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I'll be reading today's scripture lesson from Psalm 16, verses 1 through 11.
Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.
I say to the Lord, you are my Lord, I have no good apart from you.
As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight.
The sorrows of those who run after another God shall multiply.
Their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out or take their names on my lips.
The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup.
You hold my lot.
The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.
Indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.
I bless the Lord who gives me counsel.
In the night also my heart instructs me.
I have set the Lord always before me, because he is at my right hand.
I shall not be shaken.
Therefore, my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices.
My flesh also dwells secure.
For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your Holy One see corruption.
You make known to me the path of life.
In your presence there is fullness of joy.
At your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
The grass withers and the flowers fall.
But the word of our God stands forever.
Thank you, Susie.
Good morning, everyone.
My name is Andrew, and I'm one of the pastors here.
Mark, we're so glad to have you here, and so proud to be partnering with you in this mission to Japan.
We believe here that missions exist where worship doesn't.
And we so hope that your labors will result in worship.
Let the nations be glad, right?
Let the nations be glad.
We're going to open up God's word from Psalm 16 this morning, but let's go to the Lord in prayer first.
Oh, God, we ask that your spirit would so descend upon us in this moment that we would be utterly convinced of the words that you speak to us in the scriptures and in Psalm 16.
Would we so believe that in your right hand are pleasures forevermore, and in your presence is the fullness of joy.
Would you so convince us of that truth that we would pursue holy habits of grace, being near to you, intimate with you, close to you, God, in our daily lives?
Because we just can't get enough.
Make us those kinds of trees.
Make our church that kind of garden of trees, we ask in the name of Jesus.
Amen.
All right.
So this might sound kind of weird, but it might sound kind of creepy, but I'm just going to go with it.
But the thing that's been on my mind the most lately is eighth and ninth grade boys.
All right.
That's something that I've been thinking a lot about lately, eighth and ninth grade boys.
And it probably started about a month ago because I was invited to preach at a youth retreat.
It was the retreat held by the church that I grew up at, the same youth retreat that I grew up attending.
And so what happened was me and Amy, we got there.
Some of our youth came as well.
I didn't have to preach until the next morning, so we just kind of settled in, went to the dining hall to have dinner with everybody else.
And I was like, cool, I got this.
All right.
I'm just going to start mingling, get to know these students.
There are about 110 students, sixth through 12th graders.
No sweat.
Should be fun.
Right.
So I go and I sit down with this table of like four eighth grade boys, or they're about to be ninth grade boys.
And I think to myself, oh man, these guys are going to get a kick out of having dinner with the guest speaker.
Right.
Can't wait to show them how cool I am.
Right.
But you know, like pretty much one minute into sitting with these eighth grade boys, these awkward eighth grade boys trying to chat with them, I was like, oh shoot.
Everything I'd prepared is totally not going to work.
Like five out of the six talks that I thought I'd finished, you know, all my reheated, slightly modified Christchurch content that works here with you guys, I realized all of that was totally going to fall flat unless I made some major changes.
And I knew this like conceptually as I was preparing.
I did make a lot of changes to my content, but clearly not enough.
Because when I sat down with those eighth to ninth grade boys in real life, it struck me like, yo, I might be the special guest preacher here, right?
Specifically chosen by their youth pastor to teach them about repentance.
But come on, no one's here at camp for me.
All right.
Haylin, did you sign up to go to camp to listen to me?
No, you didn't, right?
No one signed up to listen to some millennial dad give six talks about repentance.
repentance, right?
No one did that.
I was the honored guest preacher, but I was so not the main event, right?
I was more like, I felt like I was the vegetable that they had to swallow in order to just enjoy everything else about camp.
That's how I felt.
So I ended up spending like way more time in my room during that retreat than I expected, just kind of reworking my material, really just forcing myself to focus on the question,
how the heck do you like so capture the attention of eighth and ninth grade boys that they don't feel the urge during every single one of your talks to get up and use the bathroom?
All right.
That was my goal.
Or more seriously, I just thought to myself, how do I engage the heart of an eighth grade boy?
How do I lead a ninth grade boy into a deeper relationship with Christ?
Those are some of the questions that have been on my mind a lot lately, and they're hard questions.
But, you know, even though being the speaker at that camp was probably one of the hardest and most humbling things I've done in a long time,
it was actually a really good exercise for me as a pastor and a preacher to try to get into the mind of eighth and ninth grade boys,
especially because we have six of them right here in our youth group, in our church, and I'll be leading them in a small group this year.
