Lord, we thank You and we praise Your name together for all that we see unfolding; the unity we perceive Thou hast wrought among us, the delightful fellowship we have, the way we are delighting in one another with such a supreme rejoicing. We thank You for what is coming, Lord: this breaking of our spirits together. We thank You for the deep humility and the desire to serve that is in such evidence among the brethren. Amen.
We shall consider three or four thoughts from the eighteenth Psalm. If they are very carefully heeded, they will bless you. I love Thee, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge; my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised, and I am saved from my enemies.
He sent from on high, He took me; He drew me out of many waters. He delivered me from my strong enemy, and from those who hated me, for they were too mighty for me. They confronted me in the day of my calamity, but the Lord was my stay. He brought me forth also into a broad place; He rescued me, because He delighted in me. He delighted in me. Psalm 18:1–3; 16–19.
So many translations of the Scriptures hold to this one obvious meaning of the word “delight,” the fact that the Lord delights in us. I don’t know how to express what the word “delight” means, but in the twenty-first chapter of Deuteronomy we see an illustration. According to the viewpoints of the world, this story and many other passages in the Bible would almost be rated “X.” Do you think that is speaking disrespectfully of the Word? No, because to the pure all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving everything is rated “X,” according to Titus 1:15.
Deuteronomy 21:10–14 tells what is to happen if a man goes out to battle and his army wins and takes many captives. When you go out to battle against your enemies, and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands, and you take them away captive, and see among the captives a beautiful woman, and have a desire for her and would take her as a wife for yourself, then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and trim her nails.
She shall also remove the clothes of her captivity and shall remain in your house, and mourn her father and mother a full month; and after that you may go in to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. And it shall be, if you are not pleased with her, then you shall let her go wherever she wishes; but you shall certainly not sell her for money, you shall not mistreat her, because you have humbled her.
I am not concerned about any of the technicalities of justice in systems where slavery existed, but in finding something in this passage which gives light upon this thought of delight.
A man has seen a captive girl and wants her to be his wife. He is to treat her with a certain honor and respect, for she is to be his wife. It is not to be just out of lust that he takes her. Because she is a captive, she shaves her head and goes through the periods of mourning. This God honors. In that day God more or less accepted things as they were for His people. Some of them had been slaves. They were not to be mistreated nor was a woman to be treated as a slave if a man was going to make her his wife, but he was to treat her with respect.
We see something else here. The law sometimes does not bend to people’s feelings or to what is really in their hearts. So the Lord says, “You may take this woman to be your wife,” but you may suddenly find that she is a woman of foreign background and you realize that you don’t know her at all or really understand her.
She looked beautiful, but maybe underneath there was a lot of ugliness and you couldn’t delight in her. Then you were to let her go with all the honor and dignity that could be given her. She was a free woman. She could walk among Israel from that time on and become, in effect, an Israelite. She could become a worshiper like anyone else. So God would work it out even for her good.
I don’t think people should ever get married unless they absolutely delight in each other. A couple came for ministry and in a very matter-of-fact way they said, “We want to be checked out for marriage.” They had a cold-fish sort of relationship, so they were told, “Go away, and come back when you really love each other. You don’t love each other enough. You are going to live together, so you had better really delight in each other.”
These illustrations clarify what the psalmist meant when he said, Delight yourself in the Lord. Psalm 37:4. Don’t serve Him as if it is a marriage of convenience. You must be hopelessly “delighted” over the Lord because the Scripture has told us that the Lord delights in us.
Now that means He has lived with us a long time and He is not going to send us packing because He doesn’t delight in us. He loved us while we were yet enemies and while we were filthy and unclean, and He anticipates that one day we will be presented to Him without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but we will be holy and without blemish in the most perfect love affair that has ever happened, that between Christ and the Bride, His Church.
