Football, politics, fishing, porn

Ever wanted something so bad your whole life groaned for it?  A passion so strong that your yearning swallowed whole your very existence?

I have – an athletic achievement, a woman, a form of recreation, some accomplishment, a hobby.  We all have.  To have ardent passion for someone or something is built into our spiritual DNA. 

The first of the Psalms is what scholars call the “gateway.”  This single chapter of the Bible is thought by some to have been especially written to introduce all the rest of the Psalms.  It sets down basic options in life for the singers and readers of this precious poetry.  Those options between the righteous and the wicked are particularized across the rest of the 149 chapters of the Psalter, of the balance of Wisdom Literature in Scripture and, indeed, it could be argued, of all the Bible.  The first lines…

Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked,
or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. 
But His delight is in the Law of the Lord… (Psalm 1:1-2)

Delight is a great word.  It crops up well over 100x in the Bible with the greatest concentration in the Psalms (esp. 119).  In the Hebrew (Heb. chephets/guttural - HAY-fets) it means to take pleasure in, long for.  Our English word is rooted historically in the Old French with a frequent sexual connotation attached.  Probably shouldn’t be surprised that “delight” comes up about five times in the highly erotic Song of Songs. 

A counselor told a friend of mine recently a simple yet memorable truth:  “Whatever you feed, grows.”   My friend was warned not to feed wrongful attitudes or wayward desires but to feed on the good and pure and the holy which, of course, would  grow into a relationship with The Good, The Pure and The Holy. 

This feeding is a choice that frequently grows into an affection, even an addiction. 

Obsessions…football, politics, fishing, pursuit of materialism, porn….these are all things that can grow in our lives as they absorb more time, more thought, more money.  We choose whether or not to give things like these an inordinate amount of our attention and emotional energy.

Or, the Lord seems to indicate, you can develop a passion for the Bible, God and the things that grow out of His Word and obedience to it. 

Choose any one of these competitors for your attention (or a multitude of other options) and pretty soon it affects your reading and viewing material, the group your root for, what you think about when your mind wanders and the way you spend your money or your day.  It impacts everything. 

Delight, obsession, passion can be chosen for good, for the trivial, or for outright evil. 

A moment ago we mentioned our spiritual DNA.  If “passion” is woven into our DNA then we must also recognize that the capacity to direct that passion is also part of our makeup.  We can choose the law of the Lord.  Or not.  God has built that option into every corpuscle of our bodies. 

“Father, grant me grace to delight in your Word today and the things it instructs me to do – mostly, the love of You, my neighbor and even of my enemy.  And then help these passions to grow.”