Sacrifice From the Heart - Psalms 39-41

Psalms 40:6-8 (ESV)

In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted,

but you have given me an open ear.

Burnt offering and sin offering

you have not required.

Then I said, “Behold, I have come;

in the scroll of the book it is written of me:

I delight to do your will, O my God;

your law is within my heart.”

There is no secret what God wants from those who seek Him.  He wants their heart.   Jesus summed up the entire Law and Prophets in one statement: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind.   The above song of David states that very thought.   We, as human beings, think that God is pleased with our “activity” of worship.  We think that God takes pleasure in our coming to church and singing and giving money.   And, He does - IF it begins first and foremost in our hearts.  In the above lines we read that God “delights” in our doing His will from our “heart.”   Because our hearts are wicked, we can’t do that, however.   No matter how hard we try out hearts are full of sin and selfishness.  God had to provide a way for this stanza of David’s song to be fulfilled in our hearts.   Note how the writer of Hebrews explains it:

Hebrews 8:10-12 (ESV)

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel

after those days, declares the Lord:

I will put my laws into their minds,

and write them on their hearts,

and I will be their God,

and they shall be my people.

And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor

and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’

for they shall all know me,

from the least of them to the greatest.

For I will be merciful toward their iniquities,

and I will remember their sins no more.”

When Christ came, as our high priest, He fulfilled the entire law. Note, again, from Hebrews:

Hebrews 10:8-10 (ESV)

When he said above, “You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), then he added, “Behold, I have come to do your will.” He does away with the first in order to establish the second. And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

Jesus came to do God’s “will.”   By doing that “will” from a pure heart, yet in a man’s body, Jesus did what we cannot do.  Now, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, God is writing on our hearts His Word that we, too, through the power of the Spirit, might do His will.   God does not take pleasure in our sacrifices (but does command we do them, but from the heart).