Ps. 37:4- Delight yourself in the LORD;
And He will give you the desires of your heart.
This little verse is filled with great spiritual treasures. It all really starts with the first part of this verse, “Delight yourself in the Lord”. This phrase is the very heart of our Christian faith. The natural man thinks that true spirituality is about denying our desires rather than pursuing them. Pursuing pleasure is part of the nature of all of God’s creatures. Pursuing pleasure is not evil, its just that man’s fallen nature has distorted our pursuit, in other words our fallen nature is finding pleasure in the wrong places. David got it right when he said to delight or find pleasure in the Lord. The problem is this, its not possible to change what we delight in, that is the mystery of true conversion. Delighting in God is a guarantee that you have been born again. The very things we desire have been changed by the new birth. Here is how C.S. Lewis described this.
“The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is “meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Understanding this truth, delighting in God, is revolutionary. Instead of trying so hard to do the right things we are fully released to pursue pleasure with all of our might. The catch is that our pleasures have been changed by the miraculous work of God in our souls. We are now pleasure seekers, its just that we find our pleasure in the Lord.
1 thought on “DELIGHT OF MY HEART”
“Understanding this truth, delighting in God, is revolutionary.” We are told to “ask” but most unfortunately, too often He becomes moved to our back burner. We are told to “seek” but this too, prioritizing daily reading with purpose, the Word and wisdom encounters are given a few minutes or seconds. We are told to “knock”, to me this means where we go, place to place, house to house, we enter with a God purpose, a God unveiling and everything else is taken care of by the Lord.