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The Desires of Your Heart

The Desires of the Heart from Refreshing Hope Ministries on Vimeo.

Transcript:
Today I am going to be talking about: “The Desires of Your Heart” and how to live them. I am going to be focusing on Psalm 37, so if you want to follow along in your Bible, you can go ahead and turn there.

This is something that has been proven over and over in my life and I stand in awe of the goodness of God Almighty. When you pursue Him, He will pursue you. It becomes a trade, all of you, for all of Him. It will cost you everything, but like Paul, if you make the trade you will soon count everything that you had as dung in comparison.

Psalm 37:3–5 (NKJV) Trust in the LORD, and do good; Dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness. Delight yourself also in the LORD, And He shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD, Trust also in Him, And He shall bring it to pass.

David wrote Psalm 37 and there is a lot there to cover, every verse is a treasure. David tells us to trust in the Lord and do good, even when evil is prospering all around us, and we feel like doing something else. He tells us not to fret for the the evil will soon be cut down like the grass.

Then he tells us to: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

Now one thing that I want you to take away from this message is that this verse literally means exactly what it says. This is not spiritualized symbolism like “Oh I was blessed to be a part of His church for so many years. That was the desire of my heart.”

No, it is more relative to us personally. I have seen it literally come to pass in my life time and time again and I am going to share some of those with you. Our God is not dead, He is surely alive. What He has done in the past, He will do today unless He said that He would not, like in Genesis when He said that He would not flood the entire earth again. What He has done for me, He will also do for you.


From time to time I dabble in computer programming, and I see this verse just as an IF / THEN statement in the code:

IF (“You delight yourself in the Lord” = True) {
    THEN (“He gives the desires of your heart”)
} ELSE {
    Return
};

This is a completely conditional statement, and the second part does not apply to everyone. It for those that choose to delight in the Lord.

I feel today that many people have created a God that agrees with them, instead of the other way around. A God that delights in us and gives us the desires of our heart. It is a very subtle change, but that will always end in disappointment, because it doesn’t actually work. Sure God loves us, and He delights in us, but this promise is for those that delight in HIM.

The word translated here as “Delight” means: To take a high degree of pleasure or mental satisfaction in. It implies desirability, something that you want, that you deeply desire. Something that you feel is worth pursuing.

Any of you that have been married thought at one time that your spouse was worth pursuing a deeper relationship with. You gave up some of your free time in order to be with them. This is the same thing.

Now I am preaching to the choir because all of you here have set aside your morning to come learn more about Him. I am here to tell you how valuable that is to Him, and that He does notice what you do with your time.

Delight also conveys happiness, that you are happily serving God in whatever circumstance that you find yourself in. Face it, life is not always pleasant. You learn to make the best of the situation, and delight yourself in the Lord while in the trial of fire.

Your attitude towards God determines your altitude. See a positive attitude will cause you to climb above the situation, into His presence, while a negative attitude will cause you to descend into despair.

For comparison, I want to show two examples in the Bible of people that had a right attitude, and people that had a wrong attitude, and how God reacted towards them.

An example of a bad attitude:  In Numbers chapter 13, the Israelites had reached the promised land and camped there, then they sent twelve spies into the land to learn what they would be facing.

With the exception of Joshua and Caleb, the other ten spies came back with a horror story and said there was no way that Israel could attack these people. They felt like grasshoppers among a race of giants. In Numbers 14:1 it reads:

So all the congregation lifted up their voices and cried, and the people wept that night. And all the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to them, “If only we had died in the land of Egypt! Or if only we had died in this wilderness! Why has the LORD brought us to this land to fall by the sword, that our wives and children should become victims? Would it not be better for us to return to Egypt?” So they said to one another, “Let us select a leader and return to Egypt.”

When faced with adversity, this group of people severed their relationship with God. They blamed God for their situation, began to view Him as their enemy, thought that He was out to kill them and their wives and children, then they decided to appoint a new leader and return to Egypt.

God became disgusted. He told them in Numbers chapter 14:28:

‘As I live,’ says the LORD, ‘just as you have spoken in My hearing, so I will do to you: The carcasses of you who have complained against Me shall fall in this wilderness, all of you who were numbered, according to your entire number, from twenty years old and above.

Can you imagine the Lord telling you that? Just as you have spoken, so I will do to you.” Their attitude determined their altitude.


An example of a good attitude: In Acts chapter 16 Paul and Silas were out preaching the gospel and casting out devils just as Jesus had told them, but the townspeople turned on them, had them arrested, beaten, and thrown into prison. While chained in the inner prison, with their feet in the stocks, instead of complaining, Paul and Silas began praying and singing hymns to God. It reads:


“But at midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were loosed.”

Paul and Silas went on to lead the jailor and his family to the Lord Jesus that night, and they were released the next day. See though they had been beaten, arrested, and chained in prison, they did not turn against God. They kept their situation and their thoughts toward God separate. They understood that there is also an evil force at work in the earth, they cast out a devil and there was a backlash. They didn’t blame the results of warfare with the enemy, on God.  

