Wants and Needs: The Difference Psalm 34:8-10

Sometimes people perceive a desire as a necessity. The heart can become so consumed with a craving that fulfilling it feels critical to well-being. Then, when God does not meet the “need,” anger and frustration result.

Believers wondering why they have been neglected should honestly answer one question: “Is my petition essential to accomplishing God’s purpose, or is it only for my enjoyment?” Beyond basics like food and shelter, necessities might include counseling for a troubled marriage or money for a mission trip. If we can’t complete the Lord’s plan without something, then it is a need, and He will answer when we pray for Him to fulfill that requirement (Phil. 4:19).

God is also pleased to satisfy desires that fit within the confines of His purpose and will (Ps. 37:4). The things we long for bring pleasure, entertainment, or a sense of joy. Many are good and worth pursuing, but they become troublesome when we deem them essential for our plans. God isn’t obligated to grant wishes or fulfill any plans but His own. However, He says that those who seek Him won’t lack any good thing (34:10). Pursuing the Lord above all else means making our desires subject to His will. And when we “delight in the Lord” (37:4), He’ll also shape our desires to be most beneficial.

The heavenly Father wants to be His children’s greatest delight—the One in whom fulfillment and satisfaction are found. When that is true in a believer’s life, then he or she does not require a lot of “stuff,” entertainment, or people in order to be happy. Joy is in the Lord.

Finding True Rest

But the dove found no place to set her foot.

Genesis 8:9

Reader, can you find rest apart from the ark, Christ Jesus? Then consider that your religion may be in vain. Are you satisfied with anything short of a conscious knowledge of your union and interest in Christ? Then woe to you. If you profess to be a Christian while finding full satisfaction in worldly pleasures and pursuits, your profession is probably false. If your soul can stretch herself at rest and find the bed long enough and the blanket broad enough to cover it in the chambers of sin, then you are a hypocrite and far away from any proper thoughts of Christ or awareness of His preciousness.

But if, on the other hand, you feel that if you could indulge in sin without punishment, that would be a punishment itself, and that if you could have the whole world and live in it forever, it would be quite enough misery not to be separated from it, for your God—your God—is what your soul longs for, then be of good courage, you are a child of God. With all your sins and imperfections, take this for your comfort: If your soul has no rest in sin, you are not as the sinner is! If you are still crying after and craving after something better, Christ has not forgotten you, for you have not quite forgotten Him.

The believer cannot do without his Lord; words are inadequate to express his thoughts of Him. We cannot live on the sands of the wilderness—we want the manna that drops from heaven; the pitchers of self-confidence cannot produce for us a drop of moisture, but we drink of the rock that follows us, and that rock is Christ. When you feed on Him, your soul can sing, “He who satisfies me with good so that my youth is renewed like the eagle’s”;¹ but if you don’t have Him, your wine cellar and well-stocked pantry can give you no sort of satisfaction: Learn to lament over them in the words of wisdom, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!”

¹Psalm 103:5