Delight Yourself in the Lord

What does it mean to delight ourselves in the Lord? We love to quote that verse, yet David outlines a way to walk with the Lord, where trust, faithfulness, and commitment play a big part in what it means to delight in the Lord. Today, I'm reminding myself (and you!) that there is delight to be found in the Lord when we trust Him. When we obey Him. When we cultivate faithfulness right where we are.

As we head toward Thanksgiving and the end of the year, I want to turn my heart towards thanking the Lord and practicing gratitude for all He's done in the midst of a difficult and grievous year. 

Will you join me?

Scriptures referenced:

• Psalm 37:3-5
• From last week's episode: Genesis 29:31-35 Genesis 41:50-51
• Galatians 5
• Hebrews 12:2-3
• Ephesians 2:8-10
• Psalm 119
• Jeremiah 17:9
• Ephesians 6:23-24

You can find me on Instagram / Threads

Transcript

Speaker: 0:06

Hey friends! How are you doing today? I hope you are doing well. I want to welcome you to the newest episode of Honey from the Rock. And this is an episode that is just a bit random this week because oh my goodness, it's been crazy. It has been very, very busy. It's been good busy, but it's been it's just been nuts. You know, when you have family come in and you're spending time with everybody, and then you're driving to DIA 17 million times, and you know, just all of that. And then you're saying hello to new friends and goodbye to old friends, and it's just been the last two weeks have just been really nuts. They've been really good, but they've been really crazy. And so yeah, I'm coming to you very tired and yet very, very full. So today's episode is just um, yeah, just some random, just some random things that I'm really thankful to the Lord for. Um, I mean, in the random news of football, I am very excited that the Broncos be the Chiefs this week. I mean, yes, please. I've been a Broncos fan for decades, and while the last 10 years have been literally like the real housewives of Denver, it's fun to watch this team again, and I will hear no hate about my boys. So that was very exciting and very satisfying to watch the Chiefs lose. That just makes me happy. I apologize to any of my listeners who are Chiefs fans. I'm very sorry, uh, but not that sorry. Um, I've been doing some home improvement projects with my mom this week, and there is something really satisfying about when you cut something to fit into a certain space with a saw and it slides right in that um and you've measured correctly, and like you you slide it right in, and it just looks so good. I did that with baseboards this week. I managed to cut all of my baseboards correctly. I don't know if anybody knows what an accomplishment this is because I am so severely math challenged. Like I I didn't have dyslexia. I guess there's a name for it now where you you switch your letters and numbers and they start to more. I don't know. I'm just bad at math. Um, but I measured and cutting, and people would be like, oh Carrie, how could you screw that up? Trust me. Trust me, I could. So it but it was very satisfying, and the Lord was so kind to me in in that, and it's just those little touches when you're working on a project trying to put the final touches on things where when those things work, it's just so sweet. And you know, that's just really kind of been this week is you know, after preaching to myself last week, which by the way, again, I mean, I know I say it probably every week, but thank you so much to so many of you who reached out to me about last week's episode because it was hugely encouraging. Uh, I know I got really passionate about some things and really, really fired up, but it also resonated with so many people, and I'm I'm grateful. I'm grateful for that. I love it when Jesus uses things that are so universal to all of us, ways that we struggle, ways that we need to preach the gospel to ourselves. I just love it when he takes something like that and and really uses it for, really uses it for his glory. So I just want to thank you guys for all of your support for reaching out and sending me messages or um calling me or you know, just leaving notes on my social media. It seriously, it means so much as I continue on this journey of being obedient to the Lord and doing this podcast. And so I had thought about several things to talk about this week and have been literally all over the place, um, just be just because like I said, it's been so busy. But one thing I was I was kind of focusing on, and I and I'm I'm focusing on it in the in the way that I am just I am really trying to be intentional about being thankful and expressing my gratitude towards the Lord, but also really trying to be intentional about how I exhibit faithfulness to the Lord. And this has been a busy week. I was my mom and I took a long walk yesterday and she was like, What are you gonna record? And I was like, I have I have no idea. I