PLEASING GOD
Delight Yourself in the Lord
Lee Warren
CBN.com –
Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give
you the desires of your heart. -- Psalm 37:4
I gave birth to my son at the age of seventeen,” Cindy
recently told me. “Holding him in my arms, I wept. ‘It’s
just you and me,’ I told him, caressing his tiny head. His
father abandoned us four months before this miracle entered the
world. My hunger to be loved overwhelmed me.”
Have you ever felt like Cindy? I have. In the midst of my turmoil,
I’ve often turned to Psalm 37:4 and meditated on it. I love
the idea of God giving me the desires of my heart, but that promise
has a condition—delight myself in the Lord. That’s
the hard part of the verse—the place where I have to ask
myself whether I am truly delighting myself in the Lord.
One day I wondered how the Bible defined “delighting”
myself in the Lord. I knew it wasn’t an abstract concept.
Two verses that I found helped me to know if I was really delighting
myself in the Lord or not:
Psalm 40:8
“I delight to do Your will, O my God, and Your law is
within my heart” (NKJV).
Romans 7:22
For in my inner being I delight in God’s law.
How do we delight ourselves in the Lord? By doing what pleases
him and putting his law in our hearts. Then, as we are sanctified,
he gives us the desires of our heart. Here’s how Matthew
Henry put it: “He has not promised to gratify all the appetites
of the body and the humours of the fancy, but to grant all the
desires of the heart, all the cravings of the renewed sanctified
soul. What is the desire of the heart of a good man? It is this,
to know, and love, and live to God, to please him and to be pleased
in him.” *
Imagine what our desires would be and how God would meet them
if we spent more time on the first part of Psalm 37:4 than the
last part.
Digging Deeper into Psalm 37:4
1. How have you dealt with your longing for love?
2. Describe your thoughts when reading Psalm 37:4 in the past.
3. After looking at two other Scripture verses about delighting
ourselves in the Lord, and after reading Matthew Henry’s
quote, how have these helped you better understand Psalm 37:4?
4. What can you do to delight yourself in the Lord?
5. How do you think your desires will be different if you do
the things you listed in the previous question?
Excerpted from Single
Servings: 90 Devotions to Feed Your Soul by Lee Warren.
Used by permission of Fleming H. Revell, a division of Baker Publishing
Group, copyright © 2005. All rights to this material are
reserved. Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations
for retrieval, published by other media, or mirrored at other
sites without written permission from Baker Publishing Group.
Visit the publisher's Web site at www.BakerPublishingGroup.com.
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