The Struggle Of Delight

The sacrifices the Law demanded could never perfect us, at best those blood sacrifices simply covered our sin.
Jesus is spoken of in Psalm 40, and it says of Him, 'Burt offering and sin offering you have not required. Then I said, "Behold I come; In the scroll of the book it is written of me. I delight to do your will, oh my God".

I can never escape this One who keeps lovingly getting into my face, with the urgency of his heart probing question , "Who do you say that I Am"?
There is nothing simpler or easier than to have a vicarious relationship with God done through and by what others have to say, those who have forged, treaded the wine/olive press alone. Before Jesus asked, "Who do you say I Am, he first asked, Who do men say that I Am"?
Somehow trying to ride on the wave of where others have been brought into an eye witness encounter with the Lord, is not going to cut it in our being processed by Him.

This morning reading Oz Chambers, http://www.heartlight.org/cgi-shl/my_utmost/utm.cgi it so deeply touched me, again the call, being called to Himself, not to some position, status, but simply to Himself, the lover of my soul.
I would say the key word that stood out to me in what Oz shared was the word 'struggle'!
This quote is what I believe defines the journey I have been on and am moving into: You must struggle to get expression experimentally, then there will come a time when that expression will become the very wine of strengthening to someone else; but if you say lazily - "I am not going to struggle to express this thing for myself, I will borrow what I say," the expression will not only be of no use to you, but of no use to anyone. Try to state to yourself what you feel implicitly to be God's truth, and you give God a chance to pass it on to someone else through you.

Getting back to delighting in Him. My wife and I were discussing this very thing over breakfast this morning. My thoughts were as follows. It is my understanding that when Jesus said he came to do the Father's will, and that he delighted in doing it, he saw that His will being done in and through a human heart/body was not possible from extreme suffering.
Suffering is something everyone is exposed to at one level or another, but the true suffering I see the Son of man/God experiencing, is what we are called to embrace no differently than He did.

Scripture speaks of the Son of man in this light: Though he was God's son, he was perfected through suffering, and he learned obedience through his sufferings.
It is these sufferings I am wanting to flesh out here. I am of the opinion that from his earliest times as a child, Jesus was subjected to the barrage of misunderstood reactions from his fellow human beings. In this setting he knew the key to not giving into self-vindication-retaliation, was the growing secure knowledge of His fathers love for him, learning in the thick of these blows to his soul, of giving up over and over again, the 'right to himself'.

I see bondage in its truest expression having its firm hold on all of humanity until love breaks through the lies. For example, look at the multitude of people lead by Moses out of Egypt's bondage. Seemingly it would appear that their bondage was over, or was it? Maybe they would soon discover that bondage still owned them although 'outside the box'.

How is it possible to go on with the Lord as long as I am hanging onto 'my right to myself'?
Maybe Jesus wasn't asking anyone to give up things as much as he was asking us to give up that which is more important than any-things, the right to myself? Much like the young rich ruler, his wealth, his abilities defined who he was, his reputation of looking just right was too much of a price to simply let go and discover who he really was meant to be.

Is this all part of what it means to be 'made of no reputation', learning in the struggle of the lies that I no longer have to convince others that I am not the person others say I am? Maybe there will be no real established identity in the believers life apart from learning what it means to empty ourselves as Jesus did.

Rich