Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. -Psalm 37:4 (ESV)
Introduction
I’m not asking rhetorically. I really want you to pause for a moment and answer the question to yourself.
What do you desire right now?
For some, the answer might be a nap or a hot fudge sundae or a deep tissue massage!
Of course, you might have a deeper answer—a new career, a better marriage, a good report from the oncologist.
If you meditated further, your answer might go even deeper. Maybe you’d realize what you want most is a sense of purpose, an assurance of God’s presence, or a lasting spiritual legacy.
Notice this: desires can co-exist at many different levels.
At any given moment, your flesh might desire a hot fudge sundae while your mind desires a healthier body while your heart longs to fulfill a God-given mission.
Also, think about this truism: our desires change.
When I was a child, I wanted to be Batman. Well, uh, not a good example. I still want to be Batman. Let me use another example. When I was a child, I wanted to be a professional tennis player.
That desire changed by the time I went to college (mainly because I was not good enough to be a pro). But my professional athlete desire was more profoundly displaced when I was a junior in college and I had an encounter with a holy God who almost audibly spoke to me and called me into ministry. I had never had a conscious desire to be a minister until that day and I’ve never doubted it for a moment in the last 40 years.
Desires have different levels AND desires can change.
When the Scripture assures, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4, ESV), two qualifications are highlighted—prayers are only answered when we delight ourselves in God AND when the desire is from the heart.
There is no provision or promise in the Bible that the Lord will grant us the desires of our flesh. Thank God that He doesn’t routinely grant us what would be bad for us! Likewise, there is no promise in Scripture that God will give us what we want in our minds (Greek: psyche). In fact, once we are Christians, a beautiful process begins wherein we are changed by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:2; Eph. 4:22–24). Another way to put it—our mental longings are changing!
If I had prayed, “Lord, make me a professional tennis player,” and God granted it, I would have missed my calling and whoever I’ve helped over the last four decades would have missed something God wanted to give them. Thank God He didn’t affirm what I thought was my real desire. Being a professional tennis player was a desire, but it was not my deepest, truest desire. Until being overwhelmed by the Spirit in my dorm room my junior year, I would have never known what my heart most deeply desired.
When God affects your desires and changes your heart’s longings, it is a gift of grace that fuels a kind of Spirit-inspired prayer that has great effect. Pure-hearted, Spirit-inspired yearnings move God because they are aligned with God’s own heart.
For all these reasons, when you pray the God-formed desires of your deep heart, you are praying in the Spirit!
Isn’t Desire the Problem?
A lot of people don’t even want to be reminded of their desire. “I’ve lived enough life,” they say, “to learn not to get my hopes up.” Interestingly, some Eastern religions teach that the way to Nirvana, the way to Paradise, is to extinguish your desire because desire causes suffering. If you never desire anything, then you’ll never suffer when you don’t get it. Buddha taught four Noble Truths: life is suffering; suffering comes from desire; the cessation of desire is the key to ending suffering; there is a pathway to achieve the end of suffering. And he described an eightfold path as the way to live this out.
There’s a part of you that can understand this, isn’t there?
Desire is scary. Hope sets us up for disappointment.
While some Eastern religions promote extinguishing desire, other religious systems offer plans to curb desires. For example, a religious teaching might acknowledge that men too often have physical attraction to women who aren’t their wives, so, to curb the problem, laws are established to keep men and women apart or for women to be dressed in a certain way.
Unlike philosophies that try to extinguish desire or religious rules designed to curb desire, the Bible seems to celebrate desire. In fact, it is filled with stories of people moved by desire: Abram and Sarai who wanted a child; Jacob who wanted to be blessed; Moses who wanted to defend the Hebrew slaves; David who wanted the presence of the Lord.
I can’t find anywhere in the Gospels where Jesus rebuked someone for desiring too much. He didn’t tell the blind man yearning for sight to be quiet and accept his plight in life. Jesus didn’t say, “Get used to it. Quit complaining.” Even the Samaritan woman at the well, who had been married five times, didn’t get corrected by the Savior with a set of stricter rules for better living. Instead, the Lord told her that if she knew who He was, she would have asked for even more!
Desire is a glorious invention of God!
Atheists often argue that people made up images of gods in a false hunt for security. Wanting a form of mental reassurance, the argument contends, people of all cultures have created their own magic genies to give them what they want. Life is scary, so people have invented cosmic security blankets in the form of imaginary deities.
But what if the real reason people in all cultures throughout history have made up myths about gods is that there really is a God and our heart’s deepest longing is for connection to that God?
If a baby longs for milk, does it not “prove” that milk exists? If we crave love, does it not prove that love is essential for life? C. S. Lewis said, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
So, in the Bible, desire can be the instrument by which we get in touch with what is most real, most important, most valuable, and most precious.
God Loves Giving You the Desires of Your Heart
Sometime early in my pastorate at the church I’ve served nearly 30 years, an elder told me that he’d had a dream about me and God and that he wanted an appointment to share the dream. I knew this brother really did hear from God and I was eager to learn what he’d dreamt. A couple weeks later we met.
“Please, tell me this God dream,” I asked.
“In the dream, God appeared to you and asked, ‘Alan, what do you want?’” the elder responded.
“Okay. Wow. This must be important. What happened next?” I inquired.
“Nothing,” the elder said. “That was the end of the dream.”
“What? That was the dream? I want to know what I said and how God responded and all that!”
I caught my breath and asked my good friend, “Well, what do you think it means?”
