“I delight to do your pleasure, My God. Your law is within my heart.”

Psalm 40:8

How many ways can we disqualify ourselves from being the person we know God is calling us to be? We say things like: “I could obey God better if I just knew more about God. If I understood myself better. If I could deal with sin and get some victory. If I could get over the past. If I could be content. And a thousand other variations on that theme ….” We know that this isn’t faith. It is unbelief and excuse and defeat. These are some difficult, doomed ways of trying to live for God in our own ability. And it never works very well.

Faith is delighting in God. It is knowing God personally and intimately as a Friend. It is loving God with all our heart.

Faith shakes the believer by bringing him to see God’s grandeur and allowing him to be devastated by God’s holiness. Faith is how we become a person who connects with God. By faith we come to understand who God is. It brings us to claim a close relationship with God by which we experience all that God desires for us to know about himself.

Faith, from first to last, is knowing the unseen God. Knowing God is more than finding facts about God. It is knowing who he is, what he is like and knowing what he loves. True faith brings us to a point where we actually know what pleases him the most. This short verse in Psalm 40:8 is a picture of what faith looks like in a true believer.

Look at this language carefully:

“I delight to do your pleasure, My God.” He calls God by the one-word name, Elohâ. This is the name of God, Elohim, added to the personal pronoun “my.” It is simply, “My God.”

Many translations handle that Hebrew word, “My-God” as an oath or a prayer, a cry: “O My God.” But that is making a tender and personal name for God into something it is not.

This line of testimony is a short-course in knowing God. He says directly, personally to God, “I delight to do your pleasure, My God.” He is using the language of prayer and the language of a profound and precious friendship. This is most beautiful.

The Psalmist is telling us how in his life of faith and service he succeeds in “doing” what God delights in. He begins with the deep under-girding of the law of God that has found a home within his heart.

He doesn’t go to the law first. He begins by going to God and on what pleases and delights him. This is the grander and much more effective route to obedience: We love him and then we want to do what pleases him. The life that pleases God comes from a heart that loves God and delights in him. This is how the life of faith sets us free from the condemnation of the law.

The Psalmist tells us that God’s law is not just “written” upon the heart. It is true that that language is used elsewhere and it is a helpful picture of the way in which our lives are transformed by knowledge of the nature of God. It implies that the content on God’s law is read by us and studied seriously, and that is a good thing to do (see Jeremiah 31:33 and Hebrews 10:16). But here what is expressed is not the process of writing the law on the heart, it is what happens after the law is written deeply within your heart. Then you know and do what pleases God.

The law is “within my heart.” Evidence that you understand God and know him, is that you love him and delight in him. “Your law is within my heart” means that you know what God is like and you are aware of what he loves and what he hates. Sin keeps God a million miles away and it makes our language about God impersonal and disconnected from our deepest loves. Saving and sanctifying faith brings us to the place where we can address God as “My God.”

Faith makes our desire and delight to do what pleases God. Faith immerses itself in the Word of God so that the very law of God is in the deepest part of our lives, “Your law is within my heart.” Not just chiseled on the surface like on stone tablets, but internalized to become part of who we are. From the heart we delight in his pleasure because our hearts are becoming a little bit like God’s very heart. “I delight to do your pleasure, My God.”