Delight yourself also in the LORD, and He shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass. —Psalm 37:4-5

Many have taken these magnificent verses to mean “Delight in the Lord and He will give you whatever you desire.” That is not the meaning at all, but rather we should understand this passage as “Delight yourself in the Lord and He’ll give you new desires.” How else could we commit our ways to Him? If God granting us anything we desire is the proper understanding, then what about when we want something that is not good for us or not His will for us? Do we get it anyway because God gives us whatever we desire? No, a better understanding is that God will plant godly desires in our hearts, and one of them, in a life that is led by the Spirit, is to commit to the ways of the Lord.

As I look back on my life, I see that after I came to Christ, new desires, new goals, and new priorities were birthed inside of me. I committed to those ways and have spent the last twenty-five years watching them come to pass. This required seasons of trust, in which I failed miserably at times.

But God is faithful to bring to pass that which He places in our hearts. He alone knows best, and His will exceeds any plans and desires of our own. Our journeys as saints include a continual revealing of new desires, things we wish to change about ourselves that we know are not His will for us.

The longer we walk with Him, the deeper He probes into our souls to bring to the surface things that need replacing. And when He pinpoints attitudes or actions that are not His best for us, a desire to change begins to form. From that, a commitment to change is made, and then God slowly but surely brings it to pass. Then He does it again and goes deeper, and He does it yet again and goes deeper. He is constantly creating desires in us for things that both please Him and allow us to reflect Him more clearly.
What is His desire for you today? What has He been digging up in your soul in order to create a new desire in you? It may not be too hard to identify; it may be that thing about yourself that you often wish you could change (a spiritual thing obviously). That’s the desire. Now commit it to the Lord, pray that the desire will translate into action, and watch God bring it to pass. Then do it again and again and again—until the day when you see Him and are finally like Him!