Delight Yourself In the LORD

Psalm 37:4 says this: Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.

This has, at times, confused me, because it seems like a promise that is simply not always the case. I know plenty of people who love the Lord, and yet the things they desperately needed or wanted just did not come true. Why would God say this - that is we take delight in Him and love Him, we'll get the things we want? Why would He go about promising this kind of near-prosperity gospel when in fact "taking up our cross" to follow Him often includes often includes a hard bout of internal wrestling when we are denied the those desires of our hearts.

Recently, however, I was thinking about this verse when I felt the Lord tell me something about it. I think the truer message of this verse is this: if we actually learn to delight in the Lord, if we actually learn to live lives that find Him and His ways delightful, then the desires of our hearts will change into the things that He does give anyway. Rather than letting delight in the Lord become a form of payment with which we try to purchase the things we want, delighting in Him changes us into people who desire the things He gives. He doesn't start giving, we start learning to truly yearn for the right things. This doesn't mean that we will never want specific things in our lives or that, if we do want worldly things, somehow we haven't arrived yet at the platform of actually loving Him. But I do think that it means that the end-of-the-day things we want the most are the things of Heaven that actually matter.

For me, C.S. Lewis put this idea the best, as he always, always does."It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort; it's not the sort of comfort they supply there."

I often find myself frustrated with God because I feel like He promised to give me the things I desire and yet, sometimes, they just aren't there. But I think the thing that needs to change is not God's business of giving. He was giving, quite literally, before we were born. He is always, unrelentingly, in the business of giving. We just haven't learned to want the right things. Delighting ourselves in the Lord is not the way to make Him give the things we want, but the way to learn how to want the things He gives.