Take Delight In The Lord

"Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart." - Psalm 37:4

This verse has been rolling around in my head ever since I heard it on the radio a month ago.  It has been nagging at the back of my consciousness with the low grade sort of noise one would expect from an important thought one cannot rid from their mind.

Why?  Because it seems to be both an exceedingly great and exceedingly simple process.  One the one hand, take delight in the Lord (whatever "delight" means) - on the other, the "then" statement, He will give you the desires of your heart.  Pretty heady stuff, right?  After all, who does not want the desires of their heart.

But what does it mean to take delight in the Lord?

Delight, in case you were wondering per Merriam-Webster, is "A high degree of gratification or pleasure, joy, satisfaction."  Hmm.  So replace delight:

"Be gratified in the Lord..."
"Find pleasure in the Lord..."
"Take joy in the Lord...."
"Be satisfied in the Lord..."

As I look at those alternates, satisfied is the one that makes the most context sense to me.  "Be satisfied in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart."  Why?  Because when I am satisfied with something,  I have no need to look to something else for satisfaction.  That thing fills my desires (whatever they are) because it has satisfied them. 

Which I find a bit confusing, of course. If you asked me what the desires - the true desires - of my heart is, they are all the sorts of things that (at least I think) the Lord cannot fulfill in a way that I understand: the career I would love, the relationships I wish I had, the places I wish lived, the things I wish I could do.  That sort of thing.  But perhaps that merely betrays the shallowness of my desires.

If all those things never came to pass, could God still grant me the desires of my heart?  Of course!  Ask all those who, through history, have seemed to have nothing yet have been completely consumed by Him.  It more likely my weakness of sight and insight rather than the facts themselves that preventing me from seeing this so.