He said, “I think it means God wants to know what you want. Like when He asked Solomon what he wanted and Solomon said, ‘wisdom,’ I think God is putting the question before you.”
Then the leader looked me in the eye and said, “Pastor, what do you want? What do you want for your ministry? What do you want for this church? For your life?”
I was young and I had a hard time answering it.
I had a hard time answering it in the first place because I had assumed that what I wanted didn’t matter. I’d assumed that all that mattered was what God wanted and I was His servant.
I shared the dream with a wise and prophetic friend who said, “Alan, God cares about what you want in the same way I care about what my son wants. When I take him out for ice cream, I want to know if he would like chocolate or butter pecan.”
If you are in Christ, you are a child of God—a son, a daughter. And your Father loves you infinitely, and He loves to give you the desires of your heart.
He really does care what you want. You aren’t a slave. You aren’t a robot.
That’s why your prayers really matter to God. What you want connects to the heart of God.
So, if God loves to give us the desires of our hearts, but He doesn’t want to grant us the superficial cravings of the flesh, the ill-informed longings of a sin-tainted mind, what does God do?
He changes the desires of our hearts!
His plan was prophesied long ago:
Jeremiah 31:33 (ESV) — “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
Ezekiel 36:26–27 (ESV) — “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”
The heart is mentioned about a thousand times in the Scripture and no one knows for sure what it is. It seems distinct from spirit or soul. Some have proposed that the heart is the connecting point of soul and spirit.
The heart is attributed with thoughts and desires. It can be pure or mixed, clean or unclean—the heart.
The heart is the mysterious inmost being, the part of your inmost being that is in some way called upon by God to be the source of life and desire. The great Shema of Israel: Deuteronomy 6:4–5 — “... love the LORD our God with all your heart, with all your soul, mind, and strength.”
The heart. You remember when Samuel the prophet was going to anoint the new king of Israel, because God had removed His hand from King Saul, and Samuel goes to Jesse’s house, looks at all of the sons that look kingly, but the Lord says to Samuel, “Do not look upon outward appearance, for the Lord looks upon the heart.”
Jesus spoke of the heart. He started out His ministry saying, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” And when you see God, you’re transformed. He also said, “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.”
Paul says the Spirit helps us in our weakness and intercedes when we don’t know how to pray (Rom. 8:26–27). One of the Spirit’s sweetest helps is to clarify and cleanse desire until it harmonizes with Jesus. Then prayer becomes less like rubbing a magic lamp and more like breathing with God.
What can we do to pray in the Spirit by praying the desires of our hearts?
1) Dare to Desire – It’s a brave and beautiful thing when we have been gravely disappointed and yet we come to God with our heart’s longings. To allow our hearts to have desires requires a process of allowing God to heal our traumatized beings and to trust that His grace is sufficient to carry us through future disappointments. To dare to desire is also to reject idolatry—the longing of our hearts becomes idolatrous when it becomes ultimate. The ultimate desire of our deepest hearts is the “Desire of Nations”—Christ Himself. That’s a heart longing that will never be disappointed.
2) Be Unashamed of Your Desires – God CARES about what you want. You are an infinitely treasured, gloriously made, wondrously redeemed human being crafted in the very image of God, and you have unique gifts and a one-of-a-kind calling in this world. What you want matters!
3) Commit to Deep Heart Living – Give yourself time and space to look beneath the surface. Practice the kind of pause that asks, “Is what I’m wanting the true, deep-down desire of my heart?” If it’s a flesh desire (the hot fudge sundae I’d like right now), just acknowledge it – this is a desire, but it’s superficial. It might be just fine to ask God for it, but it might or might not be granted. It’s not ultimate and it’s not deep – it’s just something you’d like.
And learn to distinguish between more superficial desires and the deeper longings of the heart itself. You might be in a difficult relationship right now and your surface desire is, “I sure wish this conflict would end.” But what is the deeper longing of the heart – what’s the great desire of the heart? Isn’t the truer, deeper longing for a peace that passes understanding?
4) Ask the Spirit for His Help – Ask and you’ll receive. Invite the Holy Spirit daily to cleanse and clarify your desires. Ask Him to enlarge your desires and make them God-sized. Allow Him into the deepest places of your heart so He can mold your deepest longings to God’s own heart. Ask Him to help you!
5) Let the Word of God Sort and Sift – Be suspicious of your own raw impulses and check everything with God’s Word. The Word of God isn’t a set of morals or a collection of good advice statements—it is one big story of God’s redemptive love. Let the Word shape your whole life. Find yourself in the story of God’s saving mercies in Christ. Think much of the power of the Gospel.
6) Delight Yourself in the Lord – To delight in Him is to enjoy Him, to treasure Him, to glorify Him. As you love Him with your whole heart, your heart changes. What you love changes your heart! He’s wonderful and glorious and kind. Delight in His goodness. Delight in His smile. Delight in His grace. Don’t fear Him or expect His frown. Celebrate His presence. As you delight in the Lord, your heart’s desires become more and more aligned with God’s own heart.
A Prayer
Lord Jesus, Desire of every nation and the true desire of my heart, thank You for not extinguishing my longing but redeeming it. Search me by Your Spirit. Sift my wants by Your Word. Sanctify every desire until it sings in harmony with Yours. Teach me to ask boldly for what delights You, to move obediently where love is obvious, and to wait patiently when wisdom says “not yet.” Give me a heart that wants what You want— for Your glory, my joy, and my neighbor’s good. Amen.
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