He delights in us. How, I don’t know. I’m sure all the demons in hell must be lined up, watching this love affair and saying, “I don’t see what the Lord sees in them. Nah, there’s just nothing in them that He should ever love them. He is judging us and sending us to hell, and look at them! He’s going to make them His sons. They are going to rule and reign with Him.”
He loves you no matter what is in you. That is the mark of His love. He doesn’t love us because we are lovely; He loves us with a faith that does not let us go, that will redeem us unto Himself. We will be everything He wants us to be.
We will become a perfect mirror, loving Him because He first loved us. We will not love Him with an unfaithful, weak love, but with the same kind of love He has for us, though maybe not the same quantity. Because He loved us so much, He created in us a divine capacity to delight in Him.
What a beautiful thing the Lord is doing for us! Every day we are changing more and more. Have you ever watched a little girl you have known for quite some time, as she goes around looking rather sad, with a lonesome look on her face? Then one day someone turns the lights on inside and her eyes begin to sparkle. She seems to glow. She is radiant!
You say, “All right, tell me. Who is he?” And don’t think she won’t tell you! Even if she has very little to say, she will say it in at least a thousand words. It will just pour out. She will paint pictures and suddenly you think, “My! Who is this superman?” She’s just beaming as she says, “Here he is!” You look at him and as you shake hands you think, “How in the world could she love him?” Something has happened, that great thing of love.
The Lord wants that same thing within us. Not that we are to look to the Lord and feel He is unworthy, but as He looks at us, we are so unworthy. It is a beautiful thing that He is working. Psalm 37:4 says: Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart. Delight in Him. Can I delight in the Lord? Yes, I can. Not only can I delight in the Lord; I can delight in my brethren. In this Walk I am not calling for tolerance that you just put up with each other; I want you to delight in the Christ who is coming forth in each one of you.
If He seems to come forth in one manifestation of His personality that you are not used to, that is all right; delight in it. Learn to delight in one another, and don’t simply be tolerant of each other. Go beyond a tolerance of another person’s idiosyncrasies, for that distinct and unique trait he has may only belong to one person out of a million. Learn how to love one another and to delight in one another. You may say, “There is something peculiar about that person.” Don’t you think there is something peculiar about everybody? There is something peculiar about you too. If you don’t think so, your attitude in itself is peculiar. Open your heart to this word and learn to delight in each other. We can do it because we are all of one household, a part of the Father’s family.
There was a family in which there was a little boy who was born a mongoloid. Such children do not fully develop mentally, and they do not generally reach maturity. Usually they die while in their teens, as this child did.
There was a large family of brothers and sisters, and they all seemed to understand. They loved the boy and played with him. The father and mother loved him. His mind never developed, but his mother loved him very much. If we study that situation, we see, “That is the way the Father’s family should relate with their brothers and sisters, the members of the Body all having the same care one for another, even for a seeming misfit like you, even though you seem to be retarded spiritually.”
When you go through something and you flip out, no one is turning you away; they love you. And by the grace of God, that is what we are going to do. That will be our attitude. If God sets before us principles and guidelines and says, “This is what you can do,” then we can do it. We can learn to delight in one another.
I want to impress upon you so forcibly, that we must not only delight in the Lord, but in the Lord who is coming forth in our brothers and in our sisters—in every member of the Body.
We must develop more than a tolerance, because with tolerance you put up with people or situations. I emphasize it again: it’s more than a tolerance; you delight in one another!
There are those who come into the church from a hippie background after several years of living without the preparation and conditioning discipline that many young people have had. They don’t know anything, not even how to boil water. They have blank areas in which so many things are missing. What do we do? We bless them. These conditions are not permanent. These young people change a great deal as time goes on, and the next thing you see, there is a prophet of God!
You have traits and attitudes, too, which other people will be tolerant of. You may have become almost a slave to the routine and the procedures of the establishment and you don’t understand how completely disassociated some of the young people are from that.
