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| I desire to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart. |
| —Psalm 40:8 |
Have you ever wanted to do something so much that the desire consumed you? I have.
Beginning in seventh grade and extending all the way through high school graduation, the President’s Council on Physical Fitness required all teenagers to endure physical education class five days a week throughout the school year. That 50-minute long period each day always represented the most miserable time of the day for me.
In those long ago days, if some advertising agency ever needed the perfect example of someone whose personal physical fitness hovered near zero, I could easily meet that need. I can imagine the poster or television commercial advertisement that ad agency might make:
“Want to live as long as possible? Don’t be like this fat slob! Go to the gym and become physically fit and you will live a long and fruitful life!”
In any case, during all six of those torturous years, I longed to wake up some morning with a new body, new strength, new innate ability, and a new attitude. I dreamed of becoming transformed from “Mr. Fat Slob” to “Mr. Handome Athlete.” I could almost feel the change in people’s outlooks towards me. Where once they laughed at my inability to accomplish the tasks required of those who were physically fit, I now had moved to the top of the chart. Football? Basketball? Softball? Gymnastics? I had become a star.
You may argue that had I really wanted to achieve all of that I could have done so. But, I didn’t and I couldn’t. I remained the fat slob who finally arrived back at the starting point twenty minutes after all of the other cross country runners had completed the race.
In the Scripture verse at the beginning of this blog post, King David expresses his overwhelming desire to do God’s will and also describes the solution to achieving that goal in a very few words. David shares that he is consumed with a desire to become obedient to doing what God wants David to do. And, David expresses his understanding of the way to achieve his great desire: to keep God’s law within his heart.
As followers of Jesus, David’s desire should become our desire. David’s solution to reaching the goal expressed by his desire should become our pathway in life. Just as David learns how to become one who does the will of God by keeping God’s law within his heart, so we should learn how to become obedient servants of God by keeping the truth of His written Word, the Bible, within the very core of our being.
The truth of God’s written Word should permeate every one of our four human modalities: heart, soul, mind, and strength— or, our emotional being, our spiritual being, our intellectual being, and our physical being. If we strive to make that desire become a reality, we will achieve the same kind of peace that King David achieved.
