Less of Me - More of Him
From the time we are born, we begin a path that says, more of me, less of mom, dad, others. We experience phenomenal growth as we acquire raw data. By the time we are 4 years old, our personality is basically established, by the time we are 6 we know more than half of the “stuff” we will ever learn and by the time we are teenagers, we know more than our parents.
Fueled by desire - I like, I want, I must have. Who cares about you!
Desire in the Bible is identified with our selfish nature, - our flesh.
I want friendships, I want entertainment, I want my senses satisfied, I want to accomplish, achieve, dominate. Life is centered around the idea - More of ME - less of everything else.
Recipe for misery.
Some if it may be from the devil, but a majority of it seems to be what the Bible calls Flesh - Old Man. Unregenerate man. Man with self or stuff at the center, rather than man with God as the center
With man at the center, we elevate the wrong stuff. We make gods out of things and ourselves.
Too bad because we are made in God's IMAGE - we are more like God than the things we worship as gods - and the God we were made to worship gets ignored.
Food and drink - never made to satisfy us fully.
Taste and see that the lord is good. Anyone thirsty?
Loneliness - sexual desire - longing for intimate connection - ecstasy, union harmony. - again this is a symbol of the satisfying unity we were designed to have with God.
Alcohol, drugs, sex - all have a buzz, but all have limitations. Mankind is on the search for the everlasting buzz one with no side effects.
Creation - made in God's image we are naturally designed to create, to build, write, sing, design. The desire to create could help us understand the relationship that the creator has with his creation. What we make is a part of us, someone attacks our creation, they attack us. Why don't we see the connection.
We are made by God, he is intimately connected with us. Someone attacks His creation, He rises up. The ultimate act of creation happens when a child is born. What parent wants to create a child only to see that child grow distant, unconcerned, to ignore their company. The world is filled with broken parent child relationships. Where they exist, you can see a bit of the imagery of hell as well
Read John 3:22-26 JN 3:22 After this, Jesus and his disciples went out into the Judean countryside, where he spent some time with them, and baptized. 23 Now John also was baptizing at Aenon near Salim, because there was plenty of water, and people were constantly coming to be baptized. 24 (This was before John was put in prison.) 25 An argument developed between some of John's disciples and a certain Jew over the matter of ceremonial washing. 26 They came to John and said to him,
