Sunday, February 4, 2018

God’s Will and our Desire - Psalm 37:4 and 1 Samuel





Psalm 37:4 
"Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart."

Guidance is a subject I have been wanting to talk about for some time, but the Holy Spirit hadn’t given me permission. I originally had an outline of what I was going to say, but somehow, I never felt the time was right. Now, I begin to see why God never let me speak on the subject. I’m learning that the subject of guidance is much bigger than I ever imagined.  

We usually associate finding God’s will with big decisions—taking a job, getting married, obeying a call to the mission field, etc. But guidance really isn’t about just the big decisions. It’s about how we live every day. If we only seek guidance for big things, we’ll miss it.  Discerning God’s will is something that we do every day and every moment. It’s learning to tell which of our feelings are from God and which originate from ourselves or some other spirit.

When Jesus said, “Follow Me,” He didn’t give the disciples a printed schedule of where they were supposed to be for the next three years. He gave them a command to walk with Him day by day. They didn’t need a calendar-- they only had to know at every moment where Jesus was, and stay close to Him.  That’s real guidance—to know where Jesus is all the time. 

There are three key words in daily guidance—desire, discern, and decide. Desire is the first and most important of the three. We must desire God and make our desires known.   

Psalm 37: 4 says, “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”  The word “delight” comes from the word meaning delicate or dainty. It means warm, tender feelings towards God. It’s that loving affection we have towards our wife, our children or out pet. “Desire” means what we really, really want. When God is our delight, and God delights in us, guidance is easy. God wants what we want, and we want what God wants.  But we must know that God loves us, and we must know our own desires. 

The problem with most of us is that we don’t know what we really want. This causes three problems. One problem is mistaking secondary desires for primary desires. Ask a homeless alcoholic what he desires, and he might say a fifth of scotch.  But if you give him that drink he will be even more miserable tomorrow. Ask a bored husband what he wants, and he might say a mistress, but he would hate himself tomorrow and probably ruin his hope for happiness at home. What we desire is not always apparent to us. But when God’s delight and our delight line up, then we are on the way to happiness, if not already there.  

The second mistake is mistaking lack of desire for sacrificial love. I once had a friend who was convinced God was leading her to the mission field, to a country where people ate bugs. She thought this because there was nothing more disgusting to her than eating bugs! She was sure that God was requiring her the ultimate sacrifice of herself, so she thought whatever He had for her had to be disgusting!

Discerning God’s will for your life doesn’t start with what you think you desire or don’t desire, but with learning how much God loves us and desires our happiness.

A third mistake is desiring from God without love. Before He grants the desire of our heart, we must ask in love, not coercion. 

This is not “name it and claim it.” I cannot demand my will from God based on a legalistic reading of some verse, as if I were suing God in court. God grants my desires out of delight, not rights. God doesn’t allow me to demand from Him, but he abundantly gives us what we ask, because he loves us. If there is something that will make us happier in the end, then He will gladly give us that instead. We do not demand from God—we do not have to demand. God already is on our side, and wants to give us everything. 

We see this in the Old Testament story of Hannah, Samuel’s mother, in 1 Samuel 1. 

Hannah was a young woman who was married to Elkanah--one of his two wives. Now we don’t practice polygamy today for a very good reason--it’s a stupid idea! It’s hard enough keeping one wife happy, let alone two, and it’s impossible to have two wives without jealousy. There’s not one case of polygamy in the Bible where everyone was happy!
Elkanah was a good man. He was very good to Hannah and gave her a double portion because she had no children. Even so, she desperately desired a child. 

The people around Hannah didn’t understand what her problem was. Elkanah was something of a jerk. He said to his wife “Aren’t I better than ten sons to you?” Men are always saying silly things like that to women. Was he so egotistical as to think that sharing a husband would satisfy her as well as having ten sons?

Elkanah was telling her what she ought to desire. People were always doing this to women of her time. Her father told her who she was to marry.  “Here, daughter, you are going to desire this man!”  He husbands said.  “if you can’t have children, so you should desire me even more!”   