have no clue because there's just so many things that have caught my attention, but trying to hone in on where, Lord, what are you saying this week? What are you giving us out of your word? What are you teaching me? Where are you dealing with me? And actually the verses that I kept landing on were out of Psalm 37, which has a very famous verse in it that everybody loves to quote, and it's it's a fabulous verse. Um, why shouldn't we want to quote it? But I think sometimes we quote it wanting to perceive or feel like if I quote this verse, then oh man, then Jesus is gonna do what I want, essentially. Like it's it's like our genie verse, right? Or I used to work in a Christian bookstore. It's it's one of those verses that lands on a piece of art with a kitten in a teacup, right? And the verse that I am talking about is Psalm 37.4, which is delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. Now, there's been I've heard so much discussion, I've participated in so much discussion about this verse and what it's meant to me at different points in my walk with Jesus. But as I was reading it again, I was really struck by the two verses that it is actually um in between, you know, kind of this there's like this delight, there's a delight sandwich. I guess I don't even know where that came from, but let's just roll with it, guys. We're gonna study the Lord's delight sandwich today, okay? Because it's not just that the Lord, like delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. But David writes in Psalm 37:3, trust in the Lord and do good. Live in the land and cultivate faithfulness. I was reading the Berean Study Bible translation, and it says, feast on faithfulness, and which I just I love that imagery. I love, I love that picture because it's actually not feasting on the Lord's faithfulness, although we certainly can, but feast on being faithful to the Lord. And again, that's not that's not an edification to do to do works so that the Lord will love you more and give you more things or bless you more. We again, the Father has already proven his great love for us in sending Jesus to earth to give us the gospel, to show us how to live the gospel, to be crucified, buried, resurrected, and ascended, right? To send us the Holy Spirit. The Lord has already showed us in in mind-blowing ways how much he loves us. But there is our part, right? Paul talks about that we're not saved by works, um, that it that this this faith is grace and it is a free gift of God. And yet it also, he also says then in 1st uh 10 in Ephesians 2 that we are created for good works in the Lord from the foundation of the earth. And so, you know, as I was preaching to myself last week, and you guys got to listen into that about the fruit that the Lord bears in the land of our affliction. Do we really believe that? I think the flip side of believing that the Lord is going to bring fruitfulness in the land of our affliction, like he did for Joseph, is that we feast on faithfulness, that we cultivate faithfulness also in the land of our affliction. And so trust the Lord and do good. Live in the land and cultivate faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. And then verse five, commit your way to the Lord, trust also in him, and he will do it. And I just I think it is so imperative for us as we walk with Jesus, as we seek him. I mean, if we read these three verses together, I mean, we are told twice, we are told twice to trust in the Lord. And and think about all the verbs that are in this verse. What are the things that we are told to do? We're told to trust in the Lord, we're told to do good, we're told to live in the land, we're told to cultivate faithfulness, delighting ourselves in the Lord, that is a verb, like delight yourself in him and and trust that in our delight in him, you know, people want to say, Oh, he's gonna give us the desires of our heart. You know, God's favor is on you in this way, and he's gonna, he's gonna bring your breakthrough, and he's gonna do all of these things. But delighting ourselves in the Lord is a fruit of trusting in him, it's a fruit of cultivating faithfulness, it's it's a fruit of living in the land and and doing good. And and and usually in scripture when the land is mentioned, it is it is Israel. And and I think that's probably what David means here. I don't know. I didn't really dig into that portion of the verse, but I would say to any of us, wherever the Lord has called us to live, we need to be trusting in the Lord, we need to be doing good, you know, and we need to be cultivating faithfulness, we need to be feasting on faithfulness. And as we do those things, we will find delight in the Lord. And I think that's something that was so key out of last week's message that the Lord gave us, out of out of what he gave us out of Genesis 29 and Genesis 41, where you know, Leah is aching and just agonizing. She just wants the love and affection of her