Danby House
If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the LORD, honourable; and shalt honour him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words:
Then shalt thou delight thyself in the LORD; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.
( Isaiah 58:13-14 )
In my daily Bible reading I have just finished the book of Isaiah. I noticed that at some time in the past I had underlined a verse: the second of the two above.
Now to add some context to this I preached a sermon at Open Door Baptist Church last September called “Desires of Thine Heart.” This sermon was an attempt to understand how we can know whether or not something that we are desiring is godly and helpful, or worldly and destructive.
I think I did a reasonable job of showing how you can use godly judgment to figure out what’s going to be good for you and help you vs. what is going to bed bad for you and hinder you, but I took the long way round. I realize now that I missed the point.
Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.
Commit thy way unto the LORD; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass.( Psalms 37:4-5 )
Instead of asking:
How do I get the desires of my heart?
I should be asking:
How do I delight myself in the Lord?
The best way to know for sure if what I desire is appropriate is not to try to figure out if my desire is appropriate. I don’t need to figure it out. If I delight myself in the Lord then he will give it to me – whatever it is.
So that brings us back to the first of the two verses which I based this sermon on. The one that I didn’t underline.
Matty (Headwind) 