So this is where my mind's been at, eighth and ninth grade boys, and, you know, honestly, especially so this week, right?
After the Appalachee High School shooting, Colt Gray, right, the shooter, he's 14 years old.
He just started his freshman year of high school.
And a thought that I had this week was like, man, it's crazy that even in an eighth grade boy,
there's already so much, like, destructive, life-taking potential.
It's so crazy to think about that, right?
But, you know, another thought that I had was that, you know, man, if a broken family and a gun in the hand of a ninth grade boy
can make him such a deadly, life-taking force in this world, how much more might the gospel,
how much more might the power of God and the love of the Father in the heart of a ninth grade boy
make him a delightful, life-giving impact on this world?
And this is a word to all of us, especially those of us who are ministering in our kids' ministry,
in our youth ministry.
We aren't glorified Christian babysitters.
We're called to lead these kids, these youth, into deeper relationships with Christ and his church.
But now, of course, the question is, well, how do you do that with, like, an eighth grade boy?
How do you do that?
And in trying to answer that question, I've been trying to reflect upon who I was
as an eighth grade boy growing up in the church.
And honestly, when I think about that, Andrew, I'm like, okay, yeah, I use the bathroom a lot, too,
during tons of sermons, all right?
And I know for sure that my youth group leaders, they, like, pulled their hair out over me and my buddies
because all we ever cared about was having a ton of fun.
We never showed up to worship God or to listen to the teaching of the Bible.
All we were there to do was play basketball, eat lots of junk food, laugh like crazy,
hang out with girls, and throw dodgeballs at each other, right?
As an eighth grade boy, all that I lived for was pleasure and entertainment.
I was a junkie for dopamine and delight.
And my vision of the good life of paradise was fun and games and laughter all the time
and endless entertainment and all the physical and emotional pleasures that I could think of.
To eighth grade, Andrew, heaven would be paved with hardwood floors so I could play basketball 24-7, all right?
There would be my favorite TV shows streaming endlessly from everlasting to everlasting,
and there would be a stream flowing through the city filled with nacho cheese.
And I would love it.
Because, again, all I lived for was pleasure, or at least pleasure as I knew it.
And you might say that these temporary, material, consumable pleasures were even my God's.
My whole life was devoted to them.
These pleasures were what I woke up in the morning, got out of bed to pursue.
I hungered for them.
I labored for them.
I sacrificed for them because I believed that they would satisfy me, fulfill me, make me happy, and make me whole.
And now maybe you're expecting me to say that this is everything that's wrong with modern, western, contemporary culture and society,
that we're all like eighth grade boys with an inordinate desire for delight
and in passionate pursuit of pleasures at all costs, right?
Maybe you're expecting me to say what so many other religions say, what you've heard so many Christian pastors say,
that self-control and self-denial and self-restraint and the suppression of our desires is the right way to live righteously in the presence of God.
But what I really want to say is what if the problem isn't so much that our desires are too strong,
but actually that our desires are too weak and tragically misdirected?
I love how C.S. Lewis puts it in his sermon, The Weight of Glory.
He basically says that, you know, sure, the New Testament does talk a lot about self-denial,
but the New Testament never talks about self-denial as an end in and of itself.
Lewis says it is right.
It isn't a bad thing to desire our own good and to hope for enjoyment in this life.
Lewis says that, yes, Jesus talks about, you know, denying yourself and taking up your cross,
but the focus should actually be on what we get.
What does Jesus say?
Deny yourself, take up your cross, and what?
Follow me, Jesus says, right?
See, Christianity isn't first and foremost about self-denial.
It's about getting to be with Jesus.
So C.S. Lewis writes this.
He writes,
Indeed,
Eighth grade Andrew was far too easily pleased.
Even 36-year-old Andrew is far too easily pleased.
When I often dream of that city flowing with streams of nacho cheese, right?
Even though that nacho cheese makes me have to wake up in the middle of the night because I'm so thirsty, right?
Reach for my water bottle.
God instead promises us a better stream, the stream of living water, so that we might never have to thirst again.
That's what we're supposed to desire.
So you see, the problem with the world is not that human's desire, but it's what humans desire instead of God.
The problem is that we've exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and we've desired created things over the Creator.
