Daily Manna · Day 320 · November 16
Desires of the Heart
“Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.”
This is a psalm about land.
That is easy to lose, because the line gets lifted out and used as a promise about personal wants. But read the psalm and it is about property and it is about a specific grievance: fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. The evildoers in question are prospering, visibly, in a small agricultural society where one family gaining a field meant another family losing one. Five times the psalm says the meek shall inherit the earth, or shall inherit the land, or shall dwell therein for ever. It is written for a man watching a corrupt neighbour absorb his ground and doing the arithmetic on whether honesty is worth it.
We read it in a world with a very different anxiety. Ask a room what they want and the answers come back as a different house, a different job, one relationship repaired. Not a field. The pressure is not the same pressure, and it would be dishonest to pretend the psalm was written to our version.
But the mechanism it describes is the same in both. Delight thyself also in the LORD, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. The delight comes first, and it is delight in him and not in his arrangements. Enjoy anyone long enough and your wants start to bend toward theirs; that is not a religious principle, it is how affection has always worked on people. The psalm is not a transaction that pays out for enthusiasm. It is a claim that a heart kept close to God gradually stops wanting things God would have to refuse. And the next verse says what to do while that is happening: hand the road you are walking over to him, and put your weight on him for the rest.
So which do you actually want, the thing or him? That is not rhetorical and it has no respectable answer ready to hand. And the honest test is not what you would say now, in front of yourself, with the question freshly put. It is what you would still want after ten unhurried minutes in his company with nothing on the list.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 320 is They Checked Him (Acts 17:11).