The Delight of Submission
“Delight yourself in the LORD, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 37:4
I love making to-do lists. It is how I get done what I want to get done. Many people are list-making people. Children make Christmas lists for the toys they want to receive. People make shopping lists of what to buy at the store or supermarket. Wives make honey-do lists for husbands.
Maybe you have a prayer list. However, it is usually a list we fail to develop or construct with short-sighted vision. Who are we making our prayer list for, is it for us, or God? What is the purpose of our prayer list? It is not for us to know we have completed praying.
This verse from the Psalmist sounds like a self-indulgent type of promise. On the surface, it seems to focus on our delights and desires, and that would be the problem. When it comes to our prayers we often allow the desires of our heart to drive our prayer time and prayer lists. Can we dare hope that to delight in the Lord means we get whatever we desire? Doesn’t delighting in someone place their desires ahead of our own?
There are over 25 different words in the Hebrew language for delight. This particular Hebrew word is to be understood as submission or service. The word itself means luxurious, in the sense of being soft or pampered. The delight here is a focus upon ease and comfort. The twist is, that it is not about our ease and comfort, but the comfort of another. That is where the submission or service element comes into play. The word indicates a sensitivity to the needs of others and an action on our part to look for ways to serve them.
The word is also feminine in nature and implication. Think about the frazzled and tired mother who seems to always find a way to change the baby’s diaper, get the laundry done, help a child with their homework, and set a meal on the table despite the chaotic family schedule. This mother is focused on the needs of others. My image of a mother is often a woman who consistently puts the needs of others before herself. I grew up with this kind of woman and was honored to have a wife who is this kind of woman. This is the type of delight the psalmist is highlighting.
To delight ourselves in the LORD is to focus completely on Him and His desires. Thus, our question in prayer should be, “What can I do that will serve the Lord today?” When our delight is to serve the Lord, the focus changes from self-indulgence to self-sacrifice. Our prayer list is not something we hand to God like a to-do list for the divine. It can be a request for direction on how He desires us to serve Him today.
The term for desire here is literally a request or a prayer, but the source of the request of prayer comes from the inner self. The inner self is who you really are, not who you want people to think you are. The things I do to convince people that I am better than think I am, only serve to promote a false façade of myself. We often live with P.T. Barnum’s philosophy of “fooling some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time”. However, God is not fooled. He knows your heart and the real inner you. To pray from our inner self is to drop the façade and be honest before God. It is a place where we desire a real relationship with Him. To fail to be honest before God is an attempt to manipulate a divine relationship in order to get what we want. We are hiding who we are from God.
The desire of our prayer list should be consumed with knowing God and serving Him. When that happens, it changes how we make our prayer list.