Instead of crying out to the Lord like David does here in verse 1,
Preserve me,
We lift up this prayer all the time.
So all these different, like, creaturely things, and maybe not explicitly from our lips, but in our hearts, and with our hands, and through our habits,
We build a dependence upon these things, often without even thinking about it.
So the question I want to ask this morning, the question I want us to consider is,
Do you believe, or rather, can you believe, in a God who offers Himself to you as the fullness of your joy,
pleasures forevermore, and the fulfillment of your deepest desires?
Can you trust that that is who God is?
That He wants your joy?
That He wants your pleasure?
That He is your joy?
And that He is your pleasure?
See, Psalm 16 is King David's prayer of confidence that the answer is yes.
Yes, we can trust Him to be the fullness of our joy and pleasures forevermore, the fulfillment of our deepest desire.
Or we could look at Psalm 16 as King David's prayer of defiance against all the other voices in the world,
tempting him to believe that the answer is no, God doesn't want your joy.
No, God doesn't want your pleasure.
God doesn't want to fulfill your deepest, purest, and highest desires.
Others, Psalm 16 is the prayer of God's people fighting to believe that God is better, that God is enough,
and that blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stand in the way of sinners,
nor sit in the seat of scoffers, but whose delight is in what God says and in who God is.
Psalm 16 is a prayer of confidence, a declaration of faith, fighting to believe what it says at the very end of this psalm,
in verse 11, you, God, make known to me the path of life and not death.
In your presence there is fullness of joy.
At your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
This is what Psalm 16 is about.
It's basically saying in the words of John Piper,
if you think that God is incapable of making you happy forever, you don't know God.
You don't know God.
For what is fuller than fullness, what is longer than forevermore,
nothing can outdo God in filling you with all the life-giving joy and pleasure
that you were created to experience in relationship with Him as His beloved child.
Now, if you're new here today,
Jonathan started us last week in this series in the Psalms.
He started with Psalm 1,
and the specific question we're asking as we go through the Psalms this fall is,
what are the holy habits of grace that God's people should weave into our lives
in order that we might be a garden full of trees planted by the stream of living water,
yielding fresh, juicy fruit in season and never withering?
What does it look like to be a deeply rooted, flourishing tree that is constantly being nourished
by the life-giving presence of God?
What kinds of holy habits keep us in communion with Christ who is the vine?
That's our focus this fall.
And as we go through these holy habits,
I'm going to keep warning us again and again and again as often as I can
that the danger in a series like this on spiritual disciplines and on holy habits
is to think of these holy habits as just some spiritual techniques
to practice in a transactional relationship with God.
Like just some things we do to manipulate God into blessing us,
put quarters into the slot machine, right?
Like if I say my prayers,
God will make sure my children are going to be okay and have a nice day at school.
If I practice the Sabbath faithfully,
if I don't work on the Lord's Day,
then my business will make even more money than if I disobeyed the Sabbath rule.
But see, the point of these holy habits is not to get stuff from God.
It's to get God.
It's to be with God.
The point of being a tree with deep roots in God's stream of living water
isn't just to enjoy the fruit,
but to enjoy the union and communion that exists between a healthy tree
and a fresh flowing stream.
The point of our holy habits is for us to enjoy God,
really to know the pleasure of being fully human.
This is core to what we believe at Christ Church.
Did you know this is one of the very first teachings,
one of the very first official doctrinal standards
that the church has in our Constitution?
Westminster Shorter Catechism, question one,
what is the chief end of man?
Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
This is what we're after in this series on holy habits.
Not some rule-abiding, super-disciplined, self-controlled robot Christians.
We're after joyful children of God
who intimately know the pleasure of communion with their Father in heaven.
But now maybe this sounds nice and ideal,
but it's really hard for us to imagine enjoying holy habits in the presence of God.
It's hard for us to imagine enjoying this habitual communion with this God who's so far away.
And I mean, this is who I was when I was an eighth-grade boy.
That's how I felt.
Even when I wanted to try to grow as a Christian,
grow in my relationship with God.
I remember in eighth grade, I was at another camp,
and I was just challenged to give Jesus the steering wheel of my life.
This is before Carrie Underwood's song, right?
But somehow it clicked for me.
That picture, it clicked for me.
Like, yo, Jesus gave His life for me.
I should live mine for Him.
So I started to try to engage in these holy habits,
to read the Bible, to pray, to spend time with Him.
