Psalm 37:4 – “Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
Many religious people have been told and often believe that all of the desires of their heart are evil. They come only from our flesh and therefore must be destroyed in order to be holy. I do not agree with this concept at all.
I often feel desires that I cannot explain and when I reflect on and take delight in God’s word, I find those desires come from him.
One such desire is to love Jesus Christ and to seek to pursue those things he’s called me to do. To that end, I read scripture regularly and pray often. I also make time to worship God regularly.
But what about the desires we have? Are they given to us by God or are they evil? I suppose they could be either – but many of those things we simply wish for our lives were given to us by the one who created us.
So when religious people insist that our desires are evil, I’m convinced that I’m not a religious person.
Here’s an example. In my day-to-day life, I do marketing for a group of business leaders. But I rarely am aggressively seeking new clients to sell to. Seems a contradiction doesn’t it? I mean, doesn’t marketing and sales require you to chase people and convince them to part with their money?
Instead, I share ideas in places where my audience is known to be found anyway. I pray over those messages and ask God to send me ONLY those people he wants me to serve. When they contact me, I work to help them, as I would help any of my brothers and sisters in Christ.
This is the way Jesus commanded us to be. I simply seek to obey. Operating his way is counter-intuitive to the way I was trained and therefore I’m convinced that the desire to act this way is from God.
Do I still have to do battle with the flesh? Yes, of course. And I’m not telling you that those desires also come from God. But there are a whole series of other desires that you did get from God, along with the gifting it will take to accomplish them.
If you make time to walk with God regularly, he will share with you those things he desires for you. It’s amazing to me how closely those desires square with the ones I have anyway. It also helps me to be better at discerning when I desire something that is not from God but from my enemy, the devil.
So today, see if you can quiet yourself and hear God speaking to you in your inmost being – and you, like me will very likely discover those things he desires for you today.
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