Delight In The Lord

Delight In The Lord

Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you your heart’s desires. –Psalm 37:4

For a long time I thought of Psalm 37:4 as the single person’s verse of hope. How many times have we heard this verse quoted to or by a single person and interpreted as, “If I just get close to God, then he’ll give me what I really want—a husband!” But if what we see in this verse is a formula for getting what we want from God, we’re settling for much less than what God is offering. God wants to change what we want. He wants to free us from the tyranny of wanting what will never completely satisfy us.

You see, God is not after an external change in our behavior; he wants an internal change in our affections. He wants to transform and redirect our most personal and passionate longings and then satisfy them fully. The truth is, he wants us to become total pleasure seekers who recognize that he is our greatest pleasure. Our problem is that we don’t always believe God is as good as he says he is. When we hear that he wants to give us himself, a part of us says to ourselves, That’s it? Just him? Honestly, I was hoping for more. But Jesus is so much better than we think he is, and this world is simply not as good as we think it is. We discover these truths as we deliberately delight in him. And when we do, we find ourselves running in his direction rather than being dragged toward him.

The truth is, most of my Christian life has been about duty instead of delight. I’m only beginning to discover what it means to delight in the Lord and to understand that, as John Piper says, “God is most glorified when I am most satisfied in him.” Understanding delight in the Lord is like a gift that has been given to me, and I hope to spend the rest of my life unwrapping and enjoying it. Because duty only gets us so far. Duty becomes a drain and leaves us dry. Duty is not enough to keep us clinging to God when the bottom falls out. But delighting in the Lord is like a refreshing spring in the desert. While duty will suck the life out of us, delight infuses us with life.

Can you see that God himself is the end of your search for what you want most, not the means to some further pleasure? Will you choose to delight in him even in your difficulty? Will you allow him to change what you want?

My greatest Delight, you are so much more pleasurable, so much more generous, than I have understood. Forgive my self-righteous sense of duty, and enjoy my ever-increasing delight in you.

DIGGING DEEPER