Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.  Psalm 37:4

     As a counselor, much of my time is spent listening to people’s desires. They come asking how they can get what they want. It’s not necessarily bad. They are asking for help, seeking growth, getting advice on how to do things better. But it comes down to desire. I get it. I want many things, too. Many.

     God understands and, like a loving Father, cares about our desires and longs to meet our needs. But there is a condition to this verse: delight yourself in the Lord. We don’t focus so much on that, do we?

     A woman came to see me to help her decide whether to continue her relationship with a man she had hoped to marry, but the relationship was not going well. She wanted him to do specific things before she would commit her life to him. In retaliation, he came the next week. He complained about how she pressured him to do certain things and how she didn’t let him to have the freedom to make his own choices. He said “I’m a guy—I do guy stuff. She doesn’t seem to understand. She just wants to be with me all the time, cuddle, wants to know where I am. She gets mad when I want to go hang out with my buddies or spend weekends hunting.”

     I said, “Just like you want to be a guy and do ‘guy stuff,’ she is a girl. She wants girl stuff. She wants to be pursued and romanced and shown that she’s important—the things you did at the beginning of the relationship.” He responded, “You mean, I have to do all that stuff for the rest of my life?!” (I am not making this up.)

     His self-centeredness kept him from delighting. So did hers. They didn’t remember what brought them together in the first place. Both of them were focused on desires. Neither of them was focused on delight.

     Isn’t this how we do our relationship with God? We forget what brought us to our knees in the first place: God’s redeeming act of love offered freely to us through His grace. We couldn’t believe His free offer of salvation in the face of our unworthiness.

     But now we say “God, You said You would give me my desires.” The condition? Delight in Him.         

     The first great commandment is to love God with all our hearts, souls, minds and strength. It’s not a burden but a rescue. When we don’t look to God as our true life, our desire for Him spills over into our other desires giving them an ultimacy and urgency they were never intended to bear.

     We become desperate, grasping, and arranging--worrying over all kinds of things, and they end up ruling us. Our desires become insatiable because we’ve taken our longing for the Infinite and placed it upon finite things. –(John Eldredge, Journey of Desire)

     Only as we truly delight in God, is it safe to give us our desires, for then they are not likely to become idols. Worship is the act of the abandoned heart adoring its God. It is the act of delighting in Him.

*What is one thing you can do to begin to delight in God?

My Father in heaven, when I think of You I have peace and joy. I can rest and rejoice. I feel safe and secure. You are loving and good. You are faithful and true. All of these things give me delight in You. My I turn my heart and my thoughts to You more often, so that I realize all my desires are met in You!



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