When I was serving on staff at a church in the Birmingham area many years ago, my pastor said something I still remember vividly.
It wasn’t flashy and it wasn’t meant to be.
He noticed that a lot of our prayer, both corporate and personal, sounded like this:
“God, bless this ministry… bless this plan… bless what we’re doing.”
All these phrases sound good, right? Sure, who doesn’t want God to bless their church and the work of the gospel? I know I sure did. I’d prayed these phrases, or something to their effect, for years.
However, he said, we have to stop praying these prayers this way…I was inquisitive and if you know me, my face does quite a bit of talking for me. I’m sure I looked quizzically and couldn’t wait to hear more. He said these prayers are not biblically accurate and we should alter our prayers to a reflect a more theologically sound model. He challenged us to start praying differently:
“God, form me, shape me, desire and move me toward that which You are already blessing or want to bless.”
That one shift changed my whole perspective on praying for God’s desire for my life and ministry and subsequently, how I plead with God to reveal his good, pleasing, and perfect will. It’s really easy to assume prayer is about asking God to line up with us. But what if the deeper work is God slowly lining us up with Him?
That’s not just a wording change. It’s a shift in posture.
It moves prayer from asking God to affirm what we’ve already decided to do, to asking God to re-form us so we can actually recognize what He is doing in the first place.
Let’s dive into what David is saying in Psalm 37…
Psalm 37 opens with a very human tension:
“Do not fret because of evildoers…”
That word “fret” is more than worry. It’s the internal pressure that builds when life doesn’t seem to match what we believe about God. When people who don’t seem to be doing things the right way are still getting ahead.
And if we’re honest, that doesn’t just stay an observation. It starts to shape us.
We start adjusting what we think “works.”
What we think matters.
What we think is worth wanting.
That’s the real issue under the surface here, not just frustration, but formation.
The psalm moves quickly into a pattern:
Trust in the Lord and do good.
Dwell where you are.
Delight yourself in the Lord.
Commit your way to Him.
This is not a random list. In fact it’s not a list AT ALL! It’s describing a process…a way a person gets reshaped over time.
And right in the middle of it is this well-known verse:
“Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.”
That verse is often read like a transaction: if I enjoy God enough or pray hard enough or want ‘good’ things for my life and ministry, He’ll give me what I already want.
But in context, it’s doing something deeper than that. Much deeper. And if you were like me, I got it backwards.
It’s saying that when you actually learn to delight in the Lord, your desires don’t stay the same. They get re-shaped in His presence.
And then God gives you those desires, not because He agreed with your original list, but because He has been forming a new one within you. How incredible is that? The God of heaven chooses to change our hearts to match up with His plans as we yield our own will to His. We will never have to “suffer” with what God wants and designed us to do, but we can serve in faithfulness and enjoy it in the process. What an indescribable God we serve!
As I pondered over this great news, I think this truth can (and should!) change how we approach, plan, and lead corporate worship. We know that one of the main purposes of corporate worship is the communal gathering to glorify God in obedient response to what Christ has done for us. Gratefully, as we respond to God, made possible through Christ’s sacrifice and empowered by the Holy Spirit, we are shaped and formed to reflect who we were created to be.
What we sing over and over
What we pray together
What we rehearse week after week
and all of this doesn’t just reflect desire. It trains it.
Slowly, almost without noticing, worship forms what feels normal, what feels true, what feels natural.
Because my blog centers on intergenerational worship and the biblical command to engage with all generations in worship, what our generations desire becomes important, not as a strategy, but as insight.
Different generations tend to carry different instincts about desire.
Younger worshipers often live closer to immediacy. They’re asking, sometimes quietly, “Does this connect? Does this feel real? Does this matter right now?”
Older worshipers carry memory. They’ve lived long enough to know that everything new and “hip” will eventually be replaced with something even newer and more current. Substance, truth, context, and history are still paramount.
Both of those instincts matter, but when one is missing, desire gets distorted and off-track.
Immediacy without memory tends to chase what feels current without considering context and clarity of mission and history.
Memory without immediacy can drift into distance and un-rootedness…faithful and steady but often detached from contemporary realities.
But when they’re together, something more grounded begins to form.
We start to realize that God hasn’t changed just because our moment feels urgent. We start to see that He’s been faithful longer than we’ve been paying attention and that reality re-shapes our desires if we’ll let it.
The Psalm goes on:
“Commit your way to the Lord… trust in Him, and He will act.”
In a world where commitment is no longer valued, the word commit challenges us because it runs against our instinct to manage outcomes. David calls us not to relinquish responsibility, but to place the weight of what we cannot control into God’s hands.
This truth should change the posture of our leadership.
You still plan. You still lead. You still make decisions, but you stop assuming that you control outcomes. The result? You start praying differently.
Not:
“God, bless what we are doing.”
But:
“God, form us, shape us, and move us toward what You want to bless so we recognize and join what You in the work of the gospel for our lives and the context and mission of the church/ministry with which You’ve entrusted to our leadership.”
That’s a more intentional, slower process, but a more biblical model of leadership. Harder? yes, but the goal isn’t speed, but faithfulness and fruitfulness as we align with the will of God for our lives and ministry.
In Psalm 37 David asks us to consider:
What kind of people are we becoming while we wait?
The answer is simple and foundational, but definitely not easy:
God is at work re-shaping desire.
And worship, especially corporate worship shared across generations, is one of the main places re-shaping and formation happens.
Over time, through repeated songs, shared prayers, and serving the Lord in authentic community, something real begins to change:
We don’t just learn what to say about God. We begin to learn what to want from Him.
And that might be one of the deepest works of grace:
Not just that God gives us what we want…
but that He lovingly, mercifully changes what we want at all to be more like Him. Thanks be to God He doesn’t leave us the same for our sake and the good of Kingdom.
Amen
Dr. Will Whittaker 
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