Psalm 37:4-6
Isaiah 58:13,14
In Psalm 37:4 it says, "Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart."
It says to delight in the Lord. How do we delight ourselves in God?
Isaiah 58:13,14 says,
"If you turn away YOUR foot from the Sabbath, from doing YOUR PLEASURE on my holy day; and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the LORD, honorable; and will honor Him, not doing YOUR OWN WAYS, nor finding YOUR OWN PLEASURE, nor speaking YOUR OWN WORDS: Then you shall delight yourself in the LORD;"
So if we honor God and turn away from doing what we want to do, we can and will delight ourselves in the Lord.
Psalm 37:4 also says if we delight ourselves in the Lord, He will give us the desires of our heart.
So if we turn from our own ways and honor God, we will be delighting in Him and He will give us our hearts desires.
When the Bible talks about God giving us the desires of our heart, it doesn't mean that whatever we desire will be given us. It means if we are delighting ourselves in God (turning from our own ways to His ways), He will place the desires that He has for us into our hearts.
Think about it this way. What would be the point in denying our own ways (flesh) to delight ourselves in God, just so He could in turn give us our own desires and ways back in exchange? When we delight ourselves in God, He will give us the desires, dreams, visions, and ambitions that our hearts should have because we are pleasing God. We are denying ourselves of carnal pleasures and our own ways.
The desires that we may have in our heart may not be evil, wicked, perverse, or prideful but the heart holds many things.
David asked the Lord to, ".....cleanse thou me from secret faults." (Psalm 19:12)
Here David was talking about secret sins.
And in Psalm 90:8 Moses prays, "Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance." Moses here was saying that our hearts are being read.
Solomon wrote in Proverbs 20:9, "Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin?"
The human heart aside from the direction of God is full of evil, pride, and fleshly desires. It is only til we deny ourselves and delight ourselves in the ways of the Lord that we will see Him give us the desires of our hearts and then see them come to pass.
