Greater Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church

Guest (Male): It's a great thought, isn't it, that one day we'll make it home? His yoke is easy and His burden is light. God doesn't put more on us than what we can handle. We don't know what we can handle. Many times in our lives, we've said, "If one more thing happens, I just won't be able to take it," and then one more thing happens and we find that we can take it. God knows our limits and He knows His strength. He knows what He infuses in us, and it's by His grace that you and I have the ability to make it. Amen.

We're so thankful and grateful to God for the awesome privilege that we have to be here today. Before we get into the message, I do want to make one acknowledgment. I want to acknowledge this young couple that's been sitting behind me. They are celebrating their anniversary today: Brother Simmons and his lovely wife. Will you just stand up? 41 years? Is that right? 41 years. Turn around and let the people see you, man. God bless you. He's headed our veterans ministry. He has led us in so many ways, he and his lovely wife. We thank God for them and just want to acknowledge you on your blessed day. You may be seated. Amen. Is anyone else celebrating an anniversary today? Thank God.

Let's join in a moment of prayer now as we ready our hearts for the Word for the morning. Holy Father, we thank You for blessing us with this day. We thank You for our journey through this past week: the highs and the lows, the ups and the downs. We thank You for the crazy turnarounds. We thank You for our rest last night and for allowing us to rise early this morning with our hearts and minds desiring to be in the house of prayer. We thank You that since we've been here, You have blessed us through the songs that have been sung, through the scriptures that have been read, through the prayers that have covered us.

Now, Lord, we need a Word to help us to live. So I pray now that You would lift again Your human out of self. Fill us with the Holy Spirit. Speak to us and through us in this moment of sharing and bless now the words in our mouths and meditations that are on our hearts, that they may be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Speak, Lord, Your servants are listening. With You, there is a Word. Without You, there is no Word. We want to hear You, and we want our lives to be changed. In Jesus' name, amen.

I also want to celebrate our pastor, Reverend James Wesley. Thank you so much for blessing us with this privilege and opportunity. We've been around the last couple of weeks in other places preaching, so it's just good to be home today. It’s good to be here with you and to give him a little bit of a break between this morning and his afternoon engagement. So I want to turn again with you and ask you to do what he was doing this morning. He was at Psalm 27. I want you to look at Psalm 37, and I want to look at verses three through eight in your hearing.

For examination, the sermonic focus will be on verse four. But beginning at verse three, the Word of God reads: "Trust in the Lord and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. Delight thyself also in the Lord; and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in Him; and He shall bring it to pass. And He shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy judgment as the noonday. Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him: fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass. Cease from anger, and forsake wrath: fret not thyself in any wise to do evil." This is the Word of God for the people of God.

I want to preach this morning from the subject: "Our Heart's Desire," based on the fourth verse: "Delight thyself in the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart." Now, God is not a Super Santa, and He doesn't propose to just give you whatever you want just because you want it. God is wise and He's merciful and He's compassionate, and even when we don't always understand what we need, God is always willing to sometimes override us and make sure we get what we want.

I'm reminded of a little boy who went with his father one day shopping, and his father took him to a bicycle store. As soon as they came into the store, the little boy's eyes lit up. He immediately ran to the largest bicycle that was in the shop. It was the most expensive. It had the flaps, it had the streamers, it had everything on it. He said, "Daddy, this is the one that I want!" His daddy said, "Wait, let's look around and see what else is here first." As they began to go on tour of the bicycle shop, the father began to explain the various features of different bicycles.

"Now, that's a 26-inch, and that's for people who are adult-sized, and this is a 20-inch, and this one..." He explained the various bicycles and all. Finally, when they finished the tour, the little boy saw another bicycle and he said, "Daddy, that's the one that I want! I've changed my mind." His daddy said, "That's just the one that I was going to buy." What had he done? He had worked with the son to help him understand that what he thought he wanted was not necessarily what he needed. By the time he finished explaining and making things clear, his desire changed.

