Desire Determines Destiny Series

People succeed for a thousand different reasons, but the one thing they all have in

common is desire. Igor Sikorsky, the great Russian airplane designer, tells in his

autobiography of how his father took him to Paris as a boy, and they visited an airport

where he saw his first plane. His imagination was stimulated, and he developed a burning

desire to build a machine that would fly. He begged his father to let him leave school and

work on it. At 17 he began, and after two years he had spent nearly all of his fathers

money, and his plane never got off the ground. His sister still had faith in him, so she

gave him all she could afford. After two more years he got his plane off the ground, but

plunged it into a local lake, and barely escaped with his life. The family still believed in

him, so they mortgaged their property to enable him to build another plane. He did it,

and then went on from this success to build the first successful multi-motored plane.

Finally, he designed an built the famous China Clipper, which he flew around the world.

His success began with his burning desire, and it was his desire that pushed him on

through all this failures to achieve his goal. If failure stops a man from pressing on, you

can count on it, he has lost his desire. As long as desire is burning, there is always fuel to

keep it going, for desire determines destiny. This is true in every realm of life. Take

marriage for example. If two people really desire to find a solution to their problems,

they will work out a way. If they loose desire, however, they have little hope of success.

Desire is the fire that pushes us higher.

On the locker room wall of the University of Notre Dame's football team is the well

known saying, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." Football games are not

won in the first half when both teams are fresh. Victory comes in the second half when

their bodies ache, and they only want the grueling punishment to end. That is when the

team with the deepest desire digs to the depths of their being for that reserve energy to

keep going. If there is no deep desire to win, it is all over. If it is there, however, there is

no telling what kind of spectacular plays will be made. Deep burning desire drives a team

to do in a few minutes what they could not do in hours.

The greater the desire to reach a goal, the more likely it is, that goal will be reached.

Longfellow said in his teens, "I most eagerly aspire after future eminence...My whole soul

burns most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centers in it." Do you think there

is any connection between his burning desire and the fact that most of us recognize the

name Longfellow when we hear it? There is a very definite connection. Right after

World War II, a young preacher who liked to paint had a showing of 50 of his paintings

in one of Boston's great art galleries. The critics were amazed, and declared he was a

genius. He never even went to art school, but James Greer was one of the great

landscape artists of our nation. William Stidger, one of his seminary professors, had

him install one of his paintings in his house. He asked him how he came to be a painter,

and he replied, "I always wanted to paint more than I wanted to do anything else in

life...." This is the key to almost every success story you will ever hear. You tend to

become what you really desire to be.

If this be the case, there are few things in life that are more important than that of

developing the desires that will dominate, direct, and determine the direction and

destination of your life. That is why the Lord's Prayer deals with desires. The six

petitions of this prayer represent the six basic desires that are to characterize the child of

God. When these six desires dominate your life, and become the inner driving force of

your life, you are as successful as any human being can be. Prayer is the soul's sincere

desire. Here in this prayer of our Lord, we have the very essence of prayer and desire

linked together as one.

This prayer was taught to the disciples because they came to Jesus asking Him to be

taught how to pray. This prayer comes in response to their desire to know how to pray

more effectively. It is, therefore, an answer to prayer, or their soul's sincere desire.

Desire is the cause of it as well as the content of it. It is a prayer which, in itself, is an