The lovely and gracious Emily Freeman has granted me permission to share excerpts from her book Grace For The Good Girl as my Psalms For Moms posts throughout the month of October. So each Wednesday in October, you'll be hearing from Emily. Thanks Emily for sharing with us!
Psalm 37:4, "Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart."
This is one of my favorite verses-- one I talked about in For The Write Reason after a wise woman explained how we get it out of order. We think we must delight ourselves in Him in order to get what we want-- the desires of our heart. We see a formula and, because we are human and we like formulas, we decide "Well that's just what I'll do." And we set out to delight in Him in order to get what we want.
What we fail to realize is that the verse is more subtle than that. God is saying "Spend time with me and the desires of your heart will line up with my desires." Emily had a great quote that explained this so well that I wanted to share it with you:
"As your spirit communes with the Spirit of God, He plants seeds of desire in your heart and then leads you according to His will. And He will work within you such that you will begin to desire what He desires. When you do what would really please you, you are actually obeying God!"
Have you ever thought that by delighting in Him He will change your heart-- and your former desires will be replaced with His?
2 comments:
I notice that when I spend time in the company of the Lord, I always want more time to spend with him, but when I neglect it, I don't even give him a thought for hours at a time. It's strange how that works, but luckily I am in a period of spending a lot of time with him now!
Actually, I've been thinking about that a lot lately. I am longing for my desires to be replaced with His and I know that HE is doing so.
The last few weeks have been really rough on me as a person (and a writer.) I've been struggling with seeing God through all that has gone on recently, but I found when I did take time to reflect and pray His desires for my life were being made clearer to me as I sought Him out.
This morning God spoke greatly to me after I picked up a book that I've been meaning to read for quite a while now. I picked up my copy of 'For The Write Reason' and HE began to speak.
I saw that my strong desires to write a story are HIS same desires too. God desire is to write my life story. HE longs to write on the tablet of my heart...but I had to seek HIM to find this out this morning and to be reminded of that very fact.
Alright, I'll stop being long winded now! ;) I just wanted you to know that your book brought me to HIS presence this morning, Marybeth. Thank you.
P.S. I finally wrote the prologue for the novel idea I've been working on. It scared me to do so and it challenged me more than I thought it would to start writing the story out, but it felt right all at the same time too.
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