Welcome to Buoy, a Life in Deeper Water podcast.

Episode 21. What Delights God? (let’s ask Him)

(click here to listen now)

Hello human.

This is not the first time, or the last that I will tell you I want faith that rocks. I want God’s divine persuasion (check out BUOY e1) to convince others through how I live my life for Him.

To do that I need to know Him deeply.

I want insight into God’s nature. 

In episode 20 I discovered that when I call, cry aloud, and search, I will then have an understanding of the fear of the Lord.

Proverbs 2:3-5  indeed, if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, 4 and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, 5 then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.

This follow-up episode, is about what happens then. 

When we “find the knowledge of God” how do we know Him better?

Rising Above a Burden Mentality

Why do I want to know Him better? Well, this is what I want to share with you in my witness21. I want to seek the nature of God to arm myself with His attributes. To rise above a burden mentality and the trappings of human nature to the higher purpose he has for me.

In one of my local worship services our Lead Pastor asked this question: “Are you going through the ringer of life as an agent of goodness or as a victim of the brokenness?

When I silently answered this to myself, I immediately knew one thing. I don’t want to be a victim of anything. Nor do I want my journey with Jesus to be centered around a victim mentality:  fear, worry, anxiety, anger, despair, among so many others.

I do not want to keep asking God to take away things He did not create. It seems to me that these negative caverns of human nature live in the dark and draw on a debt that has already been paid. I don’t like talking about the devil, giving him any mental space. But I believe that he is not creative, and always traveling on a million paths that do not belong to him. He can only prey on our lives as a parasite through how we have fallen, the fall of human nature, the fall from trust in our Creator. He builds his arguments on lies, never truth.

So back to that apple. In the garden, when “trust” became the only issue between man and God. Ever. That God told us “we would surely die” if we ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil… but we knew better.

We all have hard times knocking at our door:  brutal emotions, chaos and confusion, perpetual fear, unchallenged anger, looping despair, descending motivation, spiraling anxiety, debilitating mortality. 

I am not making light of what we experience. I am not denying we have these challenges. 

But,

– Fear can keep you from ever doing anything that requires the fearless courage of God.

– Anxiety keeps you acting as if you have to do it all on your own. 

– Anger chains you to a retaliation that will never satisfy you. It will always engage you in the next outrage.

/OT- Despair has you living as if that is the ending to your story.

What I am saying is… our challenges are not our destination. Our relationship with Him is. 

Pursuing a Deeper Knowledge of Who God Is

God knew our battles before we existed. Before He planted the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Because He wanted a relationship based on our free will to choose to trust him.

He knew what had to happen. God sent His Son to answer for all of it. To do something different with that apple. To cancel the debt of one bad apple that fell humanity.

What I want is to spend the rest of my life pursing a deeper knowledge of who He is, the One who made me in His image. Biblical “knowledge” is described in this Proverbs passage we have been considering as perception, skill, discernment, understanding, wisdom. Calling for insight is calling to see what He sees, to love the way He loves, to make decisions through Him. To get the God shot. (check out BUOY e20)

To remind myself, 

in Jeremiah 9:24, the Lord tells Jeremiah:

24 but let the one who boasts boast about this:

    that they have the understanding to know me,

that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness,

    justice and righteousness on earth,

    for in these I delight,”

declares the Lord.

Learning What Delights the Lord

Notice that God is exercising His attributes. How so?  He tells us:  through His demonstrated love for His only begotten Son, that through His sacrifice, Jesus justified man in the sight of His Father, so we can now stand before God in righteousness through His Son.

And daily, it is simply to empower Him to do so:

1. Kindness – when I draw from God’s lovingkindness to be kind to others, I am doing so out of the power of His nature and He is delighted.

2. Justice – when I live within His ability to govern, to bring fairness into all my relationships to bring His just nature into how I love.

3. Rightousness – that God is exactly what He ought to be, and when I stand in the grace of His only begotten Son, I am approved by Him, and for that, He is delighted. That through His Son, I am exactly what He wants me to be.

Knowing what delights the Lord is how we learn His nature while He is changing ours. It is not a mystery. His word is filled with scriptures about what delights our God. Look some up. There are so many to pattern a life with God, to the delight of God. Here are a few.

Proverbs 11:1

A false balance is an abomination to the Lord,

But a just weight is His delight.

Proverbs 11:20

The perverse in heart are an abomination to the Lord,

But the blameless in their walk are His delight.

Proverbs 12:22

Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord,

But those who deal faithfully are His delight.

We can’t do any of these things without Jesus. But when we do, God is delighted.

The Cure for Whatever Makes Us a Victim

One more thought on knowledge:  In his first epistle, Peter refers to knowledge with a different Greek word, that means precise and correct knowledge, used in the New Testament as the knowledge of things ethical and divine, absolute, especially the knowledge of his holy will and of the blessings which he has bestowed and constantly bestows on men through Christ. Thank you Strong’s Concordance.

2 Peter 1:2 says this:

2 Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.

The cure for what victimhood does to us, that viral grasp on ALL human strongholds—anxiety, fear, worry a burdened point of view, a down-trodden countenance, AND/OR whatever takes a dark and slippery hold of your perspective—the cure is boasting that we have the understanding to know God. 

On this BUOY, just a few minutes rockin’ together, we know three things that delight the Lord when He brings them into our daily life: kindness, justice and righteousness, first through our salvation, and now through our daily walk on His path. And more in Proverbs.

There are many scriptures about what He delights in and how we delight in Him. I will return to this on my journey… because I want to be able to describe my Lord to others from deep within my heart. I do not want to be at a loss for words. And with this knowledge of Him, Peter tells us we receive “grace and peace in abundance.”

Our Capacity to Represent His Goodness

Through our fasting and praying, Ash Wednesday marks the preparation of our hearts for what Jesus came to the earth to do. 

Fast from victimhood. Pray for insight. Keep your sites on Matthew 3:17 

17 And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

Through Jesus, we claim our divine agency, our capacity to represent His goodness.