Precise And Joyless

Sandu had led the Thursday reading for eleven years. Seven o'clock exactly, in the front room of a house with a window that stood open all summer onto a street where somebody was always calling a child in.

He was the most exact man any of them had ever met. The passage was chosen a week ahead. The order never varied. He finished at eight, and if a discussion was running he would say, kindly and without apology, that it could carry on at the door, and it always did, and he always washed the cups while it did.

Nobody had ever seen him laugh at it. Not once in eleven years. He laughed at other things, in the hallway, about the neighbor's roof.

In the spring an older woman named Rodica started coming. She had a way of saying whatever had just occurred to her, and she did not yet know any of the rules.

In June they were on a psalm, and Sandu read the line about the man who greatly delights in the commandments of the Lord, and Rodica put her hand up halfway through the sentence, which nobody did.

"Does anybody?" she said.

Sandu waited.

"Delight," she said. "Actually delight. Or do we all just turn up nicely?"

The room went completely silent, in the way a room does when somebody has said the thing.

And Sandu opened his mouth to give the correct answer, which he had, in three parts, with the Hebrew behind it.

What came out was: "I have not enjoyed this in about six years."

Rodica let out a breath and said, "Oh, thank God. I thought that was me."

And a man at the back, who had said perhaps forty words since 2019, said, "Six years for me too, and I have only been coming since April."

And that was it. Sandu started to laugh and could not stop. He laughed until he had to take his glasses off and set them on the arm of the chair, and he waved a hand at them as if to say give me a moment, and he could not get the moment, and the room went with him, Rodica loudest of all, until the woman in the corner was wiping her eyes with a sleeve.

They did not finish the reading. First time in eleven years.

They stayed until half past nine, and somebody put the kettle on twice, and when they finally left they stood in the street a while because the evening was warm.

And there is something you keep like that. Kept properly. Kept on time. Kept in the right order, for years, faithfully, and you have not enjoyed one minute of it since you cannot remember when.

Whose gladness this document runs on

Before anything else, one sentence, because a person in Sandu's position usually assumes the worst about himself first.

You are not a fraud. Keeping something faithfully while feeling nothing about it is not hypocrisy, it is endurance with the lights off, and Scripture never once describes that as pretending. The Holy Spirit is not embarrassed to live in a man who turns up flat, and He has never told anybody to stay away until the feeling comes back.

Now the verse, which is the one people use to make a man like that feel worse.

Praise the LORD! Blessed is the man who fears the LORD, who greatly delights in his commandments.Psalm 112:1

Read what that line is actually doing, because everything turns on it. Psalm 112 is a portrait. It runs through a whole life, letter by letter through the alphabet, describing a man: what he is like, how he handles bad news, what happens to his children. It is a painting, not a gate you are being asked to squeeze through.

So the delight in that verse is a description of where a life goes, and it is not a fee collected at the door. You have that distinction in your hands now and it changes what the psalm is doing to you: Psalm 112:1 is showing you a man, and the Spirit of God who inspired it is not standing behind you with a clipboard checking your enthusiasm against the text.

The gladness started on His side

Here is what He bound Himself to, in the first person, and it is worth reading slowly because most people have never noticed the last line of it.

I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.Jeremiah 32:40 and 41

I will rejoice in doing them good.

That is God on His own delight, in His own mouth, put into the terms of the covenant itself, and it is settled. It does not rise when the room is warm and it does not fall on a Thursday in November when nobody feels anything. With all my heart and all my soul, He says, which is the language a person uses about something they love.

You are being done good to by a God who enjoys doing it, and that is not my encouragement to you, it is Jeremiah 32:41 quoted flat, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line like that off a page and warms a cold room with it.

So here is the line down the middle, and it goes here rather than at the end. His gladness in this covenant is settled and it is His. Your keeping is real, it is genuinely asked for, and your feelings about it are not the toll you pay to be let in.

Which means nobody here is going to grade your motives, and I want that said plainly rather than implied. A man who keeps a thing flatly is keeping it. That is obedience, whole and entire, and it counts, and God is not standing off at a distance waiting for you to mean it more.

You have His own gladness running underneath a practice you have been doing in the dark for six years, and that is the direction this is going: the delight is where obedience arrives, never the ticket you produce on the way in. Psalm 112:1 paints the man at the far end of that road, and the Spirit is the One walking a person down it, at His own speed.