Delight

"Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart" (Ps 37:4). "You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand" (Ps 16:11). "They feast on the abundance of your house; you give them drink from your river of delights" (Ps 36:8). "Rejoice always" (1 Th 5:16). "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace..." (Gal 5:22). " I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete" (Jn 15:11).

Theme: No one enjoys life without delight and happiness. The good news is that the God who loves us desires to fill our hearts and lives with delight and happiness. Thus, utmost ultimate delight and happiness is found in our triune God. The delightful things in this world only points to the ultimate Delight.

 

"You have made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace till they rest in you." St. Augustine, Confessions.

"How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose!... You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure." St. Augustine, Confessions.

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same." C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

"All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves." Blaise Pascal.

"If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory.

"The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them... These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited." C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory.