Learn - A Higher Desire

Here's my first "life lesson" related blog post. This is something that God taught me last year, and I've been refining it more and more since then. It's a very important aspect to a lot of other concepts I believe, and so it's a good place to start!

We all have desires. It's difficult to distinguish what we are supposed to do with them, but we know they are there. The Bible talks about nature, flesh, sin, temptation, denial of self, and a variety of other subjects that can be hard to put our finger on and work with. Yet without desire, we'd be stale and actionless. All action is a combination of ability and desire. If either ability or desire is gone, then nothing happens.

Ability + Desire = Action

Galatians 5:17 discusses both the negative desires of the flesh, and the positive desires of the Spirit, so there's obviously both good an bad possibilities. There are multiple verses in Proverbs (37:4, 13:19, 11:23, 10:24) speaking not only positively about desire, but saying that God will fulfill it (under conditions) and that "the desire of the righteous ends only in good."

Now, where does this desire come from? Do we just spontaneously generate desires when we are born? They just form out of nowhere? Some secular sources say society creates them... but of course, society is made up of people, and they have to have a source for their desires ;) I think our desires come from God. Where else?

Now wait just a minute (those of you jumping to what could be a logical conclusion). "If it comes from God, how come I can not have what I desire all the time?" You have to factor in our ability to pervert what God has given us. Our free will gives us the power (that we regularly use) to abuse the wonderful creation and selves God gave us. This creates a simple philosophy of desire; there are two kinds of desire:
1. Good, pure, wholesome desire that God plans to fulfill.
2. Perverted version of our healthy desires, usually resulting from impatience and selfishness.

I believe that every desire we have, God plans to fill somehow. He wants to give us what we want! (There's biblical evidence in Proverbs shown above and elsewhere for this.) But what sin does is allows us to try and fulfill these desires in our own way and our own time. Did we ever do something that we didn't desire? We soon generate new desires from these good desires.

Pre-marital sex is an abuse of a gift God wanted us to have. Stealing is giving into our desire to possess material (which is normal and natural) in a way that doesn't reflect God's character. When we lie, it's an abuse of our freedom to express ourselves (thus perverting truth), usually as a way to gain something we were not yet meant to have. Some desires will not be fulfilled until heaven!

Now, what this means is that we do need to relinquish our will to God. We don't destroy our desires. We don't abandon ourselves. We live who we are, who God created us to be, in His way and His timing. Looking at what we want, what we desire, what we are passionate about, is a key to learning what God has planned for us! We just need to use prayer, counsel, and scripture in this search so that we don't run the risk of misidentifying a desire as from God.

This also emphasizes the importance of patience! How many sins are based on the fact that we just wont wait? God's got a plan to leave us fulfilled, if we'll be patient, seek Him, and let him do it!

From here, I'd usually start talking about how I think, in our pursuit of "denial of self", we miss out on what I believe to be the biblical idea of Christian Humanism. But we'll save that for some other time ;)

(I have not read the book Journey of Desire by John Eldridge, but it is about this same idea. I own it and do want to read it soon, haha.)

Music
I want to share the music I'm listening to while I write these. I love music, I love its emotion, I love the message that the melodies convey, and I love sharing this part of myself with my friends.

Beirut is awesome! My friend David was playing it in the Cafe, and I had to find out who it was. I'll spare you a ton of links, but here are some of my favorites! LISTEN TO THEM!!!
Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)
Postcards from Italy
The Concubine

My Family's Role in the World Revolution

Carousels