Psalm 37:4
“Delight yourself in the
Lord,
and
he will give you the desires of your heart.”
This verse is a tricky one, possibly hard to grasp for some
and is a dangerous one to quote undoubtedly.
But what does this verse really mean?
Does delighting in the Lord make all my dreams come true?
Is this another one of those “magic eight-ball-rub-the-lamp-
three wishes” verse?
Let’s take a look.
“Delight
yourself in the Lord…”
First let’s look at what the word delight actually means:
“ a strong feeling of happiness”
“a high degree of gratification”
“a great pleasure or satisfaction”
-Webster dictionary
To take delight in the Lord means to hold Him in the highest
regard; to be satisfied with his presence and ways about your life even when it
seems his hands are removed from your circumstances or they are quite obviously
holding your world together.
Having this attitude and taking true delight in the Lord
takes a large amount of faith.
It is sometimes hard because it often removes things from
out lives that we very much enjoy even if that thing isn’t necessarily sinful.
When we abandon
something out of delight for the Lord, we are putting faith in Him that His
reward is going to be worth it. Sometimes though, our abandonment doesn’t have
immediate, visible, or tangible reward.
This lack of “reward” can sometimes lead to bitterness
towards God.
This feeling is stems from the fact that we are psychologically
conditioned to receive a reward by the circumstances in our life in which God has
provided immediate joy in following Him, basically a spiritual “high”.
It is when the reward or the “high” doesn’t happen that we
become uncomfortable and untrusting.
Continued prayer and continued delight in the light, whether
your prayer is answered or not is what produces genuine faith.
Throughout this process of chasing after the Lord, if your
motivation isn’t clearly set, you will burn
out.
If you are delighting in the Lord only to get what YOUR
heart desires, I am afraid you are missing the point altogether.
Last time I checked, my God didn’t fit into a genie lamp
Our motivation after the Lord should reflect the way that he
loves us:
Unconditionally.
When you delight in the Lord with emphasis on the reward in
the background, you are using the thought of delighting in the Lord to somehow
hope to gain what you want.
Ummm… so what about that thing I desire? What do I do to get
that?
If
you are delighted in the Lord, then
by definition you should be satisfied
with the Lord.
When we encounter the Gospel, a heart change takes place.
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a
new creation.
The old has passed away;
behold the new has come” 2 Corinthians 5:17 (ESV)
With this heart change, our motivations and desires change
because, if our heart belongs to him, in our delight, our heart should burn
with desire for him to have his way with us and give us more of him!
We
get the desires of our heart when we delight in the Lord because the Lord IS our heart’s desire!
What
this verse is NOT:
-
A hope that we can gain our fleshly desires
“For those who live according to the flesh
set their minds on things of the flesh,
but
those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on things of the spirit”
Romans 8:5
-
It’s not “try and be good and you get what you
want”
-
It’s not “want me because I can get you cool
stuff”
“For my
thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways declares the
Lord.
For as the Heavens are higher than the
earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your
thoughts.” Isaiah 55:9-8
Praise God that I don’t get what
my fleshly heart desires.
As much as you could want something,
eventually you would end up with a life full of stuff you would regret.
With Christ, there is joy and
satisfaction in delighting in him.
There may not be much up front; in
fact it will probably become more difficult at times…
But delighting in the Lord means
that we are constantly delighting in the fact that we aren’t living for reward
on this earth;
He’s coming back.