husband. And Joseph is in slavery and he's falsely accused, and he's all over the place. And and I was reading his story today, and I had forgotten, you know, in between the time where he interprets the dreams of Pharaoh's cupbearer, who gets saved, who gets put back in the good graces of Pharaoh, and the baker who ends up dying, there's two years. The Lord uh the Lord makes Joseph wait two years. Joseph asks the cupbearer to remember him to Pharaoh, and the man promptly forgets about him, and Joseph is in prison for two more years. And then all of a sudden, Pharaoh has those dreams, and Joseph is called upon to interpret those dreams and to give Pharaoh the Lord's interpretation. But but Joseph, I mean, scripture talks about the fact that the Lord blessed Joseph in his slavery, that the Lord was with him and showered loving kindness on him. And we see that no matter where Joseph worked, that the Lord blessed his hand, that there was good fruit that came from it. And I firmly believe it's because Joseph trusted the Lord. You know, we look at Leah, her fourth son that she gives birth to, by the time Judah is born, what she says is, This time I will praise the Lord. This time I'm going to trust him. I'm just, I'm just going to thank him for what he's decided to do. And so when we look to delight ourselves in the Lord, I think that even though this verse says, and he will give you the desires of your heart, if our primary motivation isn't born out of trusting the Lord, like if there's not that intimacy of trust between us and Jesus, that he loves us and he has our best interest at heart, that his will truly is the very best thing for our life, then delighting ourselves in the Lord and thinking that he'll give us the desires of our heart becomes so transactional. And we start to think that the desires of our heart are good. And and that's not to say that we don't have good desires, but but I don't know about you, but I know me. And I can tell you, there are so many things in my life that I have wanted, and that and good things. They they're good things that I've wanted, and yet the Lord has said no because they were not his will, they were not his things, and at the time it was devastating, it was hurtful, it was hard, you know, where sometimes it was just like, well, okay, Lord, thank you for saying no. But I really do believe that while the second part of this verse is important, yes, the Lord will give us the desires of our heart. The the whole verse and a half before this is really the key, is that we need to trust him. We need to trust him, and we need to do good. And that's not doing good separate from the Lord, because there's none righteous, no, not one. There's there's nothing good about our flesh, there's nothing good about walking in the works of the flesh, like Paul tells us in in Galatians 5, uh, before he gives us the fruit of the Spirit. But doing, if we're gonna trust in the Lord, then we're gonna do his will. Because his will is what is good, his will is the only thing that is good, and and that is how we cultivate faithfulness. My mom and my brother and I have have developed a habit of sitting around the dinner table and each of us say three things that we're grateful to the Lord for in the day. And it is amazing how since we've started new, and it's really been only a short time, but I have so noticed the way that speaking that gratitude out loud has changed me, you know, because when I'm looking at the good things in my life, or I'm looking at the ways that Jesus has shown up for me in the midst of difficulty, when I can thank him and find glimpses of him in my day, it it changes everything. And so I just I'm like I know there are so many people who are going through such difficult times, and it can and and it can be it can be difficult to find the good things, it can be difficult to feel like I can't, you know, like putting one foot in front of the other, Lord, please help me. This this burden doesn't feel light, it doesn't feel easy, this yoke feels burdensome, and yet here in Psalm 37, David tells us trust in the Lord and do good. Do what you know the Lord has called you to do, obey his word and cultivate faithfulness. Cultivating faithfulness is the fruit of trusting the Lord and doing good. And in cultivating faithfulness, we delight in the Lord. We delight in who he is. We see and we come to know in a deep and intimate way this reciprocal relationship and union that we're in with him. And not that it's a tit for tat, or if I do this for you, Lord, you have to do this for me. But but the the beauty of delight in loving someone so much that you want to do good, you want to make them happy, you want what they want, and and you want to see them bask in your love. And and that is that is the beauty of walking with the Lord, is not only does he want us to know that he loves us, to lavish us with his love, for us to know his goodness and his correction