Delighting In The Lord

Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. Take delight 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. - Psalm 37:3-5

Considering the fact that Psalm 37:4 is likely one of the most frequently quoted verses in Scripture, I heard this verse for the first time at a very young age. And to be honest, I pretty much zoned in on the “he will give you the desires of your heart” portion of the verse and gave little thought to the rest of the passage. So as I got older and experienced the pain and disappointment that came from unfulfilled desires and unmet expectations, you can imagine my frustration, because God wasn’t seeming to hold up His end of the bargain.

But I had it all wrong.

In order for us to receive the desires of our heart, we must first delight in the Lord. Let’s take a quick look at how the word “delight” is defined. As a verb, delight means "to take great pleasure or to give keen enjoyment." As a noun, it means “a high degree of gratification or pleasure; joy; extreme satisfaction.”

All of those amazing words - pleasure, joy, satisfaction, gratification, enjoyment - all point to one word: delight. That means, when we read Psalm 37:4, we are being commanded to take great pleasure in the Lord. We are being told to find extreme satisfaction in Him, to enjoy Him, and to experience gratification because of Him. And when we do, then we will receive the desires of our heart.

Now, what’s important to understand here is that what you think are the desires of your heart, and what your heart actually desires deep down, are oftentimes two different things. For instance, you may have a strong desire to be married. But deep down, you’re really wanting love, acceptance, and companionship. Maybe you’re wanting a strong community of friends. But in actuality, you’re looking for encouragement, accountability, and support. Or maybe you want more than anything to land your dream job. But what your heart is really craving is a sense of purpose.

My point? What you think you want isn’t always what you actually want. The good news is, your Heavenly Father knows you better than you know yourself. Therefore He knows what your heart's true desires are. And to take it one step further, He knows that the only way for you to get those desires met is to delight yourself in Him.

I firmly believe that is why Psalm 37:4 is written not as a suggestion, but rather as a commandment. “(You) take delight,” David writes. It’s a statement written with authority and assurance. Perhaps David wrote it this way because he learned that human beings (yes, even those who follow Christ), don’t tend to take their delight in God when life is hard, when they’re afraid, when their tired of the view from their windows, or when they’re discontent from what they don’t have. So we have to be told to find our joy and satisfaction in the Lord, so that we don’t try to look for it in something or someone else.

Thankfully, once we begin to make a habit of delighting in the Lord, we start to receive the true desires of our heart, even though they might look different than what we originally thought we wanted. One of my mentors said it best when she said, “My guess is, we’re going to be surprised to see how different our desires look in the light of delighting in God from how they appeared when our delight was taken in lesser things. And we’re going to be so grateful He did not give us our lesser desires, even though we would have sworn those were the things that would do the trick.”

To sum it up, here’s what I want you to remember: as long as you try to find delight in your own plans and expectations, your heart’s desires are never going to be fulfilled. But if instead you take delight in the Lord, if you learn to find satisfaction and joy in Him, He will give you what your heart is truly craving.