Delight Yourself in the Lord...

By Patricia Bradley

When I sign my books, I write  Psalm 37: 4. This is a verse with a  condition and a promise. 

If you (the condition): "Delight yourself in the Lord and (the Promise) He will give you the desires of your heart."

Exactly how do we go about delighting ourselves in Him? By working harder? Or Doing more things? 

I don't think so. I believe delighting ourselves in Him means we recognize who He is. He is our Creator, the Giver of our lives, the Giver of our desires. 

When we delight ourselves in Him we want what He desires for us. 

For years, I claimed this verse  as God's promise that I would be published.  

So you can imagine that I didn't understand when year after year passed and I was not published. After all, I was delighting myself in Him...wasn't I?

One morning in my quiet time, after yet another agent turned me down I prayed, "Lord if writing is not what you have for me..." I took a breath, not sure I wanted to finish my prayer because writing meant so much to me... "then change my desires. Put your desires in my heart."

I prayed that prayer, meaning it. 

As the days passed and became months, my desire to write did not lessen. Then one day as I was reading Psalm 37, I read verse four, then five and six , then seven: "Wait patiently for God to act..."

Now, I'd read verse seven many times before, but that day it hit me. Since God didn't change my desire, then I was doing what He wanted me to do, but it would be in His timing, not mine. 

That's the day I stopped striving to get published and started enjoying the journey. Writing was my job, getting published wasn't. That was God's job, and He did such a better job of it than I ever could have.

So this Christmas season, delight yourself in Him and ask Him to put His desires in you!

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