Desires of your heart

Psalm 37:4

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

John 15:7

"If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you."

I haven't thought about these verses and others like it in a long time, but today the pastor at the church I went to spoke about business, happiness, and how we live our lives and he quoted psalm 37:4 which got me thinking about it. For a lot of people these verses are serious stumbling blocks because people think that what they want and what they pray is right.

Most people associate prayer with bringing requests before God. They ask God to heal this person or help them achieve something or they just ask for his blessing. None of these things are necessarily bad, but the problem is with the expectations that come with prayer, largely because of the verses above. We expect God to bless us, to give us certain things, like we deserve it. Pastor Aaron spoke on this once. He used the example of when he was student teaching. He once gave one kid in his class a small bag of candy, and all the other kids in the class got upset. Why? The candy wasn't theirs. He didn't take it away from them to give to the other kid. He didn't tell them they were going to all get candy. They assumed they would get some, that they deserved some.

The second and far more serious problem with our prayer lives and these verses is our tainted perception. We assume that because we read our bible every day, go to church, support missions, pray, and all that jazz that we are delighting in the Lord and remaining in His word. While all those things certainly are important and have there place in ways that we exercise our faith, they aren't our faith. Our faith is built on God. His mercy, His grace, His justice, His glory, everything about him. Our part in our faith is the complete and total submission and trust in Him. Anything else is for exercising that faith and learning more about it and about God. Who is prayer for? Who benefits from it? God? Or was prayer made for us. To comfort, encourage and challenge us. Under our normal, basic understanding of prayer(communication with God), God really doesn't have any need for it. He can communicate with us anyway he wants, and he already knows what we're going to say to him and what we're going to ask of him.

Anyways, that was all secondary thought to what the pastor said today and what caught my attention. He said that when we delight in God he gives us the desires of our hearts. That just blew me away. The fact that God would give us the desires of our hearts is just so incredible. If you're thinking that I'm talking about my wants and needs, that God gives us "the desires of our hearts" as in the stuff we want or things we want to see happen, you're wrong. God's gives us "the desire of our hearts" as in our actual desires. When we delight in God, He doesn't give us what we want. What we want changes to what He wants and has planned for us. I'll say it again. When we delight in God, He doesn't just give us what we want or think we want but He changes our desires to match His own. If He merely gave us what we wanted then it would be a lot harder to be satisfied and delight in God because we will always be able to come up with more things that we want or think we want. But God goes gives us His desires, so that we may be satisfied and find peace in our lives. Oh, how He loves us!

One final thought: Do you ever wonder why we rarely pray to Jesus and almost never pray to the Holy Spirit? We typically address God the Father. Why? Aren't they all God? All equal?

Because of his grace and for his glory.