Delight Yourself in the Lord

I never understood the verse, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”

That seemed backward, I thought. Doesn’t He want us to live out the desires of His heart? At the time it didn’t seem possible that what I wanted to do might also be what He wanted me to do. Wouldn’t that just be selfish of me to do what I wanted?

Growing up, I thought there were only a few ways to serve and please God.

I could be a missionary, or work with the three-year-olds in Sunday school. Maybe I could become an evangelist, or a philanthropist, or turn aid worker and battle injustice, poverty, starvation and destruction on the front lines. (My church at the time didn’t allow women pastors, but that would have been a possibility in other denominations.)

And quite early on, the limited options available prompted a crisis inside of me. Why? Because I didn’t want to do any of that. I’ve never been brave or reckless or defiant, and the idea of working on the “front lines”—among prisoners, the homeless, persecutors, demonic powers, preaching to hundreds or thousands, tending the sick, etc—absolutely terrified me. But that was the calling of the truly “spiritual,” or so I thought.

I also never fit in at my church. I wasn’t interested in concerts, the cool clothes, the over-confidence or indifference hiding the confusion, insecurity and pain raging inside, the flirting and rule-breaking in youth group, the sappy clichés and pathetic platitudes framed by jumping worship leaders in tight pants and tattoos.

Even in the high church—the kind of environment it would be reasonably expected might make me a happy camper, as it did many of my friends—I always felt on the fringe.

It seemed there were only a few life choices open to me as a Christian. Which was a problem, as I felt (and continue to feel) drawn to none of those options.

I used to think that if I did what God wanted, He’d change me or alter me to the point that I would eventually come to like and enjoy those at-the-moment-undesirable life choices—part of the reason why I was so reluctant to get on board with the whole “doing God’s will” bandwagon. I was afraid that following God meant that I could no longer be me—you know, “lose your life, and you will find it”? 

I took the “lose your life” part of that verse really seriously. No way could that verse mean that in any scenario would I get to do what I wanted to do. That’d be selfish. But I also thought “losing myself” would mean that I would no longer be me. Everything that I loved? All of it would be forfeit to God’s plan, and me, myself, and I, would eventually dissolve away into the shadows and folds of some lofty and horrific being.

But then I had a life-changing encounter with the real and living God, for the first time began to “delight myself in the Lord,” and He turned all of that on its head.

And do you want to know what He taught me?

More than anything else in the world, God wants me. All of me, myself, and I.

He wants to be my Emmanuel—always with me. The longing of His heart is that I would become who He created me to be, a holy reality that only He knows and sees, and all so that one day we might be able to enjoy and love one another and His creation perfectly.

His vision for my life, however, is not that I fit a mold He’s already crafted and I just have to wriggle into. Rather it’s a desire that I experience a certain kind of life.

Of this desire, Jesus is the fulfillment.

In His prayer to His Father the night before He died for us, Jesus declared, “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me…O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (emphasis my own).

But too many of us have mistaken (as I did) the calling to “follow Jesus” and become one with Him and love like Him as a demand to look exactly like Jesus. When He says, “Take up your cross and follow me,” we think that means marching in the very same footprints He made on the road to Calvary.

Come, my friends. Have you ever truly met our Lord?

Because those who know Him best (ahem, Jesus!) understand that God is not interested in the path well-worn—a path each generation of earth’s Pharisees always manage to stomp down into ruts, channels, and canals that can only imprison, possess, and deceive.

The truth is, God’s way and His plan contain no rules, boundaries or limits beyond love. Jesus didn’t give us a 405 freeway to God when He crashed our world—He gave us a Person. He gave us Himself. God Himself.

And He says to us, “I love you. And all I desire from you is that you be with me, walk with me, and learn what my love means. Once you do, you won’t be able to stop yourself from showing it to others, too. None of you will be able to stop until the entire universe knows me. Until we’re all one, as my Father and I and the Spirit are one.”

But have you noticed? Though Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one being—they aren’t the same being. Far from it. It’s a truth that has given theologians worlds of trouble explaining about the Trinity—and made things more difficult for us to understand.

