"He [the Lord] does not delight in the strength of the hose;
He takes no pleasure in the legs of a man.
The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear Him,
In those who hope in His mercy." - Psalm 147:10-11
Sometimes I wish I were perfect just so I could give myself to God and have Him be pleased with me, as if, somehow, my own merit and appearance of righteousness could be enough to meet His standards. I wish I could save myself (or somehow make it so I didn't need salvation) so that I could come to Him without needing to be dependent on Him, as if that would somehow make Him love me more or be more pleased with me. I think it is a common human desire: we wish to accomplish great things on our own to win the approval or acceptance of someone we respect, and we want to be able to do what ought to be done without needing to be a burden on someone we love. Of course, it doesn't work in our relationship with God! In our own strength, we can never live up to His standards or make ourselves righteous in His eyes, because we are stained and weighed down by sin. And in our own strength, we can never pay the penalty for our sins, because the punishment is too great for us to bear outside of eternity; if we chose to bear that burden ourselves because we didn't want to be dependent on God, He would let us - but we would never be able to be with Him in fellowship and love. For that, His grace is necessary.
The beauty of these verses is that in them we see that God finds pleasure not in the things we accomplish by our own striving and strength, but in us, we who have chosen to depend upon His grace and hope in His mercy. In the mindset of the previous paragraph, we were trying to make God delight in us by doing things that we thought would please Him and hoping that His pleasure in the good acts would translate to pleasure in us as persons; now what we see is that He takes pleasure in us when we let go of the good acts, and stop trying to be perfect on our own, and put our hope in His mercy and grace. Why would this be? Why would He be more pleased with us when we burden Him with our weaknesses and needs, relying on His grace and mercy to cover our sins, than when we strive to be righteous and offer to Him our good deeds?
Well, simply put, the answer is pride. To think that we are capable of doing for ourselves what only God can truly do (and what He suffered pain, humiliation, and death to accomplish) is incredibly proud. To want God to love us for our merit and innate goodness, so that we reject the love borne of His grace, is incredibly proud. It is saying, in essence, that we want the universe (and God!) to operate on our terms rather than on God's terms. We want His love and acceptance more than anything else - but we don't want to receive it in the way He has chosen to offer it to us. Let us lay down this pride before it leads us to the end to which it carried Satan! Let us accept the breath-taking offer of love and grace that He wants to give us, instead of trying to prove we are worthy first! We never will be, unless we first accept it as an undeserved gift.
But if we do accept His grace, knowing we don't now and never will deserve it through anything we can accomplish, then the incredible will happen. When we lay our broken and filthy souls at the foot of the cross, to receive His grace in humility and awe, we will find that He delights us, that He accepts us, that He loves us unconditionally. We will find that in the moment of surrender and faith we will have attained what all our striving could never earn: His pleasure in us. For He takes pleasure in those who fear Him - in those who hope in His mercy.
Would the contrast between Abrams and Liddle, as portrayed in the movie "Chariots of Fire" be an example of vain striving vs humble surrender? Also, what about the person, who perhaps wrongly, gives up on finding God's plan for his life because he believes that nothing he could do would merit God's approval? In other words, the opposite of the striving person in terms of outward behavior, may inwardly be very similar.
ReplyDeleteWhenever I watch that movie, I have thought that the contrast between those two men is just exactly this. Abrams' deepest desire seems to be to prove his worth by athletic success - by means of his own strength to create his identity and establish his own personal value. Liddell, on the other hand, isn't worrying about those things at all. He seems incredibly secure in his identity and worth, even while being a humble person (so his security is most likely not a facade based in pride!). Coming from an assurance of God's approval, he can do without the approval of man, and he can find the peace and joy that consistently elude Abrams throughout the movie. So yeah, that is a very good example!
DeleteAlso yes, despair is the alternative result. The heart is the same - there is a desire for approval and a belief that approval must be merited - but the self-perception is different. The striving individual believes that he might just be able to be good enough to please God, and so keeps trying, while the despairing individual believes that he will never be able to be good enough, and so stops trying altogether. I think this may be part of why men like Lewis and Chesterton have argued that despair, along with pride, is one of the worst sins - it shuts the individual who holds to it into utter darkness by building a fortress against God's grace.
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