and his discipline, his conviction and his leading and his joy in us, but he also wants worship and love and delight from us to him. He wants that from us. And so to delight in the Lord means to delight in who he is, the the good and beautiful and right and true things about his character, to delight in those things and and and then he'll give us the desires of our heart. Why? Because if we trust in the Lord and we do good and we cultivate faithfulness and we delight in the Lord, we are transformed. The desires of our heart become transformed into the desires of the Lord. We no longer walk according to the own coveting of our own heart or and we war against uh the desires of our fleshy nature and and we start to recognize areas of sin and fight against them. We desire to be faithful to the Lord and to obey him because we don't want to sin against him. We don't want to keep wounding him, we don't want to hurt him. And and and yes, there are things that we can still desire, and will the Lord give us those things? Sometimes he will. But he wants to see our heart, which Jeremiah tells us is desperately wicked, right? Is so sick. We can't understand fully our heart, but the Lord does. And when when we trust him, when we do what he has commanded us to do, when we obey his word, when we cultivate that life of faithfulness and we delight in the Lord, he the transformation he has promised us starts to happen. And and sometimes, as all of us know, and as I was talking about last week, that process is incredibly difficult and it is painful because there are things that need to be rooted out of us that are so deeply in us that the Lord in His in His amazing precision uses suffering, uses the land of affliction to take his beautiful scalpel and to cut these things out of us. But he doesn't just leave us, you know, with things taken out and just like we're just laying there like a lump, and man, this is just how this life goes. No, there is also beauty in it, there is also goodness in it, even though it is painful. And again, we see we see the example in Jesus. Hebrews 12 tells us that for the joy that was set before us, Jesus endured the cross, despising its shame. And then the writer of Hebrews follows it up by telling us not to grow weary in doing. Good. This is what it means to delight in the Lord. If we aren't considering Jesus, if we aren't fixing our eyes on him, if we aren't trusting him, if we aren't delighting in him, if our union with him isn't all about knowing him and being fed by his word and desiring his will and to do what he's called us to do, then we will we will just we will get bored, we'll fall away, we'll fade away. And those things are hard enough to fight when we are trying to pursue the Lord, right? But if we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, the beautiful author and perfecter of our faith, if we start to delight ourselves in Jesus, and again, delighting in him is yes, it's an emotion, but it's not always something that we feel, right? These are these are verb, these are verb words. What does it mean to delight in him? It means to come to his table, it means to feast on him. It means when we come to his word, again, we are asking him to reveal himself to us, to deepen our understanding of the word. We are asking the Holy Spirit as the spirit of truth, Holy Spirit, please show me where I don't have a right understanding of the Lord. Please open my eyes to wondrous things, right? That's what the psalmist writes in Psalm 119. All of these things are delighting in the Lord, but it is trusting Him when everything in life looks like it is just one gasoline vapor from absolutely blowing up in your face, right? And then at the end, so trust in the Lord, do good, live in the land, cultivate faithfulness, delight yourself in the Lord. He will give you the desire of your heart, commit your way to the Lord, trust in him, and he will do it. This this is the whole, like I said earlier, it is, it's it's the delight sandwich, right? It is it's absolutely commit our way to the Lord. And you know, I think I've mentioned in a couple of episodes the word trust, the root of the word trust means to lay your face in the ground. And and to do that means that you're not directing your own way, you're not depending on your own senses and your own feelings and and all of those things. No, you are trusting the Lord. You're not leaning on your own understanding, you're not leaning on your own perception of reality, but instead, in everything in your life, you are going to the Lord. You are asking him for his will, you are seeking his direction, you want his leading, you're in his word, you're in his church, you're with his people, you are communing with him. You know, as Paul writes, you don't cease to pray, you rejoice always, even when it's difficult, there is always a word of thanksgiving on your mouth. And you can be bawling your eyes out and so frustrated with