Personal Examples:
Now I have always loved electronics, wiring, computers, and anything technical captivates me. I realize now that it was just part of the skill set that God had given me.  

I have learned that the desires in your heart, are not always your own. He led me to where I am by the desires that He placed in me at the beginning.

I grew up on a farm and we were dirt poor. Everyone in the family dropped out of school as soon as possible and went to work. That was what was expected of us. Having no education or money created an unbridgeable gap between me and technical jobs like working on computers.

I dropped out of school at 16 and started out working as a common laborer, digging foundations and rolling wheel barrows full of cement. Eventually I worked myself up to a foreman with a big construction company. Then came a season of personal revival.

I want to tell you from experience that you can walk in revival, even when everyone around you is in despair. Looking back, I am sure that it was God. At the time I had to work 12 hours every Saturday and Sunday and I could not go to church at all. But I began to fast, pray, and listen to the Bible all day and night. I became very zealous, and very happy.

I prayed crazy prayers like: “All I want is more of You Lord, more of Your presence. Remove anything in my life that is holding me back from You.” And I meant it. At the time there was nothing more important to me. Within a few weeks, they called me to the office and to my surprise, laid me off. He had done exactly what I had asked Him.

I tried to keep a positive attitude as best that I could, though losing a good job for no apparent reason is never easy. Eventually my unemployment ran out and I still had not been able to find a job. Finally a temp service called me and offered me a job polishing brass plumbing parts at a buffing wheel, for a third of what I had been making.

I knew that it was God because of a set of signs that He had given me beforehand, and oh my, was it a horrible job. My brother Ken would come by at times and shake his head and ask me: “Dion, what are you doing here?” and I would tell him: “At the moment, this is where God wants me.”

I had to humble myself to stay. I would come home as black and dirty as the floor. My skin began to turn green from the brass dust. One day someone sat a box of parts on the floor behind me and when I turned to walk, I tripped over it, fell on the concrete and broke my knee.

All the while I pretended that I was working directly for the Lord. I tried my best to keep a good attitude, tried to smile, I kept my work area clean, I polished more parts than anyone in the building, I showed up early, stayed late, and I sang in tongues most of the day. The machines were so loud that no one could hear me anyway.

Months passed by, then a summer, and a winter. Eventually I became the manager. There was a revival at the plant and many people there got saved and began attending church together. We played the Bible over the intercom all day and prayed in circles before we started to work. Then as suddenly as it began, it ended, and the brass plant merged with another.

Then He began to do something that I never thought possible…He began to push me into my own computer business. It was entirely Him. I felt that it so far beyond me that I would never even have prayed about such a thing, but while I was out of work again and desperate, strangers suddenly began to call me and ask me to come work on their computers.

Now I had worked on my own computers as a hobby and had built one out of some scrap parts that I housed in a cardboard box, but I had never dreamed of working on them for a living.

That summer, businesses that I had never heard of would somehow get my phone number and call me, desperately pleading for me to come and help them. I would explain that I had never worked with that before, but they wouldn’t give up and would try and convince me to come anyway just to take a look at it. It was if they were being used by the Lord, though these were all just secular businesses. I would go and pray all the way there, and the Holy Spirit would always allow me to fix the problem.

Soon I had over 50 clients and was taking care of computer networks with dozens of nodes. I worked on computers all day long. If I would just answer the call and go, He would go with me. Suddenly I found myself living a desire of my heart. It reads: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” That is exactly what He did for me.

Small things:
It is not just big things like that, but also the small ones. One morning before work, I was shopping for an HDMI to DVI converter cable. I wanted to hook up a computer to a television. Now this was years ago when such a cable was extremely rare. I had never actually seen one, but I found one on Amazon for $40. I didn’t want to pay that much for it, so I waited.

Our first client of the day was an insurance company, and as we talked with the owner and he explained the problems they were having, he reached into a drawer, took out a cable and tossed it on the desk. He said: “I bought this a while back and I don’t even know what it is for. Maybe you can use it somewhere.” It was an HDMI to DVI converter cable, brand new, and still in the plastic.

God loves us, but we are to love Him back, and when you do your life will begin to change. Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.

Jesus told us in Matthew 6:33 (NKJV) “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” That is the same idea, put God first, then the other things that you desire will come.

Summary:
The way to have what you want, is through Him. The way to have a satisfying life, is through Him. See when you get Him, you get it all, and the way that You get to Him is through knowing His Son Jesus.

Delight yourself in the Lord, joyfully seek Him each day and include Him as a part of your life. Face the trials with a smile knowing that He has got your back. However this comes out, God is in control of my life.

We need to have the dedication of Joshua who in 24:15 said: “Choose for yourself whom you will serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

We should meet adversity like Shadrach did in Daniel 3:17 when he said: “Our God is able to deliver us out of your hand, but even if He does not, we will not serve your god.”

We should be filled with joy and be glad to serve the Lord, like Jesus did in Luke 10:21: He rejoiced in the Spirit and said, “I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth.”

Delight yourself in the Lord. That is how the desires of your heart will become a reality.