Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.
Psalms 37:4
For this to be in the proper perspective, I need to give you a little of my backstory.
When I was younger, I wanted to do all sorts of things. Fireman, Astronaut, Chef, Police Officer…. The list goes on and on. Long story short, I ultimately ended up becoming a computer programmer which funnily enough, wasn’t even on my list when I was a kid. It’s also important to know that I have always been drawn to Japanese culture, Ninja, Samurai, Mt. Fuji, Sushi, Anime… That list goes on forever; going to Japan has been a dream for as long as I can remember, this will become important later in the story.
We all have dreams and desires for our lives and things we want to accomplish; these things have a way of fading over time as we move through our daily life but what if I were to tell you that it doesn’t have to be that way. If you’ll read this through to the end, I can show you from personal experience how to get those things in life that you truly want deep down.
Now, before we begin, I think it’s important that we know the difference between a want and a desire. A “want” is something at surface level, something that’ll satisfy a temporary need or objective. A “desire” is something deeper; it’s something that you need in the long term or something that will change the course of your life entirely. Wants will fade away, but desires will burn within you and never fade.
My wife and I have attended Rhema Bible Church in Oklahoma, USA for 19 years. We first moved to Rhema from Alabama in 2007. When we left home, I went kicking and screaming. I was a teenager and wanted nothing to do with the idea of leaving home. God had a different plan in mind, and I didn’t see it back then. God has a funny way of moving the chess pieces in your life around to get you into the position He wants you to be in all without you even realizing it.
In 2018, my wife and I began attending Rhema Bible Training College and this is where I faced the single hardest challenge of my walk with the Lord. Now, at this point I’d been a Christian for years. I’d taught, been on worship teams, been involved in events and everything, but what God was about to ask me to do, I wanted nothing to do with. When we started school, I told my wife that we were going to graduate, then we were moving back home. I was ready to be done. I’ll never forget, I was working for the ministry at the time and I was in our monthly employee prayer session and the Spirit of God was moving in the place; it sat heavily on me, in fact, it was one of the few times I’ve heard the audible voice of God. He told me that He wanted us to become full time missionaries to Japan. Now at first, I wanted nothing to do with it and borderline argued with God, but He has His way of getting through to you. I remember going home and sitting on it a few days and eventually telling my wife about it and she said…. “Oh yeah, I know; the Lord told me about it a while ago, I’ve just been waiting on God to tell you”. You can imagine my face when she said that. From that point on, my “No” shifted to “Yes”. When she told me that she already knew, something in me shifted and I could see God’s hand on it. From that point on, we started dedicating everything we had to praying out God’s call on our lives and preparing to transition.
When we were getting rid of things to prepare to move, God started working on us to move back home for a small season before we go. At first, we fought it, we were on fire to get to Japan, and it felt like another roadblock, but God was working things out. We did move home and we’ve been here for coming up on 3 years now, but things have shifted in such a way for us, it’s crazy when we think back on it. This is where I’ll show you what it means when the Bible says that God gives you the desires of your heart.
We lived in Oklahoma for almost 20 years. In that time, family members died, children were born, events happened we couldn’t be a part of; it felt like we were missing everything and deep down, we both had a desire to spend time with our families before it was too late. God knew this even if we didn’t and He honored that.
When we left Oklahoma, we had no idea how we were going to get to Japan or how that process even looked but since moving back home, we’ve been to Japan three times for short-term mission work and have everything worked out for our move. God never forgot us even though at times, it felt like He did. God has been moving our chess pieces around to get us where He needed us to be before He could send us on our next move.
This, this is what the bible means in Psalms 34:7 when it says that God will give you the desires of your heart. The desires in your heart, I mean the real desires, not just the superficial “wants”, those desires come from God and He wants you to have them otherwise He would not have put them there to begin with. You know how to make those desires come to pass?
Matthew 6:33 – But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you.
God gave us these desires, they are His, if we truly want them to happen, all we need to do is seek Him and He’ll fulfill them. You have to have faith that He can do it. Rhema taught us to Live by Faith. It funny when I think about how God put us in these places so we could get the knowledge we needed without us knowing what was happening.
Mark 11:23-24 Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, be taken up and thrown into the sea and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen
(Hebrews 11:1).
This means that we don’t always have to see it, we just have to believe He’ll do it and it’ll happen.
Now, when we sit down and think about all we have to do or the financial needs of moving halfway around the world, it’s easy for us to get overwhelmed. My wife and I tend to over-analyze things and cause ourselves a lot of unnecessary stress and worry. It’s easy to focus on the natural and forget that God is our provider.
My God shall provide all my needs according to His riches in Glory in Christ Jesus.
Phillippians 4:19
Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that this country kid from that grew up in the woods of Alabama and liked foreign cartoons would ever in a million years be moving to Japan full time to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ but looking back on it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
God can and wants to do great things through you, but He’s a gentleman. He will never force Himself on you or make you do anything you don’t want to do. What He needs is for you to say Yes when he calls you. If you’re willing to set yourself aside and live for Him, He has a funny way of giving you everything you ever really wanted to begin with. Honor is reciprocal. If you honor Him, He will honor you.
If you get anything out of this post, I want it to be this,
Never be afraid to say yes to God.
Even if you don’t understand it, even if it doesn’t seem possible, even if it seems like it’ll cost you everything. Whatever you lose in saying yes to God you didn’t need in your life, whoever you lose by saying yes to God wasn’t meant to be in your life anyway. You can’t be afraid of losing things or people because…….
Your best is on the other side of your Yes!