By Abby

Read: Leviticus 6:1-7:27, Mark 3:7-30, Psalm 37:1-11, Proverbs 10:3-4

Relate:
When I was younger, I was terrified of falling into some deep sin, such as being a drug addict, or something terrible like that. My fear was that I would find the worst way possible to sin against God, and I didn’t trust myself to not do it. But one day, I saw this verse written on a card as I was at my friend’s house. “Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” I realized that the more that I enjoyed and spent time with God, the more I would see His guidance in my life. In addition to this, I realized that the more time I spent with God, the more my desires would align with His, and He comforted me with the fact that He guides us in taking away our evil desires and replacing them with His own will. Further relating to this idea, verse five tells us that if we put our trust in Him and commit our way to Him, He will act. We can be comforted by the fact that He responds to the hurt in our lives, but we must realize that this also requires action. We must commit our way to Him, and delight in it. Not commit our ways plural, but our way. It is the way, the whole of our lifestyle. But take heart, this takes a lot of discipline and practice, so if you aren’t quite there yet, don’t feel guilty. But don’t belittle its importance either, for it is through practices like this that we can really become like God and start to see Him as the best friend anyone could ever ask for.

In the context of this Psalm, David is describing a person who is angered by seeing those who aren’t living right prosper despite their evil tendencies. In this chapter, and in the verses we are focusing on, God doesn’t solve the problem in the way we might want Him to. The wicked aren’t immediately punished, and they still have all the prosperity they did before. God does encourage them that those who do evil will eventually be punished and that those who do good will be rewarded in due time. However, His primary teaching here is that He shifts our focus from someone else, onto our own life. We are not to focus on problems out of our control. Rather we are to make sure that we’re spending our time on activities that hone our focus on God. It is then, when we draw near to Him that we will be able to strongly sense Him drawing near to us.

React:
As mentioned earlier, we are to make sure that God’s voice is the loudest in our heads and that His way is the one in our hearts. But how do we live this out practically? It all comes down to the habits that we build in our life like finding a rhythm of reading the Bible and praying. Not only this, we must make sure we are filling our time with things that don’t stifle God’s voice and allow us to think through and relate what we’ve been reading in the Bible to our day.

Respond:

Dear Lord,
Thank you so much that you are one that we can delight in! Thank you that you take into account our heart’s desires and that you are present in our lives. We pray that you will help us to delight in you in a way that causes our will to align with yours. Help us to not be discouraged or distracted by those around us who are not following you, but instead, Lord, let your voice be the loudest in our heads and our hearts.
Amen.

Nearly all posts in February and March have as special guest authors the Juniors from the Christian Living class at Faith Academy.