You and I come into this world and we look around and we see many different things. We see a lot of people doing a lot of things, and it's very easy for us to be persuaded that we want to live like some other people and that we want to do some of the things that we see some of the other people doing. But it's not always in our best interest. You and I need to understand this morning that our desires must align with God's will in order for God to fulfill this promise. Does He make a promise? Yes. Does He intend to give you the desires of your heart? Yes.

But there's some work that has to be done. There has to be some alignment. There has to be some understanding about who we are and where we are and what it is that God prefers for our life. That's what I purpose to share with you a little bit this morning. I want you to understand first that Psalm 37 here is very much like Psalm 27. It's in a group of psalms that are assigned to David. I won't go into the animated illustrations because we know who David is and I don't want to reiterate that.

But he was also a man who grew in wisdom and in knowledge, and it was in David's later years of his life that he writes this psalm. There's no particular occasion. It wasn't the fact that he had an enemy on his trail at this moment. It wasn't the fact that he had a circumstance there. But this psalm is the accumulation of wisdom. To give us the clue, down in the 25th verse, David speaks on this wise. He says, "I have been young and now I am old, and I have never seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging bread."

So this Psalm 37 is from an old man's perspective about the sum totals of life and all of the challenges that life presents and why we must align our life with God's life. I smile when I watch James preach and when others preach because he's young and he's skating and he's dancing and he's full of energy and all of those things. I'm like the old man, just sitting back. I've been young and now I'm old, and I see things differently and I understand things differently.

So here's the first thing I want you to understand. First and foremost, the ability to even have a desire comes from God. Can you help somebody understand that? The ability to have a desire comes from God. God is our Creator. He's the Maker of the whole world, and He has designed in each one of us some parts that are like Him. God is a Creator. God is a planner. God is a thinker. He made us with the ability to think and to create and to plan.

If you are going to be a person who can create and who can think and who can plan, then it means you can also be a person who has a desire to have those plans and dreams and all fulfilled. Somebody said one time dreams are for those who sleep, but if you never had a dream, you'll never know when you had one come true. So you need to have a dream. You ought to thank God for every dream that He gives you, for every desire. Now, I'm going to warn you in a minute because God does give us a warning about desires.

But I want to first establish the fact that He's the one who places the desires in our hearts. When they are right, when they are aligned with Him, when they are for noble, godly purposes, you can be sure that they have come from Him. The psalmist here says I know it's very easy to get distracted because you can look around and you can see people—so many people in our society—who are doing wrong things and look like they're getting away with it. How many know it really can frustrate you?

Sometimes even today, I have to every now and then just go ahead and just turn the channel. I like the news. I do. I like to know what's going on, like to stay current with events. But there are sometimes when it just gets a little much because it just seems as if some people are getting away with things that I know other people just won't be able to get away with. So we hear the wisdom of David. The wisdom of the old man says, "Fret not thyself."

Don't get uneasy. Don't get overburdened. Don't get overly concerned about those who are doing wrong, because he makes it clear that they will soon be cut off. It used to tick me off sometimes when we were growing up. Some of my brothers could do things that I could never do. Some of the kids in the neighborhood could get away with it. Mama, you just don't care who gets us. If we were wrong, the whole neighborhood could straighten us out. Other folks' children could do whatever they wanted to do and no one would say anything to them.

Thank God for the neighborhood. I really appreciate it today in ways that I couldn't appreciate it then. He says don't worry about people who look like they're getting away. They may get by for a while, but they won't get away. You'll look around one day and you won't even see them anymore. It gripped the United States Senate today. I don't want to say it in a negative way, but I want to just say thank God for Senator Graham and the service that he gave. Senator Graham had been one of those ones who had been pushing, but today he's at home with the Lord, I believe, or I hope.

