David looked at his life and realized that God Himself was not just giving directions—He was the Way. The Lord had shown him a “path of life” that was not dead religion, but a living relationship. On that path, God’s nearness becomes the deepest joy, and the future is not dark or uncertain, but bright with everlasting delight. Today invites us to step onto that same path with both feet, refusing the cheap substitutes our culture holds out, and learning to taste the real joy found only in God’s presence.

The Path of Life in a World of Detours

We are surrounded by competing “paths”: self-discovery, success, comfort, vague spirituality. They promise life but quietly drain it from us. The psalmist speaks of a path that God Himself reveals—a way that leads to real life, not just existence. That path is not an idea or a technique; it is a Person. Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6). To walk the path of life is to follow Christ, trusting His Word more than our feelings and more than the opinions of the crowd.

That path is sometimes narrow and costly, but it is bright. “The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining brighter and brighter until midday” (Proverbs 4:18). As we submit our choices, relationships, and ambitions to Christ, the fog begins to lift. His commands stop feeling like restrictions and start feeling like guardrails that keep us from plunging over the edge. If you feel pulled in a dozen directions today, pause and ask: “Lord Jesus, what does obedience look like right now?” Then take the next step He shows you. That is the path of life.

Joy That Does Not Evaporate

The joy God offers is not the fragile happiness that rises and falls with our circumstances. The psalm speaks of joy that springs from God’s presence—joy that can sit in a hospital room, at a graveside, or in a season of uncertainty and still quietly sing. Peter writes to suffering believers, “Though you have not seen Him, you love Him; and though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and rejoice with an inexpressible and glorious joy, now that you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Peter 1:8–9). That kind of joy is not natural; it is supernatural.

This joy grows as we draw near to God, not as an optional extra, but as our daily lifeline. When you open Scripture, you are not checking a box—you are stepping into the presence of the God who delights to meet with you. When you pray, even haltingly, you are turning your face toward the One who has already turned His toward you in Christ. “Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13). Ask Him specifically today: “Fill me with Your joy as I trust You,” and then watch how He sustains you, even if your situation doesn’t change overnight.

Living Today at His Right Hand

The psalmist speaks of pleasures that are not fleeting, anchored at God’s right hand—where Christ is now enthroned. If your future is tied to Him, then your best days are never behind you. Eternity is not a vague comfort; it is a concrete destination in the presence of the risen Lord. Paul calls us to live now in light of that reality: “Therefore, since you have been raised with Christ, strive for the things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things” (Colossians 3:1–2). To live “at His right hand” today means to let heaven’s values shape earthly choices.

This perspective loosens the grip of idols that promise much and deliver little. When God Himself is your portion, you can say with the psalmist, “Whom have I in heaven but You? And on earth I desire no one besides You. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:25–26). Let that be your anchor today. Choose one area—your time, your money, your entertainment, your conversations—and ask, “If my greatest pleasure is truly in God’s presence, how would I live differently here?” Then, in the power of the Spirit, act on it. That is how eternal joy leaks into ordinary days.

Lord, thank You that in Your presence is real joy and at Your right hand are lasting pleasures. Help me today to turn from every false path, to seek You first, and to walk in obedience as You lead me on the path of life.

The Spirit of God has impelled me to preach and write much about the believer's conscious union with Christ-a union that must be felt and experienced. I will never be through talking about the union of the soul with the Savior, the conscious union of the believer's heart with Jesus. Remember, I am not talking about a "theological union" only. I am speaking also of a conscious union, a union that is felt and experienced. I have never been ashamed to tell my congregations that I believe in feelings. I surely believe in what Jonathan Edwards termed "religious affections." That is man's perspective. I am aware also that from God's perspective there are qualities in the Divine Being that can only be known by the heart; never by the intellect! Long ago John wrote: "Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us" (1 John 3:16). So it is best for us to confess that as humans we have difficulty in understanding what God has said when He says that He loves us!

The way which He dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil that is to say, His flesh. - Hebrews 10:20

If we rightly understand our natural condition, it is not only one of bondage to evil, but it is one of separation from God.

Parts of the Divine character are always beautiful and sweet to every human heart when it thinks about them. Parts of the Divine character stand frowning before a man who knows himself for what he is; and conscience tells us that between Him and us there is a mountain of impediment piled up by our own evil. And Christ comes, the Path-finder and the Path; the Pioneer who breaks the way for us through all the hindrances, and leads us up to the presence of God.

For we do not know God as He is except by Jesus Christ. We see fragments, and often distorted fragments, of the Divine nature and character apart from Jesus, but the real Divine nature as it is, and as it is in its relation to me, a sinner, is only made known to me in the face of Jesus Christ. When we see Him we see God. Christ’s tears are God’s pity, Christ’s gentleness is God’s meekness, Christ’s tender drawing love is not only a revelation of a most pure and sweet brother’s heart, but a manifestation through that brother’s heart of the deepest depths of the Divine nature. Christ is the heart of God. Apart from Him, we come to the God of our own consciences, and we tremble; we come to the God of our own fancies, and we presume; we come to the God dimly guessed at and pieced together from out of the hints and indications of His works, and He is little more than a dead name to us. Apart from Christ, we come to a peradventure which we call a God - a shadow through which you can see the stars shining. But we know the Father when we believe in Christ. And so all the clouds rising from our own hearts and consciences and fancies and misconceptions which we have piled together, between God and ourselves, Christ clears away; and in this way He opens the path to God. It is only the God manifest in Jesus Christ that draws men’s hearts to Him. The God that is in Christ is the only God that humanity ever loved. Other gods they may have worshiped with cowering terror and with far-off lip-reverence, but this God has a heart, and wins hearts because He has, and so Christ opens the way to Him. He not only makes God known to us, and not only makes Him so known to us as to draw us to Him, but in that likewise He, by the fact of His Cross and Passion, has borne, and borne away, the impediments of our own sin and transgression which rise for ever between us and Him.