Is God Withholding From You the Desires of Your Heart?

“Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” It’s a beautiful verse that seems to hold a promise for happiness if we perform the required prerequisite of “taking delight in the Lord.” But what if God isn’t giving you that intense desire of your heart? What if you are seeking Him the best you know how, begging Him for something specific, and He hasn’t fulfilled that deep yearning within? When our unmet longing is for something good and honorable, we can feel as if God has let us down when He doesn’t grant it. It makes us question our faith. It makes us question God Himself. 

Perhaps you are feeling the pain of this unmet longing. You may be thinking to yourself, “It’s not like I’m asking to be rich or famous. I just want this person I love to come back to God….Or I just want my husband to stop drinking….I just want God to heal my child from cancer….I just want the pregnancy test to be positive this time….” whatever your prayers are, they are whispered in desperation from a grieving heart. I think we all have been at a place where we have wondered why God wasn’t answering our prayers. 

The truth is, God is so much bigger than that. We can’t put Him in a box with a cookie-cutter formula that if we do A, then God will do B. Sometimes God has choice C in mind, a path we may never have envisioned. And we must be careful when we handle Scripture, that we don’t turn principles into promises to suit our own desires. God is not a transitive property math equation. He sees what we don’t see and knows what we don’t know. He desires what we don’t always desire but longs to make our desires the same as His. 

And that is where we are on the struggle bus —in making our desires like His. It’s hard to imagine that He is doing something good in the things that we see painful. We usually don’t see it until we are on the other side of the pain. Is it possible that your intense desire for that THING you are praying for has taken preeminence over God Himself in your life? God’s gift of children, a husband, relationships, health…are we lifting these desperate pleas up so high, that our trembling hands have transformed to hands of idolatry? Has our desire become an idol keeping us from true intimacy with God?

What exactly does it mean to take delight in the Lord? The word “delight” here is the Hebrew word anag, which means “to take exquisite delight,” but it also has another interesting meaning. It also means “to be bendable and pliable,” like a green branch. Hmmm. Pliable in the hands of God. Letting Him bend our will toward His. Going further…the next verse says, “Commit your way to the Lord.” This is the Hebrew word “gala,” which means to “roll away” from us and onto Him. We are giving our way, with all of our heart’s desires to Him and committing them to Him in trust. The word commit is actually a banking term. When we make a deposit into a bank account, we commit that money to the bank for safekeeping. We don’t worry over it. We know it is safe. We don’t go back five times a day to take it back out and look at it and worry over it.

Are you worrying about things that you have given to God for safekeeping? Are you allowing Him to bend your desires to make them like His? Are you desiring Him more than EVERYTHING else in your life, even that deep longing you are intensely praying about? God is trustworthy. Sometimes it takes years of aching from an unmet desire to realize that all of our desires can only be met in more of God Himself. God may not be withholding your desires. He may be changing them.