But that's what I'm saying. You've got to be careful. Don't get lost in wrong things. "Trust in the Lord," is what he says, "and you'll verily be fed." Then he comes to the verse for the morning: "Delight yourself in the Lord, for He will give you the desires of your heart." Now, what is it about desires that I want you to know? Second, I want you to know that desires will reveal who you really are. They will tell other people. They tell you. They tell everybody who you really are.

How do desires do that? Desires tell you what is your character. Your desires—what you think, what you plan, what you want to accomplish, what you want to do—reveal your inner person. It reveals your character. Your character is who you are when no one else is looking. It's not always you walk around with a big sign saying, "This is my character." No, your character reveals itself in what you think and how you feel and what you ultimately want to be and who you want to be.

It says a lot about you, and so you've got to be careful about character. An immoral person will not have good character. They will not have the integrity that they need in their life, and it will betray them. So you have to be careful about who you are for real on the inside. When you take off your makeup, when you take off your Sunday-go-to-meeting, when it's just you, who are you? It's revealed in what you desire.

Not only will your character tell you who you are, but your desires will also reveal your self-esteem, how you feel about yourself. There are a lot of people who are afraid to ask God for the things that they desire because they just don't believe in their heart that they deserve it. There are people who have been beat down by life and put down by circumstance and things like that, that they don't even dare look up. But God wants you to know you can come boldly to the throne of grace and ask Him for what you need.

But if you've got a poor or low self-esteem—and believe me, please don't misunderstand, there are many terrible things that can happen in life that can crush people and can crush people's self-esteem—but your self-esteem will reveal your desires. If you think little, you'll desire little. If you think much, you'll desire more. If you think big, you'll dream big. But we also have an enemy, and that enemy is not another human being. It's Diabolos, the devil.

He will always attack you at the place of your dream. "What's wrong with you, girl? What make you think God will give you that?" Like the little boy in the bicycle shop, "That bicycle too big. Tone it down." You'll always be talked out of your dream. So self-esteem will also reveal your character. Your dreams, your desires, will reveal the direction that you're going in life. Where are you headed? It starts with your dream. What is it? You ask little children early on, "What do you want to be in life?"

And they begin to regurgitate things that they've seen. "I want to be a baseball player. I want to be a football player. I want to be an astronaut. I want to be a doctor. I want to be a lawyer." That desire sets the direction of their lives. Very few people, when you ask them as young children, "What do you want to be?" say, "Oh, I want to be a hootchie mama." No, they don't say that. They don't think like that then. Life gets a hold and life gets in the way and begins to put up—other people begin to put up road signs and say, "This is what you ought to want to be."

So your desires will reveal the direction that you're going in. When I announced that I would retire from the church, people said, "Well, what are you going to do?" I said, "I've got plans, and it's not to go to the rocker." The direction of my life had already been set: community development, other kinds of things that consume me because they are still burning and bubbling over from the inside. Your desires—what you want, what you're after—will not only determine the direction of your life, but it will also determine the purpose in your life.

So you have to check your thoughts. You have to check your heart. You have to check your desires. What is it? If I ask right now, what is it that you desire most? People would be afraid of that question, and there are so many people who are unprepared for the answer. Even if someone came to you and said, "How is it that I may help you? What is it that you desire for me to do to assist you?" people will almost hesitate. They will freeze because they have not thought through what it is that I really want.

I want you to understand that those desires have this kind of impact: to shape not only the direction of your life, but the purpose of your life. For God I live, if need be for God I'll die. When you understand whose you are, when you understand what you want... "What is it that you want?" "I want to live so," the pastor used to say, "God can use me. Anywhere, Lord, anytime. I want to pray so God can use me. I want to preach so, I want to live in such a way that my life counts."

Everybody who's crossing over now—you're crossing over 40, you approach 50, and those of you that have gone beyond that—you better be thinking about what is the legacy that you intend to leave. What is it you want to be remembered for? What is that purpose in your life? What are those deep desires? What is it yet that's not fulfilled? What's on your bucket list? I don't mean that these are the final things that you want to do, but I'm just trying to help you to understand the depth of the probing that this kind of expression brings.

