Delight Thyself Also

She has had that verse on a card in her kitchen window for nine years and she read it properly for the first time last month.

Somebody gave it to her at a difficult point and it did what a good verse does, which is get somebody through a specific season, and she has been fond of it ever since.

And what she has actually been doing with it, which she has never once put into words, is this.

There is a thing she wants. There has always been a thing she wants, over the years there have been several, and when she wants one she gets a bit more diligent. She reads more. She turns the music on in the kitchen and worships properly rather than absently. She notices that she is doing it, and she does not mind, and there is a small satisfaction in the diligence.

And underneath, unsaid, in the part that does not consult her: I am delighting. So the desires get given.

She read the card in October, standing at the sink, and heard the machinery.

If you have got a verse working like that, come and sit down. Nobody is going to take the card out of your window.

Read the whole psalm and the verse changes size

Here is the sentence, and here is why nobody who reads the psalm around it can go on using it the way she has.

Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.Psalm 37:4

Now read the psalm it lives in.

It is a psalm about people who are doing well by doing wrong, and about somebody who is not, and about whether the second person should be worried. Fret not thyself because of evildoers. It goes on like that for forty verses.

That is the setting. It is not a psalm about getting things. It is a psalm about a person watching the wrong people prosper and being told, at length, in about six different ways, to hold on and to stay where they are and not to be eaten up by it.

And in the middle of that, the verse. It is a sentence spoken to somebody who is not getting what they want and can see other people getting it.

Which means it was never a procedure for acquisition. It is an instruction to a person in a dry stretch about where to put their attention while the situation does not change.

You are looking at a verse spoken to somebody who was not getting it, and it was already addressed to a dry stretch rather than to a technique. Psalm 37:4 is where that sits, in a poem about watching other people do well, and the same Spirit who set it in that context is the one who lets a woman at a sink hear what she has been doing.

The promise is stranger than the deal she was taught

Now the second half, and it is better than the version she has been operating, and it is not more comfortable.

He shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Everybody reads that as: you will get the things you want.

But sit with the wording. The desires of your heart. Not the objects of your desires, the desires themselves. And there is an older and more serious reading of that line which the psalm supports: that what gets given is the wanting, reshaped.

That is not a consolation prize and it is not a trick. It is considerably more invasive than what she thought she was signing up for. She has been running a system in which she stays as she is and the objects arrive. What the verse actually offers is a person whose wanting is worked on by God over a long time in a hard situation.

And notice how that fits the psalm. A man watching the wicked prosper does not primarily need the objects. He needs something to happen to what he wants, or he will be eaten alive by watching.

You are being offered something done to your wanting, and it was already the deeper half of the promise. He promised it, in the sentence about God working in a person both to will and to do, where the willing itself is named as His work (Philippians 2:13), and His Spirit does not operate a delivery service.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it, and it goes to the heart of what she has been doing.

Nothing on this site is a lever. Nothing here, and nothing anywhere in this faith, works as a mechanism on God: not delighting, not diligence, not going without food, not persistence, not the right words in the right order. If any page tells you that something you do produces an outcome from God, close it.

And some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor first and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule.

And the things you want still matter. This is not an article telling you to want less. Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too: telling your doctor is right, telling your husband is right, telling whoever cooks in your house is right, and none of it fails anything.

You are not holding a mechanism, and you were never handed one. Scripture settled that where the kingdom is named as not a matter of eating and drinking (Romans 14:17), and the Holy Spirit is named in that same verse as what it actually consists of.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.