"Like a tree..."

This (now ancient) song perfectly captures where I want my heart to be all of the time.
"We bow our hearts because we are free," the singer says.  What a concept: to bow in submission simply because of the fact that freedom has pronounced itself, simply because the One who freed us is deserving of our wholehearted worship.  Instead of inspiring wanton abandon, the freedom which God gives draws us to service.
"We lift our eyes to the cloud and the flame," the singer says, pondering God's faithfulness in the past, as well as his on-going promise to "guide our steps and restore us again" out of His limitless fountain of mercy.
"We delight in the law of Your Word."
Ah.  The heart of the matter.  Every other thought in this song hinges on this statement.
It reminds me of something a former youth leader told me when I was just entering my teen years.  I can't remember the context of the conversation, but it was during a routine Bible study that he looked at me and simply said, "I see in you a love for God's Word."
I remember the way that statement rocked me, then gradually settled into the fissure it had created, because it was so true.  God had blessed me with a passion for studying the Bible that my peers didn't seem to share.  It was His doing - I certainly had nothing to do with it.  That love I possessed was something I'd thought quiet and internal; in fact, I'd not truly identified it myself.  Yet it was something that couldn't help but express itself.
That hasn't always the case, of course.  There have been - and continue to be - times where reading the Word is a chore, the last thing on my list.  But if I could, I would harness that desire that my youth leader once discerned within me, that hunger for God's Word - so that it would become the perpetual sentiment of my heart.  When you find yourself in that state, everything else seems stale by comparison.

As the Psalmist wrote, "Blessed is the man who does not walk in the council of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers.  But his delight is the law of the Lord, and on His law, he mediates day and night.  In this way, he shall become like a tree planted beside streams of water, which yields its fruit and season, whose leaf does not wither."  The promise here is not comfort or wealth.  The promise is a nourishing, rich, and fulfilling understanding of God's Word: a love for His precepts that is self-compounding.  A love that produces righteousness.
"We delight in the law of Your Word."
Father, may it always be so.