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Delight

The Desires of Our Heart: Delight Yourself in the Lord

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“Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.”

Psalm 37:3-4 seems a little short and simple to study for a full week, but the longer I sit with these two verses, the more I’m finding new troves of treasure in each of them. Truthfully, I find myself focusing on that last part – the Lord giving me the desires of my heart – with much more excitement and passion than I feel in the instructions before those words. I spend so much time chasing a calling or a desire of my heart, that I forget the instructions he has so beautifully laid out before me: Trust in Me. Do good. Dwell in the land. Befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in Me. 

I’d love to spend this week together turning our attention to those things and seeing how the Lord transforms and grants us the desires of our hearts when we put things in their right order.

 

Delight Yourself in the Lord

Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Psalm 37:4

FridayMany times in life I’ve gotten this verse backwards. I’ve believed that getting the desires of my heart would cause me to delight in the Lord. I’ve thought that getting what I want will nudge me closer to the Lord, and I would measure the strength of my relationship with the Lord based on what I saw Him doing for me.

But this verse flips everything back to how it needs to be. We must delight in the Lord first. We must find our ever-present, ever-growing foundation of joy in Him and Him alone. And then He will give us the desires of our hearts.

The funny thing about doing this the right way – delighting in the Lord first – is that oftentimes it changes the desires of our heart. Finding our joy in the Lord first changes our hearts to be more responsive to His.

Delighting in the Lord frames and changes our desires to look more and more like His desires. My desire to travel and see the world has been constantly refined into a desire to follow where the Lord may lead me to be a reflection of Him. He delights to give us what we desire because we begin to desire the same things that He desires for us. Delighting in the Lord looks a lot like seeking Him first, over all things. It’s looking to Him in good and bad, and holding fast to His promises and the joy of our salvation.

He is the only place that our joy is secure and complete, and remaining faithful to that allows us to pursue Him in the pursuit of our heart’s desires.

I encourage you – “Trust in the Lord and do good. Dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

Chelsey

My Identity: What does God say about me?: Delightful

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In 2 Corinthians 5:17 the Bible reads that we are “new creations” if we are followers of Christ. Have you ever wondered about the way God feels about you? We can be very hard on ourselves at times. We often struggle with our identity. This week, we’ll turn to God’s Word to find out how He views us and how we can find our identity in Him.

 

Delightful

 

“The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”

Zephaniah 3:17, NIV

5_Delightful_FRIDAYHow does God feel about you? Does He think about you? These are questions that Scripture answers for us. Even though I often feel that God is too busy being the God of the Universe to worry about the details of my life, the truth of the Bible contradicts those feelings.

Today’s verse is one of my all-time favorites and one that God has used in my life many times. According to this verse, God takes great delight in you. He even rejoices over you with singing. It seems a little backwards to me. We sing to God and worship Him, which is appropriate since He is worthy of our praise. But God delights in us so much that he rejoices over us with singing. How wonderful!

God sees you as delightful. There are other verses that corroborate this idea as well:

“He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me.” 

Psalm 18:19, NIV

“For the Lord takes delight in his people; he crowns the humble with victory.” 

Psalm 149:4, NIV

God also thinks about you. For each grain of sand on the whole earth, God has a thought about you:

“How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered! I can’t even count them;

they outnumber the grains of sand!”

Psalm 139:17-18, NLT

It’s important for us to understand that we are a source of delight to God. As children of God, our identity is secure. In return, God desires for us to seek Him first and delight in Him. He wants us to choose Him. Once we understand how much we are treasured by God, why wouldn’t we want this loving companion as our Lord? He’s the One who will love you without ceasing.

I pray this week’s Daily Doses of Encouragement have been a helpful reminder of your identity and great worth in the eyes of God. Remember, you are loved, forgiven, known, beautiful, and delightful to God.

Seeking Him,

Allison