Wednesdays in the Word: Delight is Not Magic

 

If you’re just jumping into the blog for the first time in a while, you might not know that this year, I’m feasting on the words of Psalm 37. Each week I’m looking at one verse, and this week we’re ready for verse 4. This is one of the famous verses of the Bible, often extracted straight out of the larger text and claimed as a promise for blessings abundant.

                The verse says: Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.

                And I feel like most people look at that verse like this: Put on a good show and make God think you’re totally fine, and He’ll give you exactly what you want.

                That’s not what it means. Not even a little bit.

                First of all, this sentence is part of a larger thought. If you go back to the start of this Psalm, you’ll remember that it starts by an urging to stop fretting and being envious of those engaged in evil and wrong behavior.

                We all know that anytime you remove or stop a behavior, you need to replace it with something else. You can’t just have empty space, or you’ll run right back to the thing you’re trying to stop. So if you need to stop fretting and envying, you should do something else with all that time you once devoted to fretting and envying.

                What should that something else be? Well, last week we learned it should start with trusting God, doing good, and dwelling with Him.

                AND IF YOU DO THAT, you will naturally “delight yourself in the Lord.” I read in a study note that “delight implies a deep, abiding pleasure and commitment…a softness and pliability, keeping your heart open to God’s influence.”

                Delighting yourself in the Lord is not a magic manipulation to trick God into making all your wishes happen. Delighting yourself in the Lord is about building on the trust and dwelling/abiding you read about in the thought just before this one.

                And if you truly, genuinely delight yourself in the Lord, placing your focus on the things HE wants you to think about, then He will give you the desires of your heart, because those will be the desires of His heart too.

                God isn’t signing up to drop a pony on your porch, just because you have a fleeting craving to own one. He’s signing up to fulfill the desires of the heart that so fully and intricately in tune with HIS heart. The timing of that fulfillment might not be what you imagine. The unfolding of that fulfillment might not be what you dreamed. But both will be in perfect keeping with His plan, and because of that, it will be okay.

                So this delighting. It’s not magic. It’s not manipulation. It’s not a game. It’s the genuine response of a heart that longs to abide with the Lord.