The Given Hour SantiagoPsalm 16:11August 27, 2026

Fulness Of Joy Is A Place

This message is for believing at some level he has never examined that time with God only counts if it feels like duty, and being suspicious of any of it that he actually enjoyed

There are two kinds of morning in his week and he has quietly graded them for about thirty years.

The first kind is the one at the table with the book open, and it is often hard, and some of it is genuinely dry, and he does it anyway because a man does what he says he will do. That one counts. That one goes in the column.

The second kind happens in the truck, or out on the back step before anybody is up, and it is mostly singing. Bits of old songs, half remembered, in a voice nobody would pay for. And he talks to God in it and laughs sometimes and the whole thing has a lightness to it that he cannot account for.

That one, he has decided, is not really it.

He has never said that out loud and he has certainly never examined it. It is just how the shelf is arranged in him. The hard one is the real one. The one he loves is a nice extra, a sort of dessert, and dessert does not count as a meal.

He is sixty-one. He has been discounting his best hours with God for three decades on the strength of a rule nobody ever taught him and he cannot find anywhere.

If you have got a shelf arranged like that, come and sit down out here. Nothing you enjoy is going to be taken away.

The psalm gives joy an address

Here is a sentence that has been in the songbook the whole time, and it is not vague, and it names a location.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.Psalm 16:11

Read it as a map, because that is what it is. Where is fulness of joy? In thy presence. Where are the pleasures? At thy right hand.

This is not a psalm saying that joy is a pleasant side effect if you are lucky. It is telling you the address. The place where God is, is the place where the joy is, and those are not two facts that happen to sit near each other. They are the same fact.

Which means the mornings on the back step have not been the dessert. If there is lightness in a man when he is with God, that is not evidence against the hour. On the psalm's own account, it is evidence for it.

And notice the last two words: for evermore. This is not a temporary arrangement or an indulgence granted to beginners. It is a permanent feature of where God is.

You have been discounting the very thing the psalm uses as a landmark, and you were reading your own best mornings backwards. Psalm 16:11 is where that sits, in a verse that hands out an address rather than a mood, and the same Spirit who put it in the collection is the one who unmakes a private rule in a man of sixty-one.

Where the rule actually came from

Let me be fair to the rule for a minute, because it did not appear from nowhere and it is not stupid.

Somewhere a long way back, a man learns that feelings are unreliable and that a faith built on them will collapse the first bad week. That is true. It is one of the most useful things anybody ever taught him and he has needed it more than once.

But look what happened to it. A protection against being ruled by feelings has quietly turned into a suspicion of every good one. That is not the same thing at all. The first is wisdom, the second is a tax, and he has been paying it since his twenties.

The table with the book open is good, and it stays. The dry mornings are real worship and I would not remove one of them. What has to go is the arithmetic that says the dry ones are the true ones because they were dry, because that is not a principle from anywhere in Scripture. It is just a habit that grew in the dark.

You are permitted to enjoy Him without it costing the hour its validity, and that permission is already yours. He promised it, in the invitation to taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8), and His Spirit does not treat delight as a discount code applied to a morning.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go further, the thing that outranks all of it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there will not be one here.

And I want to say it directly to a man with a rule like his: nothing on this site treats the hard version as the real version. Nobody here admires anybody for how much it cost them, and there is no version of this where difficulty is the evidence.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is ordinary courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You have been fully inside this, and you were never at the edge of it because of what your body allows. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God has never once been given out according to a medical situation.

If today is heavier than a page can carry, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.

A picture, not an account

Picture a man who cooked for his family every Sunday for forty years and always ate last and least.

He would be up at six with the radio low, and he loved it, genuinely loved it, the whole morning of it, the smell of the kitchen and the noise coming down the stairs.

And when everybody sat down he would serve them all and then take whatever was left, standing, and eat about half of it, and if anybody said anything he would say that he had been tasting all morning, which was true and was not the reason.

The reason, which came out once when he was old and unguarded, was that he did not think the cook was supposed to enjoy the meal. He had got that from somewhere. He could not say where.

And his daughter said: papa, you made it. Who was it for, if not for you as well.

He did not have an answer. He sat down the following Sunday. It looked like nothing from the outside and it was not nothing.

That is a picture, not an account. It is not a promise about your week or a claim about anybody's life. It is here because somebody needs to see a man let himself sit at his own table.

You are one of the people the joy was prepared for, and you were included from the beginning and not added later. It is written into John 15:11, where Jesus says plainly that He speaks so that His own joy might remain in His people and their joy be full, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a man who has been standing up to eat for forty years.

The breakthrough

So here is the turn, and it takes nothing from your body at all.

You are already welcome to love it, and it is already settled, and the hours you have been writing off were the ones with the landmark in them. It is written into the address given in Psalm 16:11, where the presence and the fulness of joy are the same location, and the Holy Spirit is not more present in a morning a man endured than in one he enjoyed.

The table with the book open stays. The dry stretch in February stays and it was faithful and it counted. Nothing is being taken off the shelf. What is coming off is the grading, and thirty years of a rule that never came from Him, and a suspicion of the very thing the psalm uses to tell you where He is.

One thing to do with your body

Spend the time doing the thing with God you actually enjoy most, and refuse to discount it afterwards.

Whatever yours is. The singing on the back step. The walking. Reading the part of the book you like rather than the part you think you should be on. Do that, deliberately, and do it as the main thing and not as the extra.

And then the second half, which is the harder one: when the discount arrives afterwards, and it will, name it out loud and do not pay it.

That is the whole action, and a man eating three meals today can do it in the morning. You have been met in the part you love, and it never needed justifying to anybody. Nehemiah 8:10 says so, where the joy of the Lord is named as strength rather than as a bonus, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to stop enjoying yourself.

Declare this over yourself

Say these out loud, in your own voice, wherever you are standing. The standing to speak like this is yours in Christ and it does not rest on how hard your mornings have been. Scripture is the ground under it and the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely willing, and what God does in a week you enjoyed, and when, is His, however He answers.

Rule that only the hard hours count, you are not from God and you are finished. The psalm gives joy an address and the address is His presence, and the pleasures are named at His right hand. In the name of Jesus I stop grading my own mornings.
Suspicion of everything I enjoy, you are quiet and you are not wisdom. A guard against being ruled by feelings turned into a tax on every good one, and His Spirit is settling that difference in me tonight. Delight was always a landmark rather than a discount.
Father, I have stood up to eat at Your table for thirty years. I thank You that fulness of joy is where You are and that You said so plainly enough for a slow man to find it. Here is the back step tomorrow, and I am calling it the main thing.

Why we ask you to say these out loud