This morning I read Psalm 145, which says
The Lord is faithful to all his promises
and loving toward all he has made.
The Lord upholds all those who fall
and lifts up all who are bowed down.
The eyes of all look to you,
and you give them their food at the proper time.
You open your hand
and satisfy the deisres of every living thing.
This was a wonderful selection because I’ve also been reading about Radical Orthodoxy’s emphasis on Christian desire. As James K.A. Smith puts it in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy,
human desire is not the result of a lack or privatation but rather plentitude and excess — a positive movement toward God. Desire, then, is not the negative craving for a lack but the positive passion characteristic of love…. Here we see a marked difference between a properly Christian account of desire and the erotic paradigm adopted by contemporary evangelical worship, which operates according to a logic of privation and construes God as yet another commodity to satisfy a lack.
This is great stuff. I love contemporary worship for its freedom and missional aspects, but Smith is right that our worship songs too often make us sound like sailors who’ve been away from the ladies too long, rather than people whose love of God, reflecting God’s love for them, leads them to constantly delight in His presence.