“Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” (Psalm 37:4)
I have always thought Psalm 37:4 was one of those wonderfully dangerous verses to pull out all by itself. “He shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” Well now let’s see… I just happen to have a few.
Most of us probably do. There are things we have prayed about for years, things we quietly hope God will do, doors we would love to see open, circumstances we would gladly hand Him a detailed set of instructions for changing. We may not actually call them instructions, of course. We are far too spiritual for that. We call them “prayer requests.” But sometimes our prayers can become remarkably specific. Lord, here is what I would like You to do, here is how I think You should do it, and if You could take care of it somewhere in the vicinity of Tuesday, that would be wonderful.
Then along comes Psalm 37:4, and if we are not careful, it can sound suspiciously like divine authorization for the whole arrangement. God said He would give me the desires of my heart, didn’t He?
He did. But lately I have been wondering whether I have spent too much time looking at the second half of that verse and not nearly enough time looking at the first: “Delight thyself also in the LORD.” That comes before the desires, and I don’t think the order is accidental. You cannot spend time with God, live in His Word, talk with Him, surrender things to Him, be corrected by Him, and walk with Him day after day without something inside you beginning to change. Eventually, that has to reach what you want too.
I think we can sometimes have a rather peculiar idea about surrender. If I really want something, surrendering it to God must mean preparing myself to lose it. If I want to go left, God will surely say right. If I love doing one thing, He will probably call me to something else. And heaven forbid I become genuinely excited about an opportunity, because now I had better prepare myself for the door to slam shut.
Certainly God does ask us to surrender things. There are things I may sincerely want that are not good for me, and there are perfectly innocent things that still may not be part of His plan for my life. But does that mean everything I want is automatically suspicious?
Paul says something in Philippians that makes me think otherwise: “For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). I have read that verse plenty of times, but those two little words—to will—are easy to hurry past. God works not merely in what I eventually do, but somewhere farther upstream, where wanting begins.
That makes Psalm 37:4 much more interesting to me. What if God giving me the desires of my heart is not always a matter of Him handing me something my heart already wanted? What if sometimes He is involved in shaping the desire itself?
Psalm 40:8 seems to leave room for exactly that: “I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart.” Most of us know what reluctant obedience feels like. We obey because we know God is right while some little part of us is still looking backward at what we wanted. Sometimes faithfulness simply means obeying anyway. But this verse describes something deeper. God’s will has reached the heart so thoroughly that obedience has become a delight.
Jesus said something similar that could sound almost reckless if we stopped halfway through the sentence: “Ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.” That’s quite a promise, except Jesus first said, “If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you…” (John 15:7).
There is something happening before the asking. If Christ’s words are abiding in me, they are correcting things, teaching me, rearranging priorities I was quite comfortable with, and showing me places where selfishness had dressed itself up as wisdom. Little by little, the person doing the asking is not quite the same person who began. It makes sense that some of the asking would change too.
Of course, that doesn’t mean every strong desire came from God. My heart is perfectly capable of manufacturing its own ideas and then becoming remarkably creative about finding divine confirmation for them. Scripture still has the final word. If something contradicts God’s Word, I don’t need another sign. I already have my answer. And even when something is perfectly consistent with Scripture, surrender means I am willing to let God say yes, no, wait, or something I hadn’t considered.
But this is where it gets interesting to me. What happens when a desire has been prayed over, surrendered, tested by Scripture, and carried quietly before God—and it remains?
Sometimes we pray, “Lord, if this is not from You, take the desire away,” and over time He does. Something we once desperately wanted simply loses its hold upon us. Nothing dramatic necessarily happens. We just discover one day that we can release it, and looking back we realize God had been changing our hearts long before our circumstances changed.
But sometimes the opposite happens. The closer we walk with God, the stronger a particular burden becomes. The more we pray, the more deeply we care. Scripture does not extinguish it but seems to give it direction. Time does not weaken it but seems to refine it. What began as an interest may deepen into a conviction, or a small desire may grow into something we can hardly imagine not doing.
I think we need to leave room for God to work that way too. Surrender does not mean distrusting every desire simply because it brings us joy. The God who orders our steps is also capable of shaping the heart that takes those steps.
And suddenly I am back where David started: “Delight thyself also in the LORD.” The more I think about it, the more I realize the safest place for my desires is not under constant examination but in a heart that is staying close to God. If He becomes my delight, I can ask boldly and still surrender honestly. I can hope without demanding. I can walk toward an open door without assuming God owes me whatever is on the other side. And if He redirects me, I still have Him.
Maybe that is what I had been missing in Psalm 37:4. I kept reading it as though the great question was whether God would give me what my heart wanted. But while I am delighting in Him, remaining in His Word, and placing my plans before Him with an open hand, He is doing something much closer to home.
He is working on the heart that is doing the wanting.
And somehow that makes “he shall give thee the desires of thine heart” an even lovelier promise than I thought it was.
If this Fireside Chat warmed your spirit and sparked fresh resolve to live what you believe, fan that flame with Scripture—“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Colossians 3:16). Pull a little closer to the Light, and carry it into the week ahead.
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