Psalm 37:3-6
3 Trust in the Lord, and do good;
Dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness.
4 Delight yourself also in the Lord,
And He shall give you the desires of your heart.
5 Commit your way to the Lord,
Trust also in Him,
And He shall bring it to pass.
6 He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light,
And your justice as the noonday.
To prepare for a merge long before you're actually ready to merge, identify a gap between cars on the freeway where you can merge. Then, continue increasing your speed until you reach the gap you selected. Instead of increasing speed, drivers have a tendency to actually slow down before merging which is a big mistake
To put it simply, to merge is to BRING THINGS TOGETHER…
I pray that our desires align with the will of God.
He can show you
1 Samuel 1:9-20
9 So Hannah arose after they had finished eating and drinking in Shiloh. Now Eli the priest was sitting on the seat by the doorpost of the tabernacle of the Lord. 10 And she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed to the Lord and wept in anguish. 11 Then she made a vow and said, “O Lord of hosts, if You will indeed look on the affliction of Your maidservant and remember me, and not forget Your maidservant, but will give Your maidservant a male child, then I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life, and no razor shall come upon his head.”
12 And it happened, as she continued praying before the Lord, that Eli watched her mouth. 13 Now Hannah spoke in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard. Therefore Eli thought she was drunk. 14 So Eli said to her, “How long will you be drunk? Put your wine away from you!”
15 But Hannah answered and said, “No, my lord, I am a woman of sorrowful spirit. I have drunk neither wine nor intoxicating drink, but have poured out my soul before the Lord. 16 “Do not consider your maidservant a wicked woman, for out of the abundance of my complaint and grief I have spoken until now.”
17 Then Eli answered and said, “Go in peace, and the God of Israel grant your petition which you have asked of Him.”
18 And she said, “Let your maidservant find favor in your sight.” So the woman went her way and ate, and her face was no longer sad.
19 Then they rose early in the morning and worshiped before the Lord, and returned and came to their house at Ramah. And Elkanah knew Hannah his wife, and the Lord remembered her. 20 So it came to pass in the process of time that Hannah conceived and bore a son, and called his name Samuel, saying, “Because I have asked for him from the Lord.”
Hannah wanted a son, God wanted a prophet. Her desires intercepted God’s will. The rest is history.
Elizabeth & John the Baptist | Widow and the jar of oil | The little boy’s lunch
There are other examples in the Word, to show you and to show me, that God will grant us the desires of our heart, if we would but trust in Him to do it. However, the question remains…WHAT DESIRES?
James 4:1-4
4 Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? 2 You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures. 4 Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
Is God’s will your will, or is your will God’s? There is a difference. Too many do whatever they want, and call it the will of God…this is not Christian faith, this is carnal religion.
James 4:13-16
13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; 14 whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” 16 But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
Luke 11:27-28
27 And it happened, as He spoke these things, that a certain woman from the crowd raised her voice and said to Him, “Blessed is the womb that bore You, and the breasts which nursed You!”
28 But He said, “More than that, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it!”
Our desires must match God’s will if we are to see what we really want out of this Christian faith. When our carnality gets in the way – that’s when we get weird.
The wrong mix
Religion tries desperately to force carnality and holiness together…you can’t have both, one of them must die.
James 3:11-12
11 Does a spring send forth fresh water and bitter from the same opening? 12 Can a fig tree, my brethren, bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Thus no spring yields both salt water and fresh.
We have an entire history of people who do this, and it never works out.
Ruth 1:1-5
1 Now it came to pass, in the days when the judges ruled, that there was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehem, Judah, went to dwell in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons. 2 The name of the man was Elimelech, the name of his wife was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion—Ephrathites of Bethlehem, Judah. And they went to the country of Moab and remained there. 3 Then Elimelech, Naomi’s husband, died; and she was left, and her two sons. 4 Now they took wives of the women of Moab: the name of the one was Orpah, and the name of the other Ruth. And they dwelt there about ten years. 5 Then both Mahlon and Chilion also died; so the woman survived her two sons and her husband.
Daniel 3:1
3 Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold, whose height was sixty cubits and its width six cubits. He set it up in the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon.
Why did Nebuchadnezzar do this?
Daniel 2: 38…when Daniel explains to the king that he was the head of gold in the dream he couldn’t remember…he took that dream, and made it an idol of worship to himself…people do this in church all the time. You get a Word from God, rather than glorify Him for it, you turn it into some type of worship for yourself!
Another example is the Old and Young prophet (2 Kngs. 13: 11-25)
So we see this unholy merger of sorts, when in reality, we should be seeking God’s will and desires to merge with our own.
Conclusion
When will your desires match the Lord’s? What do you want to accomplish in this life? Is it all about you, or about the One who made you?
2 Chronicles 7:14
14 if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.
Notice how God separates the 2 dynamics in faith…
Pray & Seek My Face…two different things, both are important, but you must do both, not just one.
To seek His face is to seek His will and desires. Everyone, prepare to Merge.