Maybe the reason we don’t get what we desire from the Lord is because we haven’t been honest with ourselves about what we really desire. We’ve been told what we are supposed to want, but we haven’t told God what we really want.

In the movie The Runaway Bride, Julia Roberts plays a woman who was almost married several times. Every time she walked down the aisle, she panicked at the altar and ran away. Then one day, a friend asked her how she liked her eggs for breakfast. She didn’t know. Every fiancé she had liked his eggs differently, and she went along with what her fiancé wanted. If he liked scrambled eggs, she liked scrambled eggs. If he liked them poached, she liked poached. Then, she realized that she never knew how she liked them personally. Every time she married, she was ready to accept his desires as her own, giving up her individual desires in union with a man. What she really wanted in marriage was to be herself. She longed for a man who allowed her to be herself.

Ladies if you have ever felt this, I have good news for you! Such a man exists, and His name is Jesus!  When we delight in Him, He lets us be ourselves. The world forces us into molds, but Christ transforms us from the inside out.  He honors our desires and our personality.  We may not always get everything we want from the Lord, but He always hears our desires and works with our desires to give us more than we can imagine. 

The psalmist says, “Delight yourself in the Lord.” The word translated “delight’ means be tender or delicate. It doesn’t just mean obey, but to have a gentle, tender and delicate relationship, like a slow dance with the woman we love. Following Jesus is an invitation to a relationship, to a slow dance where one partner moves with the other. And (like any good husband) He listens to your desires and seeks to meet them.

Most people are afraid to make their desires known, so they censor them. Hannah could have prayed. “God, it would be nice to have a child, any child, but I know that you are always good, and I know I’m supposed to honor Elkanah, so just let me believe that my husband is as good as ten sons.”  That’s what a polite, cordial person would have prayed. But instead she owned up to her desires and laid before God her passion and pain. “O Lord of hosts, if you will indeed look on the affliction of your servant and remember me and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a son,” In other words, “God, give me a baby—and make it a boy!”

We’re too gentle in our prayers, because we have accepted the lie that God expects from us a barren cordiality before Him. Sometimes the church seems to encourage dispassionate prayers. Eli, the priest personifies this squelching of spiritual desire.  Eli had a wrong idea in his mind about how much passion was “right” and “proper” before this. Anything more than normal must mean that the poor woman is either crazy or drunk. God doesn’t want so much passion in church.
With this kind of attitude, it comes as no surprise, that Eli’s children Hophni and Phinehas, never had much passion for God. They eventually became great hypocrites in God’s service. Their relationship to God was no more than a job, without passion or sincerity.

 In much teaching on prayer, it appears we are teaching people not to pray our desires, but to accept without question what others think to be impossible. We pray “God’s will be done,” before we ever dare reveal our will. We think God doesn’t care to know our desires. For fear of offending God, we fail to make our will known even to ourselves. Our relationship to God degenerates into passionless cordiality. Like Ralphie in The Christmas Story, we ask for a football when we really want a Red Ryder BB Gun!

Hannah is not satisfied being poor old helpless Hannah. She goes to God honestly and openly, letting Him know what she really wants. She seeks God with passion and desire. 

Hannah had a boy, but she didn’t raise him.  She gave her son Samuel to Eli the priest. In time, he became a prophet—one who dwells in union with the living God. Eli’s natural children. Eli’s own children, Hophni and Phinehas, never knew God, and became famous scoundrels later. But it is the child of the woman who took delight in God, who desired God, who grew to anoint two kings and begin the prophetic movement that led to John the Baptist and Jesus. 

 “Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desire of your heart.” Christ died on the cross for you, so you could have a relationship with Him based on mutual delight and mutual desire.  He wants you to ask, because He delights in seeing you happy. 

If you want to know what God wants for you, first know what you want from God. Ask-don’t be shy. No real relationship can be sustained by the denying feelings. We must ask, to receive, seek to find, and knock to have the doors of God’s delights—of our delights—be opened. 






 




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