But I could never follow through with any consistency.
Because again, what I was truly living for
was fun and pleasure.
And reading the Bible weren't that to me, right?
And maybe that's how a lot of you feel
about all these different kinds of holy habits.
Not really excited about these holy habits
that God invites us into.
Skeptical that they'll lead to pleasure and joy
and just fullness in God.
And if that's you, I totally get it.
But what I want to suggest is that
maybe the problem isn't that the holy habits,
maybe the problem isn't that
Christian spiritual disciplines are boring.
Maybe the problem is that we're boring.
Maybe the problem is that
we become too easily satisfied
with lesser habits
that have conditioned us to enjoy lesser pleasures.
Maybe the problem is that
we've become the people in verse 4
habitually running after other gods,
habitually offering up to them
our own life and blood offerings.
See, whether or not you're interested
in the holy habits
or the Christian spiritual disciplines,
we all have habits.
We all have habits.
But I think for a lot of us,
our habits and our daily rhythms
are largely unexamined, right?
I think if we examine them,
we'd realize how much they are shaping our hearts
and shaping our desires
and even shaping what we find
to be enjoyable and pleasurable.
And I think if we examine them more closely,
more intentionally,
we'd also realize that these habits
and these rhythms
are not just some neutral patterns
that we've simply chosen to adopt,
but they're habits and rhythms
forged within a culture
with a lot of backward values
and a lot of empty promises.
If you haven't picked up
any of Justin Whitmell Early's books,
I highly recommend his book,
The Common Rule.
And if you are parents,
the book that I really recommend to you
is Habits of the Household.
That book's money, all right?
Gotta get that one.
But today I want to share with you
a good-sized chunk of what he says
about our habits and life rhythms
in his book, The Common Rule.
And in it, he actually challenges us
to see our daily life habits,
what we do as soon as we get out of bed,
as liturgies,
as patterns of worship
that are forming us
more than we even realize.
So listen to what he says.
This is a long chunk,
so bear with me.
This is what Justin Whitmell Early writes.
As far as our habits go,
the invisible reality is this.
We are all living according
to a specific regimen of habits,
and those habits shape most of our life.
A study from Duke suggested
that as much as 40% of the actions
we take every day
are not the products of choice,
but of habits.
And just because we don't choose our habits
doesn't mean we don't have them.
On the contrary,
it usually means someone else chose them for us
who probably doesn't have
our best interests in mind.
Take your work schedule
or your social media scrolling, for example.
Think about your internet history
or how you spent your mornings last week.
Think about the time you spend
with your family versus the time
you spend looking at a screen
during a normal day.
These things define vast portions of our lives.
And while we would like to think
we've carefully chosen them,
most often we haven't even given them
a second thought.
Most often we just swim along
with those around us.
And much more often
than we would like to admit
or even understand,
we are nudged into those choices
by those who want to make money
off the patterns of our daily life.
This wouldn't be so bad
if it weren't for the fact
that habits form much more
than our schedules.
They form our hearts.
Calling habits liturgies
may seem odd,
but we need language
to emphasize the non-neutrality
of our day-to-day routines.
Our habits often obscure
what we're really worshiping,
but that doesn't mean
we're not worshiping something.
We have a common problem.
By ignoring the ways habits shape us,
we've assimilated to a hidden rule of life,
the American rule of life,
which forms us in all the anxiety,
depression, consumerism,
injustice, and vanity
that are so typical in American life.
See, Justin Early is trying to show us
that we are all being formed,
and if not by holy habits,
then probably by many unholy
and unexamined habits
that we probably just see
as neutral and natural.
But as King David warns
in verse 4 here,
many are the sorrows
of those who run
after another god.
So a question for all of us
is what habits in our lives
are actually acts of worship
toward false gods?
Like, for example,
what are your phone habits?
And what do they reveal
about your desires
and your beliefs
and how you view the world?
And I gotta admit,
my phone habits are terrible.
All right?
This is a very embarrassing example,
maybe even inappropriate,
but we're gonna go with it.
Just yesterday,
I had to use the bathroom.
All right?
So I went into the bathroom,
I closed the door,
I sat down,
and as I started to go,
it occurred to me,
oh, shoot,
I forgot my phone,
right?
And I was like,
mad at myself.
I was mad at myself,
like, dude,
you're being so unproductive
right now,
you could be cleaning out
your inbox,
what if you get a great idea
for your sermon?