life and and at the end of your rope and still find ways to thank the Lord. Uh again, speaking from my personal experience, I especially in this season. There have been days where it has it, I have been so, so upset or in so much grief and just wrestling. And there are days when I get so wrapped up in that. It's it's like it's so tempting to be like, Lord, I don't even know what to thank you for. And yet, how could I not thank him for the breath in my lungs, for the the family that he's given me, for the way he's carried me through these deep griefs, for his forgiveness, for his conviction and dealing with me when I've sinned against him, for the gift of repentance, that I can turn from my sin and I can, with his help and by his grace and by his mercy, I can I can set my forehead to to get back up and keep going when I've sinned against him, because he washes me in the perfection of his blood. And by that same beautiful blood of Jesus Christ, I can then turn and forgive others who have sinned against me. And so, friends, today I just want to encourage you. I know that they I know that 2025 has been a really, really hard year. But as we go into Thanksgiving next week and as we as we head towards the end of the year and we look back and we see the land of affliction that we have been walking through, I pray that we will turn our hearts a little bit as as we as we approach Advent season, right? The the season of waiting for the fulfillment of the promise of the Father to send his son Jesus as we enter into a season that signifies waiting and yet also signifies hope. My prayer for us is that we will start to really, really determine to say, you know what, Lord, this year has been. I told a friend a couple of days ago, it's it's literally been the worst year of my life. So much loss and grief. But Jesus is faithful, Jesus is good, Jesus is kind, Jesus has held me, he has absolutely kept me so close to him, he has shown me things about himself and deepened my understanding and deepened my the revelation that he's given me of just how faithful he is. And that he is someone who weeps with us when we weep, and he is someone who rejoices with us when we rejoice. Friends, I just want to encourage you as we I think we've got like 40, 42 days, 43 days left before the end of the year. Instead of rehashing some of the hard things from this year, which I know the temptation, I want my prayer is that we will practically every day, every day look for the ways that we can delight in the Lord, whether it's a beautiful sunrise or a beautiful sunset, or here, I mean, I think most of the country last week had those amazing northern lights. Oh my word, are you even kidding? I mean, the heavens declare the glory of the Lord. I mean, the way they lit up that sky was incredible. And so, friends, I I seriously just, I wanna, I, oh, as we go into Thanksgiving, I just I want to encourage you to delight yourself in the Lord. I know so many of us have unanswered questions, unfulfilled dreams, aches in our heart, empty places at the table, difficult things that have happened, brokenness and hardness and hurt. And yet, you know what? The Lord is worthy of our praise. He is worthy of our worship. And so I encourage you today and I encourage myself to trust in the Lord, to do good, to live in the land and to feast on faithfulness, to cultivate faithfulness, to delight, let's delight ourselves in the Lord, worship him, trust that he will give us the desires of our heart. Let's keep committing to our way to the Lord, committing our way to the Lord, and trust that whatever he has for us, he will do it. He will do it. And so as we end today, I want to bless you as I try to do every episode because I think it is so important to have the blessing of the Lord ring in our ears. We need the conviction of the Lord, we need the discipline of the Lord, we need his chastisement, we need his dealing with us, but we also need to remember his grace and his love. We need to remember his mercy upon us. We need to remember that he delights in us and he wants us to delight in him. And these things are true. These things are true. So let's meditate on them and hold them close in our hearts. So I want to read Ephesians 6, 23 through 24. Peace be to the brothers and sisters and love with faith from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace be with all those who love our Lord Jesus Christ with incorruptible love. Friends, I pray that this encourages you as you go forth into the rest of your week. Let us love the Lord our God with incorruptible love. Let's delight ourselves in him, let's trust him, and let's let's shift the focus of our hearts from the difficulty of this year to the good and beautiful healing and comforting things that Jesus has done for us this year. Let's delight in the Lord. Let's trust Him, commit our way to Him and feast on faithfulness, that He would be glorified in everything that we do. Amen.