All I Want for Christmas… (#88 of 365+)

We’re all flying to California to spend Christmas with my husband’s dad, stepmom, and granny! We’ll leave early Thursday morning and return late Tuesday afternoon. I’ll pack my Pearls of Great Price devotional book and I'll keep having my daily “devotes” but—just in case we have technical difficulties during the trip—I’m going to prepare and schedule (in advance) daily widgets of songs that I’ve enjoyed listening to lately. Have a Merry CHRISTmas!

Today’s verse is: “Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4). Sometimes I compare different translations of the bible to get a broader view of a verse. In place of “Delight yourself in the Lord”, the Message version says, “Keep company with GOD”. This is easy enough to understand. However, it seems the second part of the verse, “He will give you the desires of your heart”, is the most difficult part for many to understand.

When I was single, I enjoyed fellowshipping with other singles at church and in a Christian singles organization. It was natural for me to want to find others who shared the same faith, interests, struggles, etc. I learned a lot of lessons during those years. One of the first tough lessons I learned was not all singles attended church, participated in events, or developed friendships for the same reasons I did. Some of them, and this applied to both women and men, were doing it for the sole purpose of finding a mate. Here’s how I found this out: We started a new bible study series. They wouldn’t attend until they found out if someone else (of the opposite gender) was interested in attending… If some people (of their gender) wanted to get coffee after a movie, they would be non-committal until someone (of the opposite gender) decided to go… When there was an event at someone’s home, they would arrive an hour late and then leave within the hour if nothing interesting had happened… And so on.

I remember a 40-something woman said she felt God had forgotten about her. She thought by now he would have sent the man she was going to marry. After years of faithfully serving the Lord at church even as she struggled with various health issues, he never sent her future mate. She watched as other single women—many who weren’t as interested in bible study or prayer as she was—were finding boyfriends, getting engaged, and having weddings in that very same church! She was obviously confused and hurt by this. She didn’t understand why the Psalm 37:4 formula wasn’t working for her.

Psalm 37:4 isn’t supposed to be the promise of wish-fulfillment. God isn’t a genie in a bottle! Rather, the verse is the promise of fulfillment period. Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary on the Bible said it well, God “has not promised to gratify the appetites of the body, and the humours of the fancy, but the desires of the renewed, sanctified soul”. He isn’t seeking to fulfill our worldly “wants”. Instead, he desires to fill our spiritual need.

Joni explained how in her own life, when she wasn’t healed from the injury that took away the use of her arms and legs, she learned what it meant to delight herself in the Lord according to what Jesus said: “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you” (John 15:7). The more she let his words fill her life and the more she abided in him, the hungrier she became for his words and his presence. When a quality relationship with the God of the universe—not physical healing or anything else—became what she looked forward to every day, God granted her heart’s desire (a deeper relationship with him). No more wishing upon a star. As she said, she got “the Bright and Morning Star himself”.

Lord Jesus, thank you for sending the rain this morning. You are like rain to my thirsty heart. “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God” Psalm 42:1. Thank you for your word, and thank you for always being so near. Amen.