Recently I’ve had a desire to do catch-up between my soul and God. In part because I’ve wanted renewal as a pastor to grow in the depths of my own experience with God. But also because in a very short time I’m going to be fathering a young life. I realize it’s more than “how to’s” but what we impart of who we are.
Caused me to look at areas in me where I recognize I’m operating outside the grace of God; less gracious with myself or others… to look at my passion… priorities… my values.
Directed me to a fundamental issue of life, THE PURSUIT OF TRUE PLEASURE IN LIFE.
- a time of looking more deeply into God’s word as I said ‘Lord, teach me about bringing a child into this world and guiding them in their desires. Lord teach me about experiencing even deeper pleasure in you.’
Question: How important is the role of desire in your relationship to God?
- To answer that question, I want to offer a theology of desire because if we understand this book (Bible) properly its my contention that its all about desire.
- What is God saying to us about desire as a whole?
- I believe there is a clarity of truth that is uniquely captured in the breadth of God’s revelation to us.
- To help capture that breadth I’ve included a number of scriptures and quotes to follow.
Begin with the words of King David,
- A man who represents the best of God’s people… the best response to God’s history of initially raising up a people
- Exceptional physique/looks; power, wealth
- Yet…
o Fell to lust
o Freely felt depression
- Kept himself bolstered above both reckoning with his sin and living with his depression and established the greatest reign Israel ever knew… both publicly as ruler and privately “as a man after God’s own heart.”
- HOW? The key lies in the many directions he gave his soul.
Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4)
The first and perhaps most obvious truth of all,
1. God is intended to be our ultimate desire.
- Though David had it all… ideal looks, power and wealth, David established in his soul that God is the ultimate source of satisfaction. He would set his desire on Him and let him be the source of all other desires in his heart.
- David understood that we are born of god and only he can fulfill us.
- There is an inherent connection between our souls and God like fish need water, like our bodies need oxygen and blood; so our spiritual nature exists in relationship to our ultimate source… God.
- As such David rightly directs his soul, and ours as well, to “serve” God? No… to acknowledge God? No… to honor God? No… TO DELIGHT IN GOD.
- While all these others are true, they flow from a deeper recognition that God is to be desired.
…As one author noted in the Psalms
“My soul thirsts for thee, my flesh yearns for thee, in a dry and weary land where there is no water. (Psalm 63:1) The motif of thirsting has its satisfying counterpoint when the psalmist says that men drink their fill of the abundance of thy house; and thou dost give them to drink of the river of thy delights. (Psalm 36:8) I found that the goodness of God, the very foundation of worship, is not a thing you pay your respects to out of some kind of disinterested reverence. No, it is something to be enjoyed: O taste and see that the Lord is good. (Psalm 34:8) How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth! (Psalm 119:103)
As C.S. Lewis says, God in the Psalms is the “all satisfying Object.” His people adore him unashamedly for the exceeding joy they find in him. (Psalm 43:4) He is the source of complete and unending pleasure: In thy presence is fullness of joy; in thy right hand there are pleasures forever (Psalm 16:11)” (John Piper)
Honoring God is not just about being
- honorable, but being happy
- faithful, but being fulfilled
- denying desires, but deepening them
It might surprise us, but God sees our duty as most naturally flowing from our desires when rightly understood.
- I don’t want your burnt offerings and sacrifices born of empty obligation… rather a contrite and humble heart.
- I don’t want your obligation, I want your desperation
o Obligation leads to legalism… distance
o Desperation leads to love… devotion
- Hiking in the mountains… compelled by the underlying message of Christ’s life. ‘God, I want to live like only you matter’ As the Lord spoke to my heart “I want to be everything to you because I am everything.”
- God is intended to be our ultimate desire.
2. Apart from God the nature of our desires have been lost… lowered.
- The key word for us to understand is LOWERED
- We could look back to the story of the Garden itself
o Estranged from our source of security and significance with God, we’ve been trying to get it back ever since… except we’re looking in the wrong places.
As God declared in Jeremiah…
“Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their Glory for worthless idols. Be appalled at this, O heavens, and shudder with great horror,” declares the Lord. “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” (Jeremiah 2:11-13)
- Does this not describe the ever increasing paradox of modern world? …more driven towards pleasure yet generally less content by any measure of contentment.
- Must remember, God is addressing those who know him, or at least acknowledge him; reminding us that we all can all dig our own broken cisterns if we direct our souls to other sources of ultimate well-being.
- In doing so, is God confronting us with having become too desirous? No, the offense is that of lowering our desire.
- As the apostle Paul declared, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” described just prior as the process of “becoming fools and exchanging the glory of the immortal God for images” (Romans 3:23, 1:23)
- The nature of our sin, of selling God short, is selling ourselves short; setting the eyes of our heart on the things of earth. We were created for His glory and fall short when we exchange it for something unworthy… of lesser glory.
- In our fallen state, we not only cut ourselves off from a proper relationship with our God and Father, but we got amnesia going out the door.
o Who is my beginning and my end?
