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This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastor Johnathan Hernandez .

Jonathan Hernandez
So our question this morning is, "Does God give us the desires of our heart?" And we would look at Psalms 37. This is where we would find that scripture where it says, "take delight in the Lord and God will give you the desires of your heart." And I think we've taken this verse and we've just, what do you wanna say? Like, simplified it into just this part of it, not the entire portion of scripture. We've just taken it down to, "let's look at the scripture and take delight in the Lord and God will give you the desires of your heart." And so, I think at times we see this and it's exciting, right? We see it on t-shirts, we see it on posters, memes on Facebook or any of these things. Like, we see this portion of scripture, or just this verse of scripture, and it sounds great. You know, like, if I delight in the Lord, I will have the desires of my heart. And so, I think people get frustrated, because here they are, they feel like they're delighting themselves in the Lord, but yet they still have this desire for say, a million dollars, right? And here we are. We're serving God, we're doing the things that we've, you know, that we see in scripture. And there we don't have the million dollars, right? And so I think when we take these scriptures out of the complete context of what we're seeing, we can get ourselves into a bit of trouble, right? And that's with any scripture, you know, we have to make sure that we're looking at it in the context of the entire portion of scripture. You know, it's not just a vacuum. It's not, you know, we just can't pull a scripture out and, you know, base everything on just that little tiny bit of it, because we have to have the full context. And what is the author saying in this? What is it? What is the whole meaning through this entire part of it? You know? And so we can't, like I said, we can't just take this little bit of the scripture. You know, we have to look at the whole thing. And, you know, in chapter 37 verse one, we started off. Verse four is where we find the, "delight yourself in the Lord." And so we look and it says, "do not fret because of the evil doers; nor be envious of the workers of inequity. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass and wither as the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell on the land and feed on His faithfulness. Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your ways to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass. He shall bring forth your righteousness as a light and your justice as the noonday. Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him." You know, as we continue to go on you guys, like this whole scripture, we're starting to see things come into place. Like I said, we can't just take it out of it. We can't do that with scripture. We can't just pull stuff out of there. And so, how do we look at this? How do we see, okay, God will give you the desires of your heart. Is this really what we're seeing here? "Delight yourself in the Lord." So verse four, it says, "delight in the Lord." And we find this thought process throughout the Bible, right? But it's also one, you know, maybe we don't really, or rarely we hear somebody preach on what does it mean to delight ourselves in the Lord? And we could probably have an entire radio show that's dedicated to just that. So to delight yourself in something is to take pleasure from that thing or person. Commonly, we would delight ourselves in like, our spouse, right? So it could be friends, our children. Maybe, you know, we see people that delight themselves in a prized possession. They have an old car, and that's, you know, the greatest thing on earth. And, you know, they delight themselves in that. Unfortunately, some people delight themselves in sin. And so they're taking pleasure, or committing themselves fully into this thing. And David is telling his readers to delight and commit fully to God, to find our joy in Him before anything else.

Jonathan Hernandez
And I would challenge us, as believers are we fully committed? Are we taking joy before the Lord? Are we seeking after Him with everything that we have? And so I think, you know, if we're looking at these scriptures, we need to make sure that we're delighting ourselves in the Lord. And then the second part of verse four, it says that God will give us the desires of our heart. And I would challenge us as believers that if we're fully committed, fully going after the things of God, I think our desires will align with His desires. You know, it's not gonna be, "I want a million dollars so I can be rich and famous, or whatever." Now it's, "okay, if God gives me a million dollars, where am I investing that into the kingdom? And how am I helping what God wants to see happen? I think a lot of times, you know, I know when I first became a believer, my desires were still in things that wouldn't be God's plan, right? First, when I give my life to Christ I'm starting to learn how to walk the Christian life out. I'm praying, "God, remove these things from my life," you know, whatever it may be. And, you know, sometimes our desires are in things that they shouldn't be. Like maybe revenge, lust, envy, greed, something along those lines. And so, the more time we're spending with God, the more time we're delighting ourselves in the Lord. I think that's where we start seeing our desires being removed from this worldly context into a godly context of, you know, what is God wanting to see? What is He wanting to see happen? Not only in our lives, but within our communities? How often do we encounter different believers that are seeking after things that we see, "okay, God is showing us these things. God is speaking these things." And so, as I continue to push and move forward in Christ, we're gonna start seeing these things happen. And it's exciting to see those things, you know? And so, as I look at the scripture, if I delight myself in the Lord, that means I'm aligning everything with Him completely. I'm aligning my thought process. I'm completely all in for God, right? And so I will receive the desires of my heart. But I believe my desires now have been formed in such a way that they're aligning with God's heart. And my heart now is that, you know, exactly what God is wanting to see happen. And so, "delight yourself in the Lord, and He'll give you the desires of your heart," isn't, "I'm gonna give my life to Christ and He's gonna give me a million bucks." Or, "I'm gonna give my life to Christ, and He's gonna give me that amazing vehicle that I've always wanted." You know? No, that's not how we're seeing this happen and how it operates. You know, how we see this happen. You know, we delight ourselves in the Lord and our heart will be aligned with God's heart, and we'll see what, you know, will align with that completely. And so I would just challenge you guys to continue to, you know, read that entire portion of scripture and allow God to speak to you through that and allow the Holy Spirit just to really lead you.