The Desires Of Your Heart

 "Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart."

I have always liked the verse above. I remember growing up I had a small poster of some teddy bears dressed up for a fancy tea party with this verse on it. It's a verse I've always thought about and had a friend even quote it to me once during a conversation about life. It was quite a few years back when we were both single and both wanted nothing more but to be married. I asked her if she ever worried that she wouldn't get married. Her reply to me was well, what does God say...."Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart." That conversation has always stuck with me and would serve as an underlying peace of sorts during times when I was really down about being single while all my friends were married. And I would think that I just needed to follow God and he would give me the desires of my heart...a husband and family. 

Fast forward about 15 years and I heard a devotion using this verse that gave me a completely different way of thinking about the verse than I ever had before. 

I've always thought of it as spend time getting to know God, read your Bible, pray, etc., and then God will give you what your heart wants. One might interpret that as a "this-for-that" type thing, but I didn't. It was more so spending time with God and then things in life would fall into place because I wasn't focused on what I wanted, but focused on God, and then He would bless me with my heart's desires. 

The devotion I heard talked more about the second part of the verse..."He will give you the desires of your heart." His take on the verse was that if you're delighting yourself in God, then those desires you have won't really be what you desire for your heart, but they will be God's desires for your heart. God would place desires on your heart that might not be from you or what you were thinking of, but they are from Him and what He wants for your life. Which in reality, I believe that God's desires for your heart are way better than any desire you could ever think of yourself! I wish you could have heard the devotion firsthand. It was really good and I hope at least part of what he said came through in this post!