Psalm 37:4 (KJV) Delight thyself also in the LORD: and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.
I was sitting in church tonight listening to my pastor preach on altar work. And I’ve always been the type of person sadly that thinks I’m not good at altar work. I love to work on the altars but was just afraid of it. So listening to my pastor preach on this, I was just kind of reminded of my desires. I may be scared of it, but my desire is to become an amazing altar worker, to be an anointed preacher, and to be a soul winner. I’ve had other desires along the way, desires of this nature and that. And I still have some of them. But this all comes down to altar work. That was a desire but not my main desire.
If you read the entire chapter 37 of psalm, you’ll find many many many good things. This chapter is absolutely packed full of good things. I want to pause just on this scripture for a moment though, it says ‘Delight thyself also in the Lord’. Webster’s dictionary defines Delight as ‘to take great pleasure.’ So if we read this scripture this way ‘Take great pleasure in the Lord, and he shall give you the desires of your heart.’ Bare with me while I try to bring my scattered thoughts together. The next verse says to ‘Commit thy way unto the Lord, trust also in him, and he shall bring it to pass.” You can separate all these verses and get whatever you want out of them. But the simple truth is this. Do you want the desires of your heart? You’ve got to be committed and happy in doing work for the Lord.
You may have read that and thought, Well, where did the working for the Lord part come in? Simple, verse 3 says, ‘Trust in the Lord, and do good.'(Emphasis mine) You see, all scripture walks hand in hand. No 2 scriptures will contradict one another. You can not pick and choose which scripture you want to believe and which you don’t. It doesn’t work that way. That would be like saying ‘I desire to be a preacher, but I don’t want to study or pray.’ God doesn’t work that way ladies and Gentleman.
When your desires begin to go hand in hand with God’s will, then it’s not so hard to see those desires come about. When you really begin to delight in God and get excited about what he’s doing then ‘old things are passed away’. Those desires for the things of the world begin to fade away and it becomes easy to begin to desire the callings of God.
Before I finish with this I have to give a small word of advice, nothing worth anything will come easy nor will it come quickly. I’ve known many young ministers my age who came into the ministry around the same time as I did that have fallen away sadly. Most of the reasons were due to impatience. I’ve been a preacher now for over 3 years and can count on my two hands the amount I’ve preached in a church setting. At the same time our youth pastor, a very dear friend of mine, a year younger than I am and began his ministry a year before I did, has preached and preached and preached some more.
I’m not saying that in asking for pity, I’m saying that to say this, without patience, I might look at them and become discouraged. But you see, I’ve had a wonderful mentor who’s a man of God that told me many things, one of which is that the bible says that ‘if we compare ourselves amongst ourselves we are unwise’. My youth pastors ministry is not my ministry, mine is not his. We are both called to preach but we have not been called to do the same thing in the same place.
Stay encouraged and know that sometimes it may take years for your calling to flourish and your desires to come to fruition, but ‘with God all things are possible’.
