"Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart." – Psalm 37:4 (MEV)
To delight in God is one of the central themes of the Bible, following after God's great plan of salvation. We're told to delight ourselves in God, for when we do He will satisfy us and grant us the desires of our hearts. Do you want to delight yourself in God?
Delighting in God
To delight in something means to be greatly pleased with or be extremely satisfied with something. Thus, when the Bible says we are to delight in God, we are to find our greatest joy, satisfaction, and pleasure in Him. Yes, far beyond any other source of these, God is to be our ultimate, it not sole, reason for happiness.
For some, the idea of making God as the source of happiness means spending a lot of time in church. For others, it's having meaningful conversations containing or centered on the Word of God. Still for others, it's about doing good things in obedience to the Lord's command to love our neighbor as ourselves.
All of the three are great ideas, but I hope to share one way to delight in God that I would consider the best. Are you ready? Here it is:
To deny yourself and live for Christ.
Trading it all for God
Friends, it's normal for all of us to have dreams and aspirations. It's perfectly normal for us to have wants and desires. It's also perfectly normal and acceptable for us to work hard for the good things we so desire, things that we can use for the glory of God and the betterment of our lives and the lives of the people around us.
We have to understand, though, that if we want to live the "normal" life we will not be able to truly experience the delight of having God as the only source of joy for us. We must desire to live a life that enjoys nothing but God and God Himself.
We need to realise that there's nothing and no one more beautiful and more precious than God Himself, and to delight in Him means being willing to trade worldly joys and happiness for Him.
Let's consider what Jesus said in Matthew 13:45-46,
"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it."
Let's also consider what Paul said in Philippians 3:8-9,
"Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him..."
Follow Him more than anything else
It's really simple, friends. If we want God to grant the desires of our hearts, we must make Him the only desire of our heart. He is the only one worth living and dying for, the God who loved us so much that He gave His one and only begotten Son to us and for us to be His.
"For the love of Christ constrains us, because we thus judge: that if one died for all, then all have died. And He died for all, that those who live should not from now on live for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again." (2 Corinthians 5:14-15)
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