This is not passive stuff. I never preach passively. I don't preach for entertainment. I preach for life change. If you sit in here, you're going to have a different life. You're going to have to think about something different. Don't just come to church just to come to church just because it's Sunday and I want to look cute and I want to be in the crowd. No. You come here to hear the Word of God, that the Word of God may penetrate your heart, that it may meet you in the street on Tuesday, on Wednesday, on Thursday, and Friday morning when you sit up in the bed.

You're still thinking about it because you can't shake it. So the Word of God—God is asking this question: what is it you desire? He says, "Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart." I'm asking what are those desires? I'm telling you those desires will reveal who you are. It will reveal your thinking. Do you understand when you're thinking, you eventually will share those thoughts in conversation with someone?

Whether it's with a spouse, whether it's with children, whether it's with a girlfriend or with a buddy, you're going to say, "I was thinking about so-and-so. I want to do so-and-so," and you are revealing the desires of your heart through what you have been thinking. That's what I asked myself when I was approaching this particular message. I said, "Lord, what is it that You've been teaching me this week? What is it that's been bubbling in my heart? What is it that's on my mind?"

Sometimes you have to gut yourself to get out of you what you have been thinking. Sometimes even in therapy and counseling and other things, sometimes when people have come to me and I've shared, I say, "Take out a sheet of paper." It sounds so simple. "Draw a line down the middle. Put on one side: things that are wrong. I want you to make a list of everything that's wrong." You begin to get out of your mind what's wrong: this hurt, this bothered me, this, this, this.

And on the other side, I want you to put down everything that you're thankful for. Everything that's right: I do have reasonable strength, I do have health, do have some money, do have health, do have family, do have a job, do have whatever it is. You will find out that the list on the right will always outweigh the list on the left, and it'll show you you. When we were kids, we used to talk about the boogie man. How many know that? Remember him? Or the monster in the closet or the one hiding under the bed?

He gets bigger and more frightening the longer he's allowed to stay covered up. But when you expose him, then he's not the monster that he appeared to be. That's what you have to do when you are filling your heart with just crazy thoughts. You've got to get that stuff out and see what it is you're thinking. When your thoughts are put out, you can know what your desires really are. Then I tell you lastly from this standpoint, from knowing your ability what your thoughts and what your desires reveal about you, is the knowledge of God.

What do you know about God? What do you think about God? See, in Psalm 73, there is a dichotomy and we all look at these paradoxes and dichotomies where we think the worst, we think the negative, and we think these things. It's okay to think those things, but you better have some other thoughts too. You better know that yes, life is crazy. Yes, I'm upset because of these people. I don't like the way the politicians are doing. I don't like the way the government is treating me.

I don't like the way my friends, my family, my coworkers are doing. I may not like that and those things may cause me to fret, but I better have some other thoughts. I better know that God is gracious, that He's merciful, that He's slow to anger, that He's forgiving, that He's kind, that He's powerful, that He's the same yesterday, today, and forever, that He's immutable, that He's unchanging. See, the knowledge of God, your knowledge of God will reveal your desires.

"Though You slay me," Job says, but listen at what he comes back with, "yet will I trust Him," because he had a knowledge that God could do it. Look at Abraham. When Abraham was up on the Mount of Moriah and he was ready to slay his son, Abraham had to know that if this God will take away my son's life, this is the same God who has the power to give it back. You have to have an understanding of who God is to stay balanced in life.

That's what this is what David as an old man understands. Yes, he's had his battles. Yes, he has faced his Goliaths. Yes, he has faced his betrayals through his own family members. Yes, he has had his wandering eyes. Yes, he has had his multiple wives. Yes, he has had all of the experiences. And yes, he was young, but now he's old and he has a knowledge of God that in spite of myself, that no matter what I've done, God is still my refuge and strength.

