Psalm 119:35—“Make me walk in the path of Your commandments, For I delight in it.”
If we are free moral agents, if we have free will—which the Bible teaches on every page that we do (for example, “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve,” Joshua 24:15), then God doesn’t “make us” (force us) to “walk in the path of” His commandments. But God does “direct our paths” (Proverbs 3:5) through His providence and our faith. So, the idea here is that David is asking the Lord to set his way in the direction of His commandments, to providentially ease his path towards obedience. God CAN do that, but our part is obedience. Disobedience will lead to straying from God’s set path. This is, as much as anything else, an acknowledgment of dependence upon God. David wants to do God’s will, and has a choice in the matter. All the people of his day (and ours) have that choice. Some of David’s contemporaries chose the wrong path; they weren’t so interested in pleasing God. God didn’t “make” them obey Him—if He “made” some obey Him but not others, that would mean God is a respecter of persons, and He is not, He loves all people. That isn’t what David is asking God to do here. Dependence and providential guidance are in view.
Of course, it helped greatly that doing God’s will was a “delight” to David. A person who wishes to serve God will keep his/her eyes open—open to see sin, open to see righteousness, open to serve the Lord. David obviously wasn’t perfect, nor are any of us. But it helps if we understand the consequences and delights of doing the will of God.