Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4)
Something as minor as the desire for a better golf handicap can be a source of misery. There is a lot tied up in that simple number. A plus 2 can evoke a visceral response in some. So can a 21. Desires are powerful. They can produce endless amounts of internal dialogue and strong undercurrents of emotion. And WHY we desire something is more revealing than what we desire.
We are eternal creatures, searching for eternal satisfaction in a temporal world.
Far Eastern traditions claim that desire is the problem in this life and the source of our suffering. Therefore, desire must be extinguished like a candle flame, no longer to burn. The Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama 500 BC) taught:
Life is suffering.
Suffering is caused by craving (desire).
We can be free from suffering if we stop craving.
There is a way of thinking that ends craving and liberates one from suffering.
While some have interpreted Jesus’ teachings on self-denial to be in line with the Buddha, they could not be further from the truth. Jesus was not an ascetic. He never called for the suppression of our desires.
Jesus spoke of redeeming and redirecting desire, elevating our wants and passions to a higher plane for a greater purpose. Jesus came to fulfill the heart’s deepest desires, not deprive us. Jesus came to give us LIFE ABUNDANTLY (John 10:10).
To the woman at the well in John 4, Jesus says, “…Anyone who drinks the water I give will never thirst—not ever. The water I give will be an endless spring within, gushing fountains of endless life.” The woman’s thirst for love, which ended in five broken marriages, was not her problem. It was her strategy for fulfillment that left her empty and dissatisfied.
Much of our sin in this life is misdirected passion. We ‘look for love in all the wrong places.’ In the novel The World, the Flesh and Friar Smith, the character Friar Smith affirms the Christian view on desire when he comments, “…that the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God.”
St. Augustine makes the same point when he prays in The Confessions; “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” And Ecclesiastes 3:11 declares that ’[God] has set eternity in the human heart.’ We are all eternal creatures, searching for eternal satisfaction in a temporal world.
C.S. Lewis argues that our desires are not the problem, not in the least. Quite the opposite. He maintains that our desires are actually too weak and not strong enough. Lewis, in his essay The Weight of Glory, explains it this way:
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 mud 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.”
In our sin, we are half-hearted, settling for quick fixes, and ignorant of the greater and more exhilarating possibilities. But our desires will not be quelled; eternity has been set in our hearts. We will forever remain restless until we find peace and abundant life in the One who fashioned our soul.
Prayer: Lord, may you alone be my source.