The desires of our heart

Trust in the Lord and do good;
dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.
 Delight yourself in the Lord
and he will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37: 3 – 4

There is something in each one of us that is rather suspicious of our desires feeling they will be fleshly and that God would not give us those things as they would be bad for us. However I am not sure that is the case.  Imagine your child really, really wants a bicycle or a Wii or some such for their birthday or Christmas and it is within your capability to give them this. Most parents would do this, knowing that the huge pleasure their child would have at receiving their desire would also bring joy to their own heart.

As parents we do not want to spoil our children but we do want to bless them with the things they desire.  God, as the perfect dad, must also want to bless his children with the desires of their heart. He doesn’t want to spoil us but he knows better than we do how to give us good gifts without making us selfish.

When I was still a young Christian, I felt God say to me one day, ‘What would you most like?’  Now I could have, like Solomon, asked for wisdom but almost immediately I said, ‘I want to travel Lord’.  God has taken that desire and over the last 28 years we have been to so many places both on mission trips and on holiday. Indeed for 11 years in a row I went on a short term mission trip as well as having some enviable holidays.

We do not have lots of money but God has blessed us again and again with travel opportunities and paid for them!  He has given us the desires of our heart as we delighted ourselves in him. I am asking God now to open up fresh travel opportunities and mission trips as I feel there are many more places I would like to go to. 

On another occasion, my father took the family to a show in London. It was amazing and on the way home I thanked God for the opportunity to do something we could never have afforded then. His reply surprised me. ‘You wanted to go, didn’t you?’ I remembered that I had said to God almost in passing that I would love to see a show in London and he had remembered and answered my desire.  There was nothing spiritual about it – it was just a desire I had.

I know now that I can trust God to bring about my desires in his own way and time and if they really are ‘bad’ for me, he will withhold them like any good Father would. We do not have to be afraid of our desires and ‘crucify our flesh’ so we have no desires. As with so many aspects of the Christian faith, it is a balancing act between ‘your will not mine’ and God giving us the desires of our heart.

The key is to seek the Giver not the gift. It is delighting ourselves in him, loving him for who he is not what he can give us. No Father wants a child to be looking at his hands to see what is in them but rather to be looking at his face and then finding his hands are full of blessings.