Should you yell to Chelsea
to get your phone for you?
What should you do?
Or should you just suck it up
and just get through the moment?
Like, no joke,
that was my thought process.
And I'm realizing
that my phone habits
are impressing upon my heart
and my mind
the false and idolatrous belief
that productivity
and efficiency
and time maximization
should be my highest values,
like even over hygiene,
apparently, right?
But seriously,
think about it.
For many of us,
our phone habits indicate
that many of us think
that we're actually
quite like God.
We think we're omnipotent,
we think we're all-powerful
because our phone
can help us accomplish so much.
We think we are omniscient
that we're all-knowing
because our phone
can deliver us
so much knowledge, right?
We think that
we can be omnipresent,
we think we can be everywhere
because our phone
allows us to be everywhere,
we can be on the top
of Mount Everest
through our phones, right?
Even if, when honestly,
it makes us less present
to the people in our own house,
in our own families, right?
One of my favorite writers,
Alan Noble,
he writes this,
I think he's a wonderful
commentator on our cultural moment.
He writes,
the beauty of using my iPhone
as my alarm clock
is that when I reach over
to turn it off,
I'm only a few more taps away
from the rest of the world.
Before I'm even fully awake,
I've checked my Twitter
and Facebook notifications
and my email
and returned to Twitter
to check my feed
for breaking news.
Before I've said good morning
to my wife and children,
I've entered a contentious argument
on Twitter
about Islamic terrorism
and shared a video
of Russell Westbrook
dunking in the previous night's
basketball game.
Or maybe for some of you,
your phone reinforces to you
that you can and should be
entertained
at every moment in your life.
Maybe that's the implicit belief
that your heart is holding on to.
Standing in line
at the grocery store,
waiting for your kids
at their sporting events
on your phone
rather than watching them play,
doom scrolling,
waiting for my sermon
to be over, right?
Pastor John Mark Comer writes,
how do you pray?
How do you read the scriptures?
Sit under a teaching at church
or rest well on the Sabbath
when every chance you get
you reach for the dopamine dispenser
that is your phone.
So do you see how our habits
shape our hearts
and the people that we're becoming
and even what we find
to be pleasurable
and enjoyable
and worth our time?
See, this is exactly
why we need holy habits
to reshape,
to reform our hearts,
to recalibrate
what we find to be delightful
and pleasurable
even if at first
these holy habits
seem undesirable
and inauthentic.
The philosopher Jamie Smith writes,
not all sins are decisions.
Once you realize
that we are not just thinking things
but creatures of habit,
you'll then realize
that temptation
isn't just about bad ideas
or wrong decisions,
it's often a factor
of deformation
and wrongly ordered habits.
And overcoming them
requires more than just knowledge,
it requires re-habituation.
A reformulation of our loves.
And see again,
that is the goal
with these holy habits.
Not simply being able to say,
I prayed,
I read my Bible today,
check.
It's to experience God.
It's to experience God
like David experiences God
here in Psalm 16.
It's to love
and to treasure God
as our highest good.
I love what David says
in verse 2,
I say to the Lord,
you are my Lord.
I have no good
apart from you.
For King David,
Yahweh is his Lord
and Yahweh is his good
and that is not at odds
at all with each other
but actually integrally
tied together.
God is his Lord
and God is his treasure.
God is his everything.
God is his good.
Then in verse 5,
he says,
the Lord is my choice portion,
right?
The only cup I'm interested
in drinking from,
the one who holds the world
in his hands,
the creator and sustainer
of the world,
the writer of history,
he is the one
who holds my lot.
He personally holds
my lot in life
within his almighty
yet gentle hands
and he has never
let me down.
Verse 6,
that's what it says there.
He has never let me down.
I love how it says
the lines have fallen,
right?
They've fallen
in pleasant places.
Like David doesn't say,
the Lord God
has helped me,
he's given me strength
to move my own lines
exactly where I want them to be,
to make my life
turn out exactly
how I planned.
No,
it's completely passive here
and even surprising,
the lines have fallen for me
in pleasant places.
My life has turned out
just fine
within the Lord's plan.
Indeed,
I have a beautiful inheritance,
more beautiful than I deserve
and more beautiful
than I could ever have
imagined for myself
and that's the kind of God
that I have
is what he's saying here.
