At the ReChurch School of the Prophetic this Monday night, Psalm 34:7 came up in our discernment process as someone had shared something God had revealed to them. Others mentioned that Ps Tony had preached on this verse last Sunday, too. Here it is once again …
Psalms 37:4 (NKJV)
“Delight yourself also in the LORD, and He shall give you the desires of your heart.”
At first glance we might think that this is the way by which we get what we want in life. Well, it is … and it isn’t. Let me explain. It isn’t the way we get what we want in that we delight in the Lord, and He turns into some genie who grants our every wish. That attitude seriously misunderstands what the psalmist (Solomon) is saying, and completely misrepresents who God is to us. We first need to understand that phrase “delight yourself also in the Lord”. What does this really mean? Well, it doesn’t mean becoming infatuated with God and best friends with God so that He kind of owes us something, either.
The psalmist – if we carefully read the whole thing – is grappling with the problem of the inequalities and unfairness of human existence and, for God’s people, God’s apparent inability to, as F. B. Meyer says, “reward His servants and punish His enemies as they deserve”. There comes a point in eternity where all such imbalances will be supernaturally, divinely re-calibrated and God’s justice will be experienced by God’s saints – and it will be such a beautiful experience. But that’s then, what about now when life is unfair, or out of whack, or so it seems? Back in Solomon’s day this might have seemed a very difficult thing to reconcile in one’s thinking – especially since no one knew back then about the coming of Jesus into the world centuries down the track and what hope that brings in the moment and when He comes again.
So, Solomon grapples with this life challenge and comes to a fantastic conclusion. It is futile to complain and whinge about the unfairness of life – it’s wasted energy and time. He comes to the revelation that to delight in the Lord – despite the unfairness and difficulties of life – to appreciate and seek to learn the character of God, to gain understanding of who He is and what are His incredibly great purposes, to live in Him daily and contemplate His nature and His far higher ways, initiates us into a place of trust that transcends the mundane unfairness that is fleeting anyway.
And we are surprised – delightedly so – in God’s beautiful excesses of grace and joy that abound to us.
I have discovered that the way to this state of being is sweet surrender to the person and fact of God. Here is transcendence which is the relegation of the ordinary and unfair and unbalanced, to the sublime, joyous and glorious. In this sweet surrender is ongoing contentment and reassurance in God’s kairos timing of things. It is the place of deep conviction, of an indefatigable assurance of trust that He not only can, but wants to provide for all my needs, and is working on my behalf all the time.
To delight myself in the Lord is about learning the essential spiritual discipline of sweet surrender to my heavenly Father, which is no tired, fatalistic resignation to life’s unfair circumstances; it is about abiding in Him in the circumstances, resting there in Him without striving for my own limited sense of justice; and letting Him lead me through them, and leaving the outcomes to Him.
To learn the heart of God in this way is sheer delight and joy.
“The LORD's eyes keep on roaming throughout the entire earth, looking for those whose hearts completely belong to Him, so that He may strongly work on their behalf."
2 Chronicles 16:9
Think on these things.
Ps Milton