God's Will
I had a long talk with a friend yesterday who was contemplating life, and she was asking me how I figured out God’s will for my own life! I kind of chuckled at her, thinking to myself, “She’s asking me?!” I have been where she is before, thinking that God has this specific roadmap written out for my life, and for fear that I may make the wrong turn, I become immobilized and don’t do anything… or I just wait for Him to miraculously tell me what I should do through signs and wonders. “OK God, if the phone rings within the next ten minutes, then I’ll know You want me to do this.” Five minutes later, the phone rings and I wonder, “Was that really from the Lord or was it just a coincidence?!” Oh, the foolish games we play (or maybe I’m the only one who has played that game)!
A verse that my friend brought up and shared her frustration with me was, “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.” (Psalm 37:4). I think we often look at verses like this and Matthew 7:7, which says “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”, and think that God is some genie and will give us whatever we want. Yet when He doesn’t, we think that we must be the exception to the rule. Of course that is not true, and what we are missing is the preface of that verse that says, “Delight yourself in the Lord”. So what does it mean to delight yourself in something? According to Roget’s New Millennium Thesaurus, some synonyms for “delight in” are: admire, cherish, feast on, indulge in, revel in, savor… and there were others, but those were my favorites. If I am going to indulge in anything, I am going to put forth all my energy towards that thing, whether it be an activity or a person. To delight in the Lord means I’m going to love on Him, I’m going to indulge in His Word, I’m going to revel in His Spirit, and simply become intimate with Him. When we do this, a funny thing happens. All of the sudden our eyes are no longer fixed on our wants and desires… but they are totally fixed on Him, and all of the sudden the desires of my heart align with His. Therefore, it is not until we are in a state in which we are delighting in Him... that His ways become our ways... that the things that burden Him, burden us.