My Desires

I read of a grandmother shopping with her young grandson. When she asked him if he was ready to go home, he replied, “Not yet, Grandma, I might find something I want to need .”
We may smile , but don’t we all mix up our needs and our wants?

Psalm 37:4 says “….. He shall give you the desires of your heart”.
Wow! sounds like a blank check and many people take their ‘want list’ and run to present it to God.
They come away disappointed because they missed two things.

First of all, there is a pre-condition …”Delight thyself in the Lord..” He must be our greatest desire ! Delighting ourselves in the Lord means that we ‘ renew our minds’ , substituting His ways for our ways, His thinking for our thinking, His priorities instead of ours. It will change who we are.
The second thing they miss is that God does not promise to give us everything we want ! He says He will give us the very DESIRES of our heart. We will want what He wants…. and when our requests fall in line with His will, they are granted, every one !

I John 5:14-15 explains it so clearly.
1> ask according to His will
2> then we KNOW that we have been heard
3> if we are heard, He WILL grant our request.

So then, the promise of Ps. 37:4 is that if we are close to God He will give us the desires of our heart. With what confidence we can then wait for God to fulfill those desires.

We do grow somewhat wiser as we grow older . Hopefully we grow much wiser in the things of the Lord.
I have learned that if a desire for something comes out of my own heart… the fulfillment of that desire rarely satisfies the anticipated joy and often is sadly disappointing. So I have learned to wait , holding my desires loosely - if the desire is in line with God’s will, then I know He will fulfill it in a way I could not have foreseen and beyond my expectations.

Some months before this last Christmas season, I had a strong desire to give a gift that would make a difference in someone’s life, to fill a real need. I had a few ideas but money was tight and they did not work out. So I watched and waited and left it in God’s hands. Nothing came up… and it was now two days before Christmas. I had pretty much decided that it wasn’t going to happen and I had either missed a clue or just been too negligent in my efforts.

My husband and I had done a ‘favor’ job for some people that we had not seen for several years and we delivered the finished product to them just before Christmas. In our conversation we learned that they are personally involved in an outreach project in a village in Uganda, which is funded and overseen by the private school their children attend. They have made several trips to the village and are going again. The lady spoke highly of the work being done there and we were fascinated.
When we handed her the bill for our work she took one look at it and objected that we had not charged enough. We insisted it was adequate and did not want any more. We argued good naturedly for a bit , then she walked into the other room and came back with a check. She said, “Here is your money… but what I am going to do is send a cow in your name to a very poor family living in the Uganda village..” The cow would change the whole family’s life from abject poverty to being able to meet their basic needs. I was thrilled.
Not only was the cow sent but we are now also sponsoring a child and her family living in that village.
The really neat thing is that these people are going down to the village this May to deliver their daughter who is going to work there for three months. We will be able to have such a close connection to our sponsored child.
God truly does all things well, if only we trust Him!