Even so, we should be wildly excited about what this hard-to-grasp fact means for us as God’s children. Because if that confusing set-up is God’s version of unity…furthest from God’s mind is the agenda to make us into His little carbon copies.

If we end up looking anything at all like Him one day, it will only and ever be because we choose it, because we want it. And even then, we probably won’t really look anything like Him. Why? Because God is love, and true love is not possessive or manipulative, not interested in coercion, power or control. Love doesn’t make mini-me’s. Love never takes for itself, but gives, gives and gives, lavishly and relentlessly…

“Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart” now begins to take on new meaning.

As I know and understand my God more deeply, the more I see that He knows me better than I could ever know myself. And when I delight in Him—love Him, walk with Him, trust Him and listen to Him—life’s impossible puzzle pieces fall possibly into place.

Before fully giving my life to God, I was always afraid that He would take away my desire to write. From childhood, I’ve always wanted to write, to “help God paint his sunsets,” but before I walked with God I never seemed able to find the courage or ability to say what was in my heart.

I was afraid that surrendering to God would mean that I must give up that most cherished desire—that my barren desert, longing for rain, would simply cease to exist after He got His all-powerful hands on it. How typical of my Father then, that when I finally did turn to Him in desperation, ready to give Him everything and lose it all, He poured out His Spirit on me and a wellspring burst forth and I couldn’t stop writing. And I haven’t stopped—and if God has His way with me, I never will stop.

I’m the barren desert, but He’s the Fountain of Living Waters.

The truth of “delighting” in the Lord is that we discover what we truly want and love, as well as the courage and ability to carry it out. We discover that God is the end of all our seeking. All things are in Him, and when we enjoy Him, turn to Him in humility and sincere surrender, He bestows (in His wise and perfect timing) all things upon us—freedom, knowledge, strength, joy. It’s not a matter of “if,” but only “when.” God is the Way to abundant life, but He is also Abundant Life. He is love, and in loving us truly and wholly and unselfishly, He wants nothing more than to see us thrive and find satisfaction and fulfillment in what He’s uniquely created us to do and be.

C.S. Lewis wrote many years ago that each of our true selves waits for us in God. And not necessarily successful, rich, and powerful selves (though what exactly that means is really between you and God), but the good, pure, loving and beautiful selves God desires all of us to become—selves that will last when the broken and tattered pieces of this world are burned away and all that remains is what God has made joyfully eternal and incorruptibly good.

I hope that when you hear “God has a plan for your life,” you will try to understand what that really means. It means—exactly what you’ve always longed and ached to do and be in your heart of hearts. And it means letting God give you the courage and experience you need to reach for it. For some of you, it will mean being a Mother Teresa to the sick, poor and the lonely, rescuing women and children trafficked for sex and slavery, preaching the truth to hundreds of thousands. But for others of you, that might simply mean being a faithful parent to your kids, or learning to become a loyal friend; it might mean discovering a cure for MS, finishing that dissertation, or cutting hair; it might mean painting, writing music, cleaning pools, or starting a small business. It might mean being a farmer or driving a UPS truck.

Or maybe you don’t know what you desire in your heart of hearts. Then simply know that wherever you are and whatever you’re doing—He’s there with you. Get to know Him, learn to listen to Him, find ways to delight in and enjoy Him, seek Him as the end of your desire and not as a means to a desire—and you might just discover longings you suppressed or never even knew were there.

Just don’t fall for the mad scramble one often encounters in Christian circles to “serve God” and “do God’s work” for no other reason than because everyone else is frantically and guiltily doing it.

In truth God doesn’t care a hill of beans about any work done without Him, or any work He does without you.

And He will never force us to become people He never created us to be. Each of us is unique, distinct, individual, and in God’s grand story, not one of us will look like another. But as those unique selves are realized, God wants to us walk with us, help us become the name written on that white stone “that no one knows except the one who receives it” from His hand. That new person will be a creature none of us are yet prepared to see—a reality beyond dreaming or imagining. It will be exactly what we’ve always longed for, though maybe thought impossible to reach. And it is a reality impossible for us to reach, walking alone, but it’s not impossible for Him.

He does all the work; our call is simply to “delight in the Lord.”