Sessions Include:

1. Do You Thirst for God?
2. Are You Increasingly Governed by God’s Word?
3. Are You Becoming More Loving?
4. Are You More Sensitive to God’s Presence?
5. Do You Have a Growing Concern for Others
6. Do You Delight in the Bride of Christ?
7. Are Spiritual Disciplines Increasingly Important?
8. Do You Still Grieve Over Sin?
9. Are You Quicker to Forgive?
10. Do You Yearn for Heaven?

The closer you are to the Lord, the closer you will be to other believers. — PETER JEFFREY

AGUR, THE ANCIENT WRITER of Proverbs 30, acknowledged:

Three things are too wonderful for me; four I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a virgin. PROVERBS 30:18–19

I don’t know much about eagles, serpents, and ships, but I have observed (and experienced) that the ways of a man with a woman he loves are indeed often full of wonder. In order to fulfill the requirements mandated by Laban for his daughter’s hand in marriage, the Old Testament patriarch Jacob “served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her” (Genesis 29:20). Long years, even long distances are irrelevant when a man delights in a woman. I was in a Texas seminary while engaged to Caffy. She was living in northwest Arkansas, where we’d met while I attended law school. My delight in her made me more than willing to make the six-hour drive from Fort Worth to Fayetteville whenever possible.

On an infinitely grander scale, Jesus made an incomparable journey from heaven and worked for more than thirty years for the delight of His eyes, the church. “Christ loved the church,” writes Paul,

… and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. EPHESIANS 5:25–27

Now suppose that the very Spirit of Jesus Christ Himself were given to dwell, not only in the body of Jesus but also in another human. (And realize that according to the New Testament, this is what happens to all who belong to Christ—see Romans 8:9.) Obviously then, like Christ, the man or woman who has been given the Spirit of Jesus would love what Jesus loves and died for—His bride, the church. So one of the best tests of whether we belong to Christ is whether we delight in His delight, namely, the people who comprise His church. Or as the apostle John put it, “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers” (1 John 3:14).

King David’s Old Testament words are a beautiful description of this New Testament love that God’s people have for each other:

As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight. PSALM 16:3

Notice the word saints in the first half of the verse. In the Bible, saints is one of the terms applied to the people of God. Paul refers to Christians as saints in nearly every New Testament letter he wrote, using the word more than fifty times. These first-century saints were ordinary Christians, but not nominal ones. They were sincere followers of Jesus manifesting “the fruit of the Spirit” (see Galatians 5:22–23). Far from perfect though, some of those he called saints were struggling with scandalous sin problems, as with the saints in the church at Corinth (see 1 Corinthians 1:2). But what was true then is true now—everyone indwelled by the Spirit of God is a saint, or as the Greek word literally means, a “holy one.”

Saints aren’t just the exceptionally devoted believers now in heaven, they are also the people who believe and live the Word of God in their workaday world on Earth, the kind of people David spoke of as “saints in the land” (emphasis added). Yet David’s delight was in such folk. He sought them out and took pleasure in their company because they loved his God too.

Donald S. Whitney, Ten Questions to Diagnose Your Spiritual Health (NavPress; Tyndale House Publishers, 2021), vi–3.

Check out our Bible Study on Ten Questions to Diagnose Your Spiritual Health . A bible study on the book of Lamentations as well as some Psalms of Lament.

These lessons are available on Amazon, as well as a part of Good Questions Have Groups Talking Subscription Service. Like Netflix for Bible Lessons, one low subscription gives you access to all our lessons--thousands of them. For a medium-sized church, lessons are as little as $10 per teacher per year.