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| Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. |
| —Psalm 37:4 |
Have you ever felt delight? Maybe you remember some time in your childhood when your parents gave you a special gift. You opened the package and felt such gratitude that a big smile of surprise creased your face and an expression of great joy escaped from your lips.
I remember one Christmas when I had asked for a very special toy. The toy was a robot sitting on top of a car. I could move the helmet on the robot’s head forward and underneath were buttons I could slide up or down in order to control the pattern the car would follow when I turned on the power switch. The robot sitting on the car was about 12-inches tall and the car was probably 7-inches wide and 15-inches long. So, this was a rather large toy.
Because we were quite poor, I later had a strong sense that my parents had saved over a very long period of time so that they could buy this toy for me. I look back on that experience from a vantage point of 65 years later with a certain amazement that my parents loved me so much that they would make such a sacrifice.
Even more, when I think back over all the days of my life, I feel enormous gratitude that God loved me so much that He sent His one and only Son, Jesus, to become a human, to suffer on the cross of Calvary, to die, and to rise again, so that in Christ”s suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension He has redeemed me—paid the penalty for my sins and given me an eternal home in heaven.
As if that great gift of God’s unfailing love was not enough, as the verse at the beginning of this blog post declares, God has taught me through the words of King David that if I delight myself in the Lord, He will give me what my heart desires.
Now I realize that this verse has a very clever meaning. On the one hand, it means exactly what it declares. But, it also indicates that if I delight in the Lord, He will place into my heart those desires that please Him.
In other words, in our obedience to God, He will transform our desires from ones that are rooted in our earthly, selfish mindsets into desires that honor Him and give Him glory. That, my dear ones, is a wonderful, wonderful reality, It is a reality in which we can and should live.
