Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4)
We saw last time that you delight yourself in the Lord by learning of Him, opening your heart to Him, and savoring Him. I must now add that, as you savor Him, thinking of His goodness, you become more and more conscious of your own failures. It is then that His grace – the favor you don’t deserve – becomes irresistible. As you give Him that burden of sin, and experience what it is to be free in Christ, only then are you really delighting yourself in the Lord. He gives you a new heart and puts His Spirit in you, so that you are moved to follow Him. (Ezek. 36:26,27). The condition for the Lord giving you the desires of your heart has been satisfied. You are delighting yourself in Him.
Now I turn to the promise in the scripture we have been analyzing. It has become clear that the promise is only for those who have a new heart and a new desire – a desire for God. This desire begins to overshadow all other desires. Delights that used to be so captivating begin to lose their power. Christ has set the captives free. God declares you righteous, but not because you have observed His law summarized in the Ten Commandments. You have not! The apostle Paul writes: “… no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin” (Romans 3:20 NIV). We become conscious of sin as the Holy Spirit within us brings things to our remembrance and we become aware of the vast difference between God and us, and between who we are now “in Christ,” and who we were before God gave us that new heart. God will give us the desires of our heart as we yield to the Holy Spirit, follow Christ, and grow in our knowledge of both God and ourselves in Christ. It is an on-going process that requires advancing in both parts of what John Calvin called “True Wisdom.”
