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.”
Psalm 37 is a psalm about land, and that is easy to forget.
Today's verse usually gets lifted out and used as a promise about personal wants. Read the whole psalm, though, and you find it is about property, and about one complaint in particular: "Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity." The evildoers are doing well where everyone can see it. In a small farming society, when one family gained a field, another family usually lost one. Five times the psalm promises that God's people will "inherit the earth" or "inherit the land," and once it adds that they will "dwell therein for ever." It is written for a man watching a crooked neighbour swallow up his ground, while he works out whether honesty is worth it.
We read it with very different worries. Ask a room full of people what they want, and you will hear about a different house, a different job, or one relationship mended, and nobody will mention a field. The pressure is not the same pressure, and it would be dishonest to pretend the psalm was written to our version of it.
Still, the way it works is the same for 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, more than in what He arranges. Enjoy anyone long enough, and your wants start to bend toward theirs; that is simply how love has always worked on people. So the psalm is no deal that pays out for enthusiasm. It claims that a heart kept close to God slowly stops wanting the things God would have to refuse. The next verse tells you what to do while that is happening: "Commit thy way unto the LORD; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass."
So which do you really want, the thing or Him? That is a real question, and there is no respectable answer ready to hand. The honest test is what you would still want after ten unhurried minutes with Him, with nothing on your list. Spend those minutes today. The promise is still standing: delight in Him, and He will give you the desires of your heart.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 320 is They Checked Him (Acts 17:11).