See,
David here in Psalm 16,
he's practicing
the presence of God.
He's practicing
the presence of God.
His whole life
and his outlook
are saturated
by the presence
and the guidance
and instruction
and counsel of God
even at night.
Verse 7,
I bless the Lord
who gives me counsel.
In the night also
my heart instructs me.
Verse 8,
I have set the Lord
always before me.
Basically,
I live as if I'm always
in the presence of God,
as if God is always
in front of me,
also at my right hand.
He's my ultimate helper,
my ultimate strength.
In fact,
I am completely dependent
upon him
and because of this,
I know that I will never
be shaken
because I'm in the presence
of God
because he's at my right hand
and the result,
verse 9,
is this,
therefore,
my heart is glad
and my whole being
rejoices,
literally in the Hebrew,
my glory rejoices,
my flesh also dwells secure.
Verse 10,
for you will not abandon
my soul to Sheol
or let your holy ones see.
Now,
how could David
say such a thing?
He died.
How could he say such a thing?
Was this just hyperbole?
Many of the more liberal,
modern commentators
want to say that David
either was just speaking
in hyperbole
or that he was just
speaking wrongly here.
But we know from Peter
in Acts chapter 2
and from Paul
in Acts chapter 13
that there's a better way
to read this psalm.
According to the apostles,
David was prophesying
about Jesus,
crucified and risen,
the most holy one
who went to the grave
but rose
and did not see corruption.
David was prophesying
that because of what God
was going to do
through his offspring,
Jesus,
David too,
by faith in that offspring,
he knew that his body
was secure,
that his soul
would not ultimately
be abandoned
to the realm of the dead.
And this promise
that David rejoices in here,
it's a promise
for all of us.
It's a promise
for everyone
who is united
with Christ by faith.
This is what God offers us,
ultimate security,
freedom from abandonment
and death and decay.
It can be yours in Christ.
He is the only God
who can offer this to us.
Only Jesus,
only the resurrected
Son of God
has made known
to the world,
verse 11,
the path of life.
Only the resurrected
and ascended Lord
seated on the throne
on high
can guarantee us
our deepest,
highest,
and purest desires.
Because it's only
in his resurrection presence,
which we will celebrate
here at this table,
that there is fullness
of joy.
It's only in his right hand,
his nail-pierced hand.
It's only by his pain
that he has secured
for us pleasures
forevermore.
And this is the gospel.
This is the good news.
Not only that God
offers us abundant life,
fullness of joy
and pleasures
forevermore,
but that he passionately
wants it for us
and that he passionately
pursues it for us.
So passionately
that he gives himself
over for us
and to us
in Christ.
At his own expense.
That's the gospel.
See,
every other counterfeit God,
every other counterfeit God
makes us pay the cost.
Every other God
makes us chase after them,
but not the God
revealed to us
in Christ.
Verse 4,
For many are the sorrows
of those who run
after another God.
Many are the sorrows
of those whose gods
make them pour out
again and again
sacrificial drink offerings
of blood
day by day
with no end in sight.
But the gospel says,
Many are the joys
of those whose God
runs after them.
Those whose God
does not cry out
for more of their blood
but offers
his own blood.
This is the only
kind of God
whose name
is worthy
of our lips.
And that's what
we get to celebrate.
That's what we get
to proclaim
at this table
where we will rightfully
and joyfully
take his name
and his body
and his blood
upon our lips
and we will taste
and see
that he is good.
And we will remember
the pain
of his nail-pierced
right hand
which secured for us
pleasures
forevermore.
Pleasures even enough
to satisfy
the eighth grade boy
in each of our hearts.
Amen.
Let's pray.
God, we want to
delight ourselves
in you.
Delight yourselves
in the Lord
and he will give you
the desires
of your heart.
That's what the psalmist says.
God, be our desire.
Be our delight.
Allow us to know
the pleasure
and the joy
of habitual communion
with you
and make us
that garden of trees
planted by
your stream
of living water.
Lord, we desire
to be with you
and for those of us
who don't,
I pray that they'd
want to want
to want you, God.
Because in your presence
is the fullness
of joy
and at your right hand,
your nail-pierced hand
in Christ,
there are pleasures
forevermore.
God, help us
to believe that
with all our hearts.
Draw us near to you.
Thank you for running
after us
and we ask that you
continue to do so
because that's what we need
as your people,
as your children.
In Jesus' name,
amen.