GOD’S WORD FOR JULY 7 ~ ~ Psalm 7:17 ~ ~ “I will praise the Lord according to His righteousness, And will sing praise to the name of the Lord Most High.”

John Piper’s book. “The Pleasures of God”

My hope as a desperate sinner who lives in a Death Valley desert of unrighteousness, hangs on this biblical truth:

that God is the kind of God who will be pleased with the one thing I have to offer—my thirst.

That is why the sovereign freedom and self-sufficiency of God are s precious to me; They are the foundation of my hope that God is delighted not by the resourcefulness of bucket brigades, but by the bending down of broken sinners to drink at the fountain of grace.

Isaiah 64:4

From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear,

No eye has seen a God besides you,

Who works for those who wait for him.

In other words, this unspeakably good news for helpless sinners—that God delights not when we offer him our strength but when we wait for his—-this good news that I need to hear so badly again and again, is based firmly on a vision of God as sovereign, self-sufficient, and free. If we do not have this foundational vision of God in place when we ask how we can please him, it is almost certain that our efforts to please him will become subtle means of self-exaltation (pride) and the end in the oppressive bondage of legalistic strivings.

I tried to make clear earlier that whatever God requires of us in response to the good news (of forgiveness through the sacrifice of Christ for our sins) must itself be good news. If God provided salvation for us in Christ, but then required us to carry an unbearable burden and work under an intolerable yoke, the gospel would not be good news.

If God demanded, as the basis of his delight in us, the end of OUR delight rather than its true beginning, there would be no gospel.

So in this chapter, my aim is to expand the good news of what kind of response God delights in.

God delights most deeply not in making demands but in meeting needs. Prayer is his delight because it shows the REACHES OF OUR POVERTY AND THE RICHES OF HIS GRACE.

Prayer is that wonderful transaction where the wealth of God’s glory is magnified and the wants of our soul are satisfied. Therefore, God delights in the prayers of the upright.

We see this in Proverbs 15:8:

“The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord,

but the prayer of the upright is his delight.”

(Remember, “upright” and “righteousness” in the Word does not describe OUR “goodness”, because in ourselves we have none. Nor does it describe our works, because they can’t impress God. It is a statement of being in right standing with God ONLY because of acknowledging and resting upon the substitutionary payment for our sins by Jesus Christ.)

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