God is Watching Over to Give Us The Desires of Our Hearts
Psalm 37:4 is an interesting promise, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” There are three very important words in this promise: delight, Lord, desires. When I think of “delighting,” I think of finding great pleasure in, giving great attention to, and enjoying. This promise tells us to DELIGHT in the Lord; to find our pleasure in Him, give our attention to Him and enjoy being with Him and following Him. The picture I have in my imagination is that of a child delighting in a parent, as she/he gazes in love upon the parent and laughs out loud at every thing the parent does to make the child happy. That child is not bothered about any other things at those moments, but is entirely taken up with pleasure in the parent’s presence.
This is the kind of delighting we as believers should have toward our dear Lord. We just want to be in His presence; we enjoy His life and words to our hearts; and we forget the time as we are literally basking in the light of His glory.
The promise says that if we have that kind of relationship with the Lord, then He will actually GIVE us the DESIRES of our hearts. Sometimes we may think that this promise is that if we go to church and try to be good, then we can have anything that our heart desires. But that is not the meaning of this promise. If we are enjoying the Presence of the Lord in our lives and delighting in Him and His relationship with us, then He actually will give us the desires in our hearts that we should have! As we delight, our desires began to change. Whereas before having sheer joy in the Presence of the Lord, our desires might have tended toward selfishness and an attachment to what this world values, but after learning to delight in Him, our actual desires become godly desires, and desires which please Him to give us and to work out in our lives.
The other important word in this promise is Lord. We delight in the LORD, and the LORD gives us the desires we should have so that He can bring them to pass. We are always dependent on our God to watch over us to give us the right desires, and therefore the right behavior. We thank You, Lord, that you are worthy of our delighting in You.
By Mary Fawcett