They may not have some of the knowledge you have, but they have something else going for them. They have reached an area where they are ready to be dedicated to the Lord and the Lord alone, to lay down their lives for Him. They are not hung up with all the conditioning some of you had from the establishment, so it all balances out very well, and you are good for each other.
Delight in each other. Do not just bear with one another, but bear one another’s burdens. Girls, did you ever have a boy carry your school books for you? That was a sign he really liked you. He wanted to help you, to carry the load with you. Delight in one another and so bear one another’s burdens. Say, “Here, brother, let me help carry the burden for you.” Let this be a delight to you in the name of the Lord.
Now we want to read three passages of Scripture, which contain the same important phrase. Make every effort to come to me soon. Make every effort to come before winter. 2 Timothy 4:9, 21. When I send Artemas or Tychicus to you, make every effort to come to me at Nicoplois, for I have decided to spend the winter there. Titus 3:12.
Do you see what I’m trying to point out? The Apostle Paul had endured imprisonment and harassment and is writing to a brother saying, “Make every effort to come soon. Whatever you’re doing, drop it. I need you!” The Apostle Paul needed them? Yes.
I wish we could see the importance of this delighting in one another. I wish we could see how much each one of us has to give. Then we would not be so critical; we wouldn’t murmur. We would reach out and not only be open for someone to help us; we would demand it.
Let us love one another and delight in each other. When there is a delight, there is no thought that you may be pestering or bothering your brother. When in need say, “Make every effort to come to me; make every effort to meet my need because I have deliberately opened my life to my need of you, brother, to my need of the Lord ministering through you to me.” The apostle was not ashamed to say, “Make every effort to come. Do everything you can do to get to me. I need you; I delight in you.”
That is what lovers do. When one goes on a trip and they are separated for a while, they write letters to each other and phone each other; they can’t wait to get back together. I wonder if you know what that verse really means, “Delight yourself in the Lord.” It becomes something so great. You yearn for the house of the Lord. We read about this yearning in Psalm 84 and Psalm 122. “A day in Your courts is better than a thousand. I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’ ” When we get to this place, then the walk with the Lord becomes easy. It becomes a burden to you when the Lord is not your delight.
You have probably heard the story so many times that it becomes trite of the little girl who was carrying her brother, and someone said to her, “Isn’t he awfully heavy?” She replied, “He’s not heavy; he’s my brother!” Isn’t that our feeling too, that we delight in our brother, in everything we can be to him, in any way we can minister to him and help him? I don’t think we’re going to separate our delighting in the Lord from our delighting in our brother. We love Him and we’re going to love each other with all of our heart. We want to have that more perfect love for one another.
We don’t need to be a people who have finely prescribed lines of behavior. We will behave correctly, perhaps not in the eyes of the world, but in the eyes of God and one another we will. This is not a movement of legalism, nor is it a life of regimented behavior patterns, telling us what we are supposed to do or what our duty is. There is a great deal of liberty and freedom in this Walk which you will find to be very beautiful. It is not how free you can be or how much you can get away with, but because you delight in the Lord and you delight in each other, you would not do anything to make the other brother stumble. You will find yourself just opening your heart all the way to be everything you can possibly be to one another, because it is your delight to do so.
Do women change their lives for the men they love? I think they do, as much as they can. A woman changes the whole pattern of her life as she decides to really make that husband the delight of her life. And he does the same for her. A man changes his whole way of thinking. He may be as free and independent as they come, but when he gets married, he is concerned about how he can please his wife just as the Scriptures say. In a sense it can become a bondage to him. But when we learn how to delight in the Lord, it is not just conformity to so many rules; it becomes our delight to change. It is our delight to please Him. Let us go to the Lord and say, “Lord, tell us how to think. Lord, we are stupid; we lack wisdom. We ask this of you: Tell us what to think, tell us how to react. Put it in our hearts to love You and to love one another and delight in one another.” In our spirits we will be constantly crying, “Make every effort to come to me to help me, and to receive what I can give you too, in the name of the Lord.”