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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