Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.
Desires. We all have them. For many of us, our desires are a healthy and natural part of life. We have our innate desires for food and drink. We desire relationships and community. We have desires for purpose and value.
For many of us, though, our desires bring with them feelings of anguish and despair. Desires of selfishness and pride. Desires of lust and covetousness. Desires of idolatry and isolation. Desires that plague the heart and torment the mind.
Knowing the power of desire, this verse was hard to understand. It was hard to wrap my mind around the idea of God granting our desires, for to give us the desires of our heart would be a very dangerous thing. It’s silly that I often question such things. It’s almost as though sometimes I read the bible in expectation of a flaw, of a mistake, of something that just doesn’t add up. And when I feel like I’ve found it, I read on...and God totally blows my expectation away.
You see, God’s granting of our desires is contingent upon one thing: delighting in Him. That one thing is the foundation upon which everything else is laid. For when God becomes our delight, our entire world begins to shift- with its dreams, its hopes, its plans and its desires.
When God becomes our delight, our desires take on a whole new meaning. When God becomes our delight, we find that our original desires somehow seem to slowly dim. When God becomes our delight, a funny thing happens. He somehow takes all of our desires, and draws them to Himself. He becomes our desire.
When God becomes our delight, we can rest easy- for the desires that used to haunt us, the desires that used to seek to destroy us, the desires that used to nag at our minds and tug at our hearts- they now belong to Him. When God becomes our delight our desires become like a compass, leading us closer to Him. When God becomes our delight, we can finally trust our heart’s desires, because He has placed them there. They are His.
May we, Christians, seek to delight in nothing other than our Lord. May we allow Him to conform our hearts and our minds to His purpose. May we allow Him to become the foundation upon which all of our desires are built. May He then take away our human desires and place in us the desires of our hearts. May His desires become our heart’s desires. And may we then learn to trust our desires, allowing our desires to lead us into His will. His good, pleasing, and perfect will.
Lord, you alone are worth delighting in. Grant us the grace to delight in you today.
Yes!
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