He's still a present help in the time of trouble. He could understand "weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning." David understood that. That's what this psalm is all about. So your desires will tell you who you are in those areas. But God also warns us about desires, because you and I can have wrong desires. How many know we can have wrong desires? We don't might—we might not like to acknowledge those, but we do have them.

Our wrong desires can lead to some hurtful things. Our wrong desires can lead us to disappointment. Our wrong desires can lead us to places of pain. What are some of those wrong desires? Some of our wrong desires can be very harmful to us. We can harm ourselves. How many know we can? Never before in the history of the world has more people been on the verge of taking themselves out. They're not all because of this or because of that; it's any myriad of things.

It's not just one type of person. Even preachers have taken themselves out, teachers and others, because their desire, their thought process overwhelms them and it becomes harmful. Some desires, such as being obsessed with wealth, will cause people to do harmful things. People can get so hung up... "I want to be wealthy," and they'll begin to do wrong things and criminal things to make it. Look at a kid, I've shared this with you before, you look at a young kid on the street and he knows that his parents go to work every day and they are struggling to make ends meet.

They see Fat Albert standing on the corner, and every time he opens his pocket, he has a big knot, he wears the chains around his neck, and they decide, "I want to be like that." They end up doing harmful things because of the wrong desires. You can have worldly desires. You can want to be like the world. You can want to do what the world is doing. I'm grateful for those parents that we had. "Everybody else is doing it, we want to do it." "No, you're not."

"Everybody else is going, we want to go." "No, you're not." They put some brakes on some things. They drew some lines around. They put some barriers up. They said, "We're not going to allow you to harm yourself by participating in those worldly things." Then sometimes you can think corrupt thoughts. Your desires can be corrupt. Yes, you can have corrupt things. Every day, there are people that are being arrested for embezzlement, for all kinds of situations, because they look like they can get away with this, they've seen others get away with it, and their desires become messed up and it can lead people down wrong trails.

How many know there's enough naturalness that's still left inside of us? Can I tell you when God saved you, He didn't take away everything? He didn't take away all of your old nature. That's one of the problems for young Christians is you don't realize that instead of having just one nature that's now on its way to glory, you still got old you living in there too. Old you, I used to say like we used to play the game, "My mama's bread is burning. I want to get out of here."

So that old nature be hollering at you sometimes. "I want to get out of here. I'm tired of doing right. I want to get out of here." So I want to get out here and do some of these other things that I see other people are doing, and I want to have some fun. People will find themselves going down wrong trails. How many know we can have fleshly desires? That's what happened to David. David was supposed to have been going to war, but instead of going to war, he stayed at home.

He was on his balcony that morning and he was stretching, and he looked out and he saw Bathsheba. He changed his own words. He said, "The Lord is my Shepherd and I see what I want." Fleshly desires. Nothing's quicker than a thought. How many know God made some beautiful people? What you don't understand—or maybe you do understand, maybe you just never thought about it—a temptation is pressure that's brought against the flesh. If it doesn't put pressure on your flesh, it's not temptation.

Everything don't tempt you, but the devil knows what you like. When he going to tempt you, he going to present it just like you like it. He’ll bring back that big, tall, good-looking thing, and you'll be going, "Whoa!" Or whatever it is that you like. I won't try to describe for you, but you know. Those fleshly desires will be up. I remember once we went to the beach. Wife and I went off, but we went to the beach. Now, I had to wear sunglasses. One that God had personally sculpted.

His hand Himself had to have done that. Wasn't nothing missing. I knew that my eyes were going to tell on me, so I hit her. I said, "Did you see that? Did you see that?" Then a few minutes later, this great big guy come in, stuff hanging down there. She said, "Did you see that? Did you see that?" I said, "Wait a minute. Get your eye back over here." I'm just saying to you that we all have fleshly desires because you're incarcerated in this flesh, and those desires will reveal themselves.

So what is the pathway that leads you to receiving then the desires of your heart? That's what the psalmist talks about. You've got to commit your life to God. Commit your way unto Him. God knows who you are. Now, listen, don't misunderstand. Preachers have messed people up because sometimes when people say things like "commit your life to God," it doesn't mean you're never going to do something wrong. But there has to be a different bent in your life.

