“Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart.” (Psalm 37:4)
When we read this verse, it is natural to focus on the second part: “He will give you the desires of your heart.” That sounds good: God is going to give me all that I desire. Whatever I want, I will receive it. What we need to notice is that this is a conditional statement. Before God will give me the desires of my heart, there is something I must do first. I must “delight myself in the Lord.”
So, the first question is: Do I delight in the Lord? If we take a look at how we spend our time, how we spend our money, what we think about, does it demonstrate that we delight in the Lord, or does it show that we have many other things we delight in more? I sometimes wonder if when Christ returns and the sound of the trumpet coincides with the sound of the whistle for the opening kickoff of a Super Bowl, will there be those who say, “Catch you at halftime, Lord”? Where is our heart? What is it we delight in?
The amazing thing is that when we delight in the Lord, He does something remarkable. When God saves us, He takes away our heart of stone, a heart that delights in the things of the world, and gives us a heart of flesh, a heart that delights in Him and in the things of His kingdom. When we delight in the Lord, He changes the desires of our heart.
C. S. Lewis wrote: “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
We are far too easily pleased by the things of the world, things that are temporary, things that can’t satisfy. Delight yourself in the Lord, first, before all else. Then He will give you the desires of your heart, the desires of the heart that He will create in you, a heart that desires Him. Amen.
Pastor Haney
