Delights and Desires
Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this: He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, and the justice of your cause, like the noonday sun. Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes. (Psalm 37:3-7)
The next part of David’s poetic invitation to living a whole life in spite of life’s challenges, is this well-known but often misunderstood sentence.
Delight yourself in the Lord:
If there were an American Dream Version of the Bible this sentence would go something like: “Believe in the Lord, and he’ll make all your dreams come true.” That would be a gross misinterpretation of what it means to “delight” in the Lord, not to mention the promise of getting our heart’s desires. But let’s start with what it means to “delight” in him.
Remember, this is the man of whom it is said that he pursued the contents of the very heart of God. David knew what it meant to delight in the Lord. He knew that it pleased the Lord to create us in such a way that we would find our highest pleasure in pleasing him. John Owen said, “When the soul sees God…to be infinitely lovely and loving, rests upon and delights in him as such, then it has communion with him in love.”
Delight is commonly, if not always, reciprocal. Among friends, between a man and a woman, and between people and their God. When we tap into his delight in us (Zephaniah 3:17) we can hardly help but delight ourselves in him. “Earth has nothing I desire besides you,” said the poet-king in another place.
The Jerusalem Bible version translates it, “Make Him your only joy!” When he’s our principle joy, we have much less room for shallow joys. Unfortunately, we (and I mean all of us to some degree) have dulled our appetite for what is good, let alone for what is best. But when he’s our highest and truest joy, we lose our appetite for what is petty and trivial.
And he will give you the desires of your heart:
When we’ve tasted and seen that the Lord is good, our taste for what is truly good crowds out our appetite for what is not. Our palate changes. It matures when we take more than small bites, but constantly feed on his faithfulness.
Aged David assures us that the serendipitous consequence of “delighting in the Lord” is that our desires begin to change to match his desires. That is, when our delight is found in him, his desires become ours.
Ask a cross section of people who identify as “Christian” what they want from the Lord, and you’ll find a number who want him to give them something––a wife, a career, enough money for rent. All valid requests from a God who loves to supply our every need and give us good gifts. But is that all there is––believing in God for what he gives us? “God has put us within sight of the Himalayas of His glory in Jesus Christ,” said John Piper, “but we have chosen to pull down the shades of our chalet and show slides of Buck Hill—even in church.”
But you’ll also hear from others, who, though they ask for some of those same things, their first and foremost request is not so much something from him, but him. It’s not presents from God, but the presence of God that they long for most. They want to know him, to please him, to be with him, and someday to see him face to face. That is their greatest desire, the desire he programmed inside them.
He delights in us and we in him and his desires become ours.
[Next, he invites us to commit not only our desires but our direction to him…]
In the meantime, what or who is your utmost delight and supreme desire?