If you've been bent all over here and this is the only way you're going, you've got to get straightened up and you've got to get bent another way, bent toward the Lord. When your mind and your desire becomes to please God, you can want to please God and not be able to do it. But at least it ought to be in your heart to want to do it. God doesn't take the perfect people. God takes imperfect people and He makes them perfect, but not in this life.

He starts working on you. He takes out His hammer. He takes out His chisel. He takes out His sandpaper, and He's always working on you. He's always working on us. So we walk around instead with an "under construction" sign around our neck. How many know I'm under construction? Be patient with me. God is not through with me yet. When God gets through with me, then I shall come forth as pure gold. But it starts with committing your way to the Lord.

I want to make sure that my life is in line. I want to make sure that my thought process is going in the direction. If something is not shaping up like it needs to be, I want to give God the permission to overrule me and to show me what's different. You've got to trust in the Lord. Now, what is trust in the Lord? It's faith in God. It's putting your faith in God, the finished work. See, Jesus has completed everything that's necessary for our salvation.

You don't save people. Preachers need to understand they don't save people. All of us, sometimes we want to have that Messiah mindset as if we are the answer. We're not the answer; we're the pointers. We point people to Jesus. Jesus is the Savior. When He went to Calvary's cross and He paid for the sin debt of the whole world, everybody who believes that testimony and receives that testimony can be saved. So what you have to do is you have to believe what God has said about His Son.

I believe that Jesus is the Son of God. I believe that He came into this earth. I believe that He went to the cross and He died as my substitute, paying my sin debt in full. I believe that He was raised from the grave the third day, and because of that, I believe that when I leave this earth, I'm going to live in His presence forevermore. That's what it means to trust God. I trust Him not only for my salvation, but I trust Him in every circumstance.

When life gets more than I can handle, I trust Him to lift the load. When my way is cloudy and I can't see, I trust Him to open the door. When friends walk out on me, I trust Him to walk in. When things are crazy in my life, I trust Him. I trust in God, whatever thing may be. Let me tell you something about that. You can't trust and worry at the same time. When I start trusting God, I stop worrying. If God don't fix it, it won't get fixed.

So you commit your way to God, you trust in Him, and then you rest in Him. You relax. You know, there are people who can't rest at night, who can't sleep at night, and it's not based upon what you have on the medical shelf. I rest because I trust Him. I really do. You know, if someone knock on the door, I don't worry about it. God, get it. Your Word is, "He who keepeth Israel neither slumbereth nor sleepeth." So if You're going to be up, I'm going to sleep. I rest in Him. I relax.

When life is more—one of the ways I rest in Him, let me talk to you practically for a moment, even financially, because I know people struggle financially. Sometimes on a financial basis, our problem is we're trying to solve problems that are waiting on you on tomorrow or in the future, and you don't have that situation necessarily today. So today I'm good. Today I rest in Him. When the tomorrow come, guess what I'm going to do? I'm going to rest in Him tomorrow.

I'm going to rest in Him. I'm going to rest in Him. I'm just going to relax and I'm going to trust Him to work things out. Today I got a dollar, and that's good because yesterday I didn't have one. But today. Tell somebody, "I'm going to rest in Him." Then fourthly, you have to wait patiently for the Lord. I think that's probably the hardest virtue of all of the Christian virtues: to wait on God. Because God's timetable and our timetable are not always the same.

God can show you the vision, He can show you the desire, He can show you the picture of your future, but the wherewithal that's needed to accomplish that may not be revealed at the exact same time. So you have to wait until there is alignment, until the resources are put with the vision so that they can be actualized. That's hard. Sometimes we want to get ahead of God and we'll come up with our own schemes as to what we can do, as if God doesn't understand.

