In what do you delight?

Psalm 37:4 says "Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart."

Ok, great! So all I have to do then is to delight in the Lord and then I can have my rainbow baby? Well, it's not quite that simple... This is something that has been woven through my life, quite often, in the past few years.

First let's look at what it means to "delight" in the Lord. The word delight, as it is here in verb form, means to "take great pleasure." In context that means that we take great pleasure in the Lord! Sounds easy enough, right? When you're taking great pleasure in the Lord, you're involved in His word, and your heart follows His.

So now the concept of receiving the desires of your heart. As I just said, when we delight in the Lord, our hearts are intertwined with what HIS heart is for. His desires are for a world redeemed, for all to know Him and love Him. So when our hearts are intertwined with His, the desires of our hearts become a desire for His will to be done! What a bittersweet concept. There's no promise that women can conceive children if they would just delight in the Lord. There's no guarantee that if you just delight in the Lord, you'll get enough money to be able to buy that nice, new house. What IS guaranteed, is that your heart will be so overwhelmed with His desires for you that you will be content in whatever circumstances you find yourself in, because that's where His will is.

What a tough concept to stick to. I'll leave you with this question. What do you dwell on? What do you spend your free time doing? Do you delight in facebook? Do you delight in Pinterest? Do you delight in charting your temperature and obsessing over your chart as you TTC impatiently for that elusive rainbow baby? Or do you take a step back from all of that and focus on the One who truly matters, when all else will eventually fade away and He is all that will remain?

I definitely put myself in the midst of that. I take some delight from facebook, Pinterest, TTC, as well as some from the Lord. Am I perfect? Absolutely not. But I have my moments of contentment. One of these was today, and hopefully it produced a reminder every day that I see it. Our church is very fortunate to have an extremely talented artist, by the name of Sereen Gualtieri. She paints acrylics on reclaimed wood as a form of worship. I was drawn to a few of her paintings that she was selling this morning (all of the money goes to a project to save enslaved children in India) and I saw the scripture she had for this painting: "Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart." Psalm 37:4. That struck such a note with me that I was intrigued. Then as I was debating buying it, she mentioned that my outfit actually matched the woman in the painting: white shirt, colored skirt, and curly hair (which she doesn't often do).

So, taking a step of faith that the Lord had a purpose for this painting in my life, I bought it! And oddly enough, it wasn't listed online with all of the others. I can only wonder what God wants to use this painting for in my life, but even if it's just a constant reminder to delight in Him, it was well worth it.