A Devotion from Stephen Charnock

Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. 
-Psalm 37:4

Without cheerful seeking we cannot have a gracious answer.

God will not give an answer to prayers that dishonor him. A flat and lumpish attitude is not for his honor. We do not read of lead employed about the temple but the purer and most glittering metals. God wants the most excellent service, because he is the most excellent Being. He wants the most delightful service, because he bestows the most delightful gifts. It is a dishonor to so great a majesty to put him off with low and dead-hearted services. It is not for the credit of our great Master to have his servants dejected in his work, as though God were a wilderness and the world a paradise.

Dull and lumpish prayer does not reach him and therefore cannot expect an answer. Such desires are as arrows that sink down at our feet; there is no force to carry them to heaven.

Lumpishness speaks an unwillingness that God should hear us. Any who coldly and dully put up a petition to a sovereign give the ruler good reason to think that they do not care for an answer. That farmer has no great mind to harvest who is lazy in tilling the ground and sowing the seed. How can we think God should delight to read over our petitions when we take so little delight in presenting them? God does not give mercy to an unwilling person. God makes his people willing. Dull spirits seek God as if they did not care if they find him; such attitudes either account God not real or their petitions unnecessary.

Without delight we are not fit to receive a mercy. Delight in a mercy wanted makes room for desire, and large desires make room for mercy. If no delight in begging, there will be no delight in enjoying. If there is no cheerfulness to enliven our prayers when we need a blessing, there will be little joy to enliven our praise when we receive a blessing. A weak, sickly stomach is not fit to be seated at a plentiful table. God will not send his mercies except to a soul who will welcome them. A cheerful soul is fit to receive the least and fit to receive the greatest mercy. Such individuals will more prize a little mercy than dull petitioners will prize a greater, because they have a sense of their needs. If Zacchaeus had not a great joy at the news of Christ’s coming by his door, he would not have so readily entertained and welcomed him.