720 Delight Comes Before Desire - Psalm 37:4

Have you ever noticed that it's a little backwards how we're supposed to delight the Lord? 

Let's talk about that today. Hi, it's Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me again today on the Follower of One podcast. We've been talking about Psalm 37 and we're in verse four today in the New American Standard Bible. It says "Delight yourself and the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart." 

One of the things that's always challenged me about this particular passage is our delight in the Lord comes first. We delight in the Lord first and He will give us the desires of our heart. Often we want the desires of our heart to be met, and then we expect to delight in the Lord, but what we find is the more we get, the more we want. The more we have, the more we want. Really the more we have, the easier we scare, and the easier it is to help us be afraid of what our circumstances is changing or something going wrong. We're called and we're reminded by the Psalmist here, which is David, we're reminded to put our delight in the Lord first. 

Almost every translation that I have says "take delight in the Lord" or "delight yourself in the Lord." What does that mean? When we enjoy our relationship with God, we take a few minutes and appreciate what God's doing in our lives. We realize that He meets the desires of our heart. Sometimes He does that after we've delighted in Him, sometimes He does it in a totally unrelated way. But if you remember, we're talking through the series because I'm tempted to fret. We talked about how we're not supposed to fret.  , I wanted to go through this passage, these first nine verses of Psalm 37, because I want to trust God. I wanna lean on Him more and relax in Him more, and so when I can focus on the Lord and take my delight in just knowing who He is, what He's capable of doing, and how He's taking care of me to date. When I do those things, then I experience the desires of my heart. I get more desires. God blesses me in ways that I never even thought of.

Often it's not material. Often, He blesses us by giving us things that we didn't even know we wanted. I tend to think in physical terms. I want more money, more time, more rest, more ease, or more comfort, but the desires of my heart are to serve God, to give away something, to be part of His kingdom, to take part in His eternal plan.

The real desires of my heart are to live with Him, with my family and friends, and to make a difference in the lives of people. God gives me those desires as I delight in Him. So I want to delight the Lord. Today. I want to challenge you. What can we do to delight in the Lord? If you take a moment before you walk into work today, or jump on your first zoom call, and you just thank God for who He is and what He's done for you, if you express gratitude in advance, I promise it will make your day better. There are studies that show that I remember reading the book The Happiness Advantage by Sean Achor, and he talked about how if we can get in the habit of being thankful for three things, we automatically change trajectory of our day.

We have the ability to change our attitude by focusing on things that we're thankful for. Remember who did those things, let's delight ourselves in the Lord today and trust He will give us the desires of our heart and we will be free and ready and able to make a difference in the lives of the people around us.

Thanks for being a Marketplace Minister, and thank you for sharing this podcast and listening to this podcast. I hope that it's helpful to you and that it challenges you to live in a way that glorifies God and makes Him visible. If you wanna be part of a community that works on that on a regular basis, check it out https://community.Followerofone.org. Join us there, and be part of a community that wants to glorify God by the way that we do our jobs. 

Thanks very much.