A different angle ...

This week’s reading was particularly centered around obedience to God, the blessings He desires to bestow on us, and the consequences of disobedience.  It sounds like something of a rules-based or works-based type of relationship, but I think it’s quite different.  I think it’s more about changing our frame of reference.

Reading through Deuteronomy 28 – 34, Psalms 31 – 37, and 2 Chronicles 1 – 7, there seemed to be numerous reminders of God’s longing desire to bless His people … and a forlorn sense when His people disregarded His provision, His guidance and His love.  There is a rather unified thread through all this … from where we read in 2 Chronicles 1 about Solomon seeking wisdom above all in order to lead God’s people and the Lord responding by not only providing him wisdom, but providing him wealth, riches and fame.  Which leads me to the passage this week that moved me … it’s one that I’ve known for quite some time (my cousin Joey, a pastor in England, shared it with me years ago and it blessed me in the place I was at that time).  This week, there was a synthesis that I hadn’t noticed before.

Psalm 37:3-5 says …

Trust in the Lord and do good.  Then you will live safely in the land and prosper.  Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart’s desires.  Commit everything you do to the Lord.  Trust him, and he will help you.

It’s really easy to look at these passages, and many similar to them, and (I think) wrongly internalize them to convince ourselves that if we only do things to make God happy, he will in turn reward us.  That is, above all, dangerous ground to walk.  By no means is that type of thinking unusual, including in Christian circles … it’s certainly the basis for many of the world’s religions.  It’s no less dangerous a way to think, though.  Why?

In this passage, particularly in verse 4, where David writes “Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart’s desires,” there is in fact an if-then relationship.  But I think we have to look at the relationship from a different point of view, a different angle, as it were.  Most of the time, we look at something like that, as noted above, and think … “okay, if I just do such-and-such, God will do such-and-such in return.”  It’s if we make Him happy, we can convince Him to do what we want.  The different angle to it is not so much that we can make God do something different or something we want.  It’s akin to how Solomon (not so ironically, David’s son … interesting that David wrote this and Solomon – at least at the beginning of his reign – was a beneficiary of it) asked the Lord for wisdom.

As I look at the principle underlying the passage, I’m moved to think that rather than us doing something to convince God to change, perhaps we are the ones who need to change.  When David writes, “Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you your heart’s desires,” I think he’s directing us in much the same path that Solomon took.  Solomon asked for wisdom, which most often people define / describe as “knowledge put to use” or something similar.  I would rather look at wisdom as seeing things God’s way.  Therein lies the connection … to “take delight in the Lord” I think tells us in a sense to delight in the things God delights in, or put differently, to see things God’s way.  In order to see things God’s way, we have to realign our thinking, not His.

Here’s the cool part … if we realign ourselves to the way God sees things, if we seek wisdom as so defined, then I think it’s very logical to expect that He will give us our “heart’s desires.”  How?  Because our heart’s desires will have changed to become His heart’s desires.  Again, we see this in the way Solomon asked for wisdom, and when he did, God gave him his heart’s desires, which were really God’s desires for him.

An accurate reading of the Bible, and a correct understanding of God will show that He wants to bless us, give us good gifts, and endow us with fullness of joy and fullness of life.  Too many people wrongly perceive God as this angry, fun-despising deity who spends all His time looking for ways to berate us and damn people to hell.  NOT SO.  Let’s get super simple about it and look at Jesus … was Jesus’s earthly mission to come down and put the Saturday Night Smackdown on humanity?  Not in the least.  Have a look at John 3:16-17, and at a whole bunch of the red letters in the Bible for that matter.  Jesus came to die in order to give us life.  God went the full distance to reach us, to save us, and to bless us.

Back to the point.  If we realign our way of seeing and thinking, and look to align our hearts to God’s, we will want the things He wants for us.  Even in those times of silence in response to our prayers, when we realign our thinking we’ll have the confidence and assurance that He is still there, still listening, still working, still blessing.  When things don’t go the way we expect, we’ll have the assurance that they DID go the way He expected … and intended … and in conjunction with His nature, it will be from His abundant love.

God longs to give us our heart’s desires.  We don’t have to do anything to earn it … and we can’t … other than change our perspectives, our foundation, our framework.  We have to delight in His ways.

This week, let’s seek God’s heart for our lives and our situations.  Let’s ask Him to open our eyes and ears to His desires … to change our frame of mind.  Then we’ll be able to see His work for what it is, the manifestation of immense love for us.

In His ways, and His love,

MR