That happened to Abraham, didn't it? God told him, "I'm going to bless you, I'm going to give you a child." Sarah came up with a plan: "Since I'm old and I'm barren, you take my slave girl Hagar and you go in unto her and y'all have a child and that will be the fulfillment." That was not God's plan. They got ahead. Abraham obliged, he took up on it. But as soon as the woman had the child, she began to look at Sarah and look at her with disdain. "Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah, I got the child, you don't." It burned Sarah up, and she realized she had made a mistake.

So let me move this thing to a close. What happens when the desires you have are never fulfilled? What happens? Maybe we misread it. Sometimes we can misread. I remember when we were building this church and we were at the place where we were in the doing the sanctuary part. We had torn up the sanctuary, and I had gone to Chicago. The guy that was supposed to have been doing the financing of it called me as I was at the airport and he said, "Pastor, we're not going to be able to finance it."

I said, "What? We've already started work! We've torn up the sanctuary." He said, "What you do that for?" I said, "Click." I went to Chicago and I'm on my face in the hotel for three days. I couldn't even tell nobody. I'm saying, "Lord, what happened? Did I not hear You right? Did I misunderstand? Did I not understand clearly the instruction?" How many know that sometimes you can miss it? Sometimes you can think that you have heard God in one way, and God needs to tweak it a little bit.

God spoke to me that day. He said, "And we know that in all things God works for good to them that love the Lord." I said, "For all things, God?" He said, "All things." I said, "Ugly things?" He said, "Ugly things." I said, "Embarrassing things?" He said, "Embarrassing things." I said, "Hurtful things?" He said, "Hurtful things. In every situation, I will work it out." So what I had to do was get off my knees and understand that maybe God had a different plan.

It wasn't that I misread what God said; He just had a different person that He wanted to use to finance what we wanted to do. What I thought was good, He shut it down because He had something better. Not only did He have something better, He had the best thing. God is never satisfied with good, because good is always the enemy of great. God had the best plan already laid out for us. Sometimes when things don't work out because you think that you have heard God one way, God got something else that He's working on over here. So wait on the Lord.

Give God permission to override your plan. Your plan is not always perfect. He may show you—remember one time, snowman, we were at Woodlawn High School, a little boy was cutting class and he was half-blind. He's in the middle of the hall and he's looking for the administrators to come this way. I came from over here. I touched him on the shoulder and he turned around. "Where you come from?" "Ah, you're looking the wrong way." Sometimes we look the wrong way.

Sometimes plans don't work because we've heard bad advice. Friends and family members tell us, "Man, if I was you, I would do it this way." That be them; that's not necessarily God. So sometimes God understands even when we make mistakes. It does not mean that He's not going to give you the desires of your heart. Align your life. Align things with God, and God will come through. Anybody know He will come through? They that wait on the Lord, something happens to them.

They renew their strength. They mount up with wings like eagles. They run and not get weary. They walk and don't fall out. I will trust in the Lord until I die. I'm going to treat everybody right until I die. I'm going to stay on the battlefield until I die, because God is good and God is good all of the time and all of the time, God is good. If you just trust and never doubt, He will surely bring you out. Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.

Amen. We're going to open now the doors of the church and give somebody an opportunity to have their desires met. God will give you your heart's desire, but you're going to have to give Him your heart. So right now, give God your heart. Pray where you sit. Ask God to forgive you of your sin. Ask God to come into your life and to help you to become the man, the woman, the boy, the girl that He wants you to be. Tell Him you really believe who He is, and He'll come into your heart right here, right where you are.

There are people who have prophesied against you, but God is prophesying for you. Come on, you can do it today. Pray where you are, and when you finish praying, give one of these your hand, give God your heart, and let's begin this walk of faith. Tell Him, "God, fix my desire. Align them with Your will. Help me to be who You want me to be." Doors open. I'm still holding on to God's hand. Come on, don't give up on your dream. Don't give up. Listen at him sing. I'm still holding on to God's holy plan. Oh yes, I am. I'm still holding on to my God's hand. Oh yes, I am.