Hi Leaders,
Sometimes I get a little austere and gritty in my walk with God . It’s about discipline, I tell myself as though I can reach some fresh level of holiness and meaning by doing and experiencing challenging spiritual practice. I don’t know that I expect God to love me more, but I wonder sometimes if he’ll like me more. Ever been there? No? Just me? Fine.
I’m handing today’s essay over to Stephanie Rousselle, who I met via a podcast interview a while back. She asks a question that quietly unsettles my austere approach and invites curiosity (a hunger, perhaps?) about something my faith may be missing. I wonder how these words will speak to you?
Read on readers,
I remember attending a service at my home church in Paris shortly after becoming a Christian. Most of the details have disappeared with time – like what the pastor preached, or the songs we used to worship. What remains with me is less concrete but, in many ways, more significant: I remember the people’s delight in God.
I could sense a quality about their faith that I couldn’t name. Their lives weren’t free from difficulty. Some were raising children. Others were navigating disappointments. They carried grief, or questions that had remained unanswered for years. Yet their relationship with God appeared to nourish them in a way that fascinated me.
Their faith didn’t seem thin, fragile, or sustained by willpower alone. There was substance to it, as though they’d discovered something about God that continued feeding them long after the church service ended, and ordinary life resumed.
I remember my Parisian church friends whenever I meet Christians who genuinely love God and sincerely desire to follow him, yet who find themselves spiritually weary. They aren’t rejecting God. They aren’t abandoning their faith. More often, they’re just tired. They continue praying, reading Scripture, serving others, and showing up faithfully. And yet, an indescribable hunger sometimes lingers beneath the resilient faithfulness.
Perhaps that is why Psalm 37:4 has become increasingly precious to me over the years: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
The wonder of this invitation increases every time I ponder it. Scripture often speaks about trusting God, obeying God, worshiping God, and loving God—and rightly so. Delight introduces a slightly different dimension. Delight assumes enjoyment, affection. It says that, of course, God is utterly worthy of our allegiance—but there’s more: he’s more than worthy of capturing our hearts.
As a French woman, I’ve always loved the word we use for delight: délice. In French, délice carries two English notions, encapsulated in this one word: délice is both delight and deliciousness. In French, the connection feels entirely natural. In French, God is both delightful, and delicious.
I suspect that’s one reason Psalm 34:8 has always felt particularly beautiful to me: “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”
There’s something wonderfully personal about that invitation. Tasting can’t be outsourced. We can listen to descriptions, study ingredients, and learn recipes. Yet eventually there comes a moment when explanation has carried us as far as it can, and experience must take over.
I sometimes wonder whether many of us spend years learning about God while experiencing relatively little of his goodness for ourselves. We know things that are true about him. We know he is loving. Faithful. Good. Near. Those truths matter profoundly. Yet Scripture repeatedly invites us beyond information into communion.
The purpose of knowing about God has always been knowing God.
The Christian life was never intended to be sustained by willpower alone. We can strengthen our discipline, establish good habits, and commit ourselves to spiritual growth. But ultimately, the heart is moved by what it finds enjoyable, beautiful, deligthful. Thomas Chalmers famously wrote about “the expulsive power of a new affection.” Lesser loves lose their grip when something better captures our attention.
The same is true in our relationship with God. Our hearts will respond when we encounter the beauty and delightfulness of Christ, when we discover afresh his kindness toward sinners, his patience with our weakness, and his faithfulness throughout every season of life. Delight grows, not because we’ve mastered a technique, but because we’ve become freshly captivated by Jesus.
This kind of delight doesn’t remove sorrow from our lives. Christians suffer, grieve, and wrestle with uncertainty just like everyone else. Delight in God isn’t a form of denial. Rather, it creates a deeper foundation beneath our circumstances. It reminds us that joy and sorrow can coexist because God’s presence remains steady when everything else feels uncertain.
I suspect this kind of delight in God is what many of us ache for. We yearn for a richer awareness of God within the life we already have.
The Christian story ends with delight. Scripture promises a future where God’s people dwell in his presence, see his face, and enjoy him forever. Delight is not a distraction from the Christian life. It’s one of its great themes, a foretaste of heaven itself.
And perhaps the invitation has been there all along, waiting for us to notice. Taste and see.
Come with an appetite.
About the author: Stephanie Rousselle is the author of Awaken Delight: satisfying your soul’s longing for God (IVP, 2026), sold at all the best bookstores. You can also find her on her top-ranking Gospel Spice Podcast, where she humbly seeks to inspire our generation to delight in God.
Awaken your delight in God today through a free digital devotional and the book at gospelspice.com/awakendelight
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The views expressed in this newsletter are solely those of the author, Jo Saxton, unless otherwise stated.
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