Delight Yourself in Him
Well as we go onto verse 4 of Psalm 37, we encounter one of my favourite verses of all. David writes: “Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” (Psalm 37:4 NIV11)
I’ve heard this verse applied in a way that I don’t think is right. Some people think – I love God, and so He promises in this verse to give me my greatest desire. And my greatest desire is to see so-and-so come to the Lord, or to get so-and-so. God’s going to do it!!
It’s a lovely thought, but I don’t believe that this is what David is teaching here. He’s not saying that whatever your deepest desire is, God will do it if you love Him.
God as Your Delight
What I am convinced he is saying is this: make God your delight. Make Him your deepest desire. Rejoice in Him with all your heart, and count Him as your greatest treasure and love, and then your heart will be full! If He is your deepest desire, then your heart will be satisfied by your relationship with Him.
Charles Spurgeon put it this way in his commentary on the Psalms: “Men who delight in God desire or ask for nothing but what will please God; hence it is safe to give them carte blanche.”
Or, to quote from a classic Nazarene author Clement J Carey, “The spiritual man has peculiarly and pre-eminently spiritual tastes. He has a relish for things godly, religious, and heavenly. He delights in the things of God as distinguished from the things of the earth. He is heavenly minded, his "conversation is in heaven," his citizenship is in heaven. The things of God appeal to his innermost nature, and his inward being responds involuntarily to everything distinctively spiritual. Just as there are appetites belonging to the physical man, so also are there appetites which are peculiar to the spiritual man. These appetites or inward desires were implanted within when he was made a new creature in Christ Jesus.”
Ask yourself today: do your deepest desires reflect a relish for God and an appetite for His glory? Or for worldly and temporary things?
Given Over to Desires
Here’s the thing, in the end, God does give people over to their desires. If sinful things are your greatest desires, and you pursue those, God gives you over to them, and they destroy you. But if God and His things are your deepest desires, He gives you over to that, and you end up getting the desires of your heart.
I pray that we who are born of God may submit our desires to Him. May our joy, our delight, our relish come from Him – nothing more, nothing less!