… As a result there is a need for David’s delight in God to be restored to our nature. Our spiritual amnesia must be reawakened. This is just what was to unfold. One would come after David; a Messiah, born of God through David’s lineage. Whereas David had established a temporal kingdom for God’s people; the Messiah would establish the everlasting kingdom by the Spirit, importing the desire for God into our very hearts.
3. Christ has come to make possible the rescuing of our desires.
- Christ not only is able to reconcile us with God by his death on the cross for our sins, but is able to reawaken us to our desire for God… imparting his very nature to us by the Holy Spirit
- This is what Christ spoke of in proclaiming thru himself the kingdom of God; the reign of God.
The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field. (Matthew 13:44)
- Kingdom… fellowship with God… is like a treasure worth everything.
- The man sells everything to receive it out of “obligation?” NO… necessity? NO… OUT OF HIS JOY.
- Just as David counseled his soul to delight, so here Christ describes our very motivation as joy.
- Approaching God not merely from duty, but desire.
- And note: joy is not described as a result of selling all he had, but the reason he sold all he had.
Does it sound like our desire is fundamental to our relationship with God?
And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. (Hebrews 11:6)
C.S. Lewis - “If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promise of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased…” (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory)
In such words, do you find God tugging on the desires of your heart? Perhaps you’ve sensed, even unconsciously, that your pursuit of pleasure and your pursuit of God were inherently opposed to one another. Perhaps we’ve known the battle described in Scripture between the flesh and the Spirit and interpreted this as a battle between desire and duty… when in truth it is a battle between desire and desire… between lower desires and deeper desires.
As John Piper describes in his book ‘Desiring God’, we are called to a healthy hedonism.
1. The longing to be happy is a universal human experience, and it is good, not sinful.
2. We should never try to deny or resist our longing to be happy, as though it were a bad impulse. Instead we should seek to intensify this longing and nourish it with whatever will provide the deepest and most enduring satisfaction.
3. The deepest and most enduring happiness is found only in god.
4. The happiness we find in God reaches its consummation when it is shared with others in the manifold ways of love.
5. To the extent we try to abandon the pursuit of our own pleasure, we fail to honor God and love people. Or, to put it positively: the pursuit of pleasure is a necessary part of all worship and virtue. That is,
“First, Christian Hedonism as I use the term does not mean God becomes a means to help us get worldly pleasures. The pleasure Christian hedonism seeks is the pleasure which is in God himself. He is the end of our search, not the means to some further end. Our exceeding joy is he, the Lord—not the streets of gold, or the reunion with relatives or any blessing of heaven. Christian hedonism does not reduce God to a key that unlocks a treasure chest of gold and silver. Rather it seeks to transform the heart so that “the Almighty will be your gold and choice silver to you.”
Second, Christian Hedonism does not make a god out of pleasure. It says that one has already made a god out of whatever he finds most pleasure in. The goal of Christian hedonism is to find most pleasure in the one and only god and thus avoid the sin of covetousness, that is, idolatry.
Finally, Christian hedonism does not put us above God when we seek him out of self-interest. A patient is not greater than his physician.”
There are many great challenges in our pursuit of true pleasure… but I believe we must initially understand that God wants to be enjoyed… He wants us to desire.
- We are called to be obedient, and if our desires are faint, let us still be obedient. But hearts of obligation or indifference are only signs that we need to be reawakened.
- Our Golden Retriever Trooper: Our domesticated baby… ours domesticated environment tamed him… but get him out to lakes and meadows… runs with a wild passion... deeper nature is awakened. So our environment has tamed us, but God wants us to reawaken to the desires fitting our dignity as those created to rule and reign with Him… in the atmosphere of His love.
Let me briefly offer the following as some implications of such an understanding of desire:
- Allows us to deal honestly with our unmet desires and longings in light of the present knowledge and connection to God’s ultimate and eternal answer.
o To recognize our need to delight in god is to realize we’re not home yet; in progress
o Through Christ we’ve been reawakened, but like Christ on earth we must accept the honest pain of our world.
- Enlightens our pursuit of freedom from addictive habits and behavior. Freedom lies not in denying our desires, but in deepening them.
o So much of our destructive behavior is merely a means to avoid or medicate our existential pain… or pain of existing apart from God, a misguided means to the ultimate love and meaning only God can provide. As we understand our true desires, we find freedom is not simply a battle to reject our desires but to redirect them.
- Infuses our motivation towards all God desires in our love of himself and others. While it is appropriate to recognize our duty, in our clearest perception we realize that such duty actually serves our deepest human desire.
- Reveals how spiritual disciplines (such as reading God’s Word, worship, prayer, solitude, silence, fasting, and giving) are actually spiritually liberating.
o Such disciplines as obligatory… fall short of capturing their nature
o They are disciplines for the sake of desire
o They are a source of liberation from lower desires to the ultimate, from our amnesia to our apprehension of God
o In the spiritual battle that competes for our very souls they are subversive.
4. The fundamental issue in our pursuit of true pleasure is the “conversion” of our desires
- Our fundamental challenge is not in doing more to be satisfied, but in deciding what satisfies
Closing Prayer: Let’s offer God our desires. Do you sense your relationship has been reduced to duty? Do you sense your desires being lowered?
