in You. I knew from the moment that thought entered my mind that it had the power to transform my affections and, therefore, the power to lead me to a true, consistent worshipper of God. So I prayed it. Occasionally, often only half-heartedly. It scared me to think that it would make me let go of so many things I had come to love. So, God let me keep those things, and He let them keep leading me back into Self Delight. But he never let go of me. He never let me abandon that desire to find My Sole Delight in Him.

It’s been a long struggle. But God has stepped up the pace in this pursuit of My Sole Delight. He as expelled so many things from my heart that at times it feels rather empty. But then He steps in and fills it with more of Himself – fills it to overflowing. And out of that overflow, He allows me to find delight once again in those things that he had removed. But it is a different delight. It’s not a delight in those things because they make me feel good, but it is a delight in them because, in them, I see the excellences of God, or the sacrifice of Christ, or the drawing power of the Holy Spirit.

It’s been a long struggle, but I have yet to arrive. Every day brings new awareness of things yet unaddressed, things that still grab my affections, but don’t draw me closer to God. Things like Extreme Chocolate Moose Tracks Ice Cream. And stuff that’s even worse. But by His enormous grace, He’s giving me the guts to pray that prayer with more conviction, and He’s answering. He’s slowly, piece by piece, ridding my heart of all that isn’t Christ, and causing me to find my sole delight in Him.

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field.

When a man found it, he hid it again,

and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

Matthew 13:44 (NIV) (emphasis mine)