“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”-C. S. Lewis

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Most of us have been corrupted by our culture, family and even church leaders (I mean our religions) that our desires bring us to sin and thus we need to fight against them. While so many people have drowned in this preaching, I do not think it is the truth that Christ taught us. Jesus Christ and the whole bible tell us that we should come to God, the true provider for our desires. The whole basis of God’s creation is God’s glory.

The creation lives and gets sustained through Him and He gets His glory through His service to the creation. “Delight in the Lord for He fulfills your desires”. The bible goes ahead and says that the desires we have were created by God and can only be fulfilled by Him (Psalm 37:4; Philippians 2:13). That is the whole truth.

In my Writings, I have forever emphasized that our desires define us. They are what we are. To lose our desires equates to sacrificing our lives. If we no longer desire anything, we stop the chase, we lose the hope, and faith dies in there. But if we are assured that God cares about our heart’s desires, then we go to Him with happiness. To find delight in God is to find complete joy, satisfaction and fulfillment in Him and this cannot be without our desires being met. The more we run away from paying attention to our heart’s desires, the more we run away from God for it is through OUR Heart’s desires that our God talks to us.

What am I saying?

We have rarely paid attention to what our heart seriously longs for and we end up picking up rubbish on the street and trying to quench the thirst and hunger with what is not the real food and water. C.S Lewis was so keen. He looked into this and realized that our sinning is not because we desire, our sin is because our desire is too weak.

But then what happened to Adam and Eve, was it not the desire?

Yeah, Adam and Eve lost to a desire, and not a strong one, but a weak one. God did not punish Adam for desiring too much, but for lessening himself far too low.

To forget that God who had created everything to serve man, made a wife just to please him more, and made him in His own image, was losing the bigger fish for a small one-the only fruit that God had forbidden them to eat. Yeah, maybe it looked better to Adam and Eve, but the truth is it was not better than how they were living It was a mistake of accepting to be little, to be less, to fall for a small thing, and accepting mediocre life. We do this every time we choose to sin instead of living holy. When we cheat, we deeply know we are falling low. And yet we go for it anyway!

So what?

Take a time, and meditate upon your desires. Think deep into what you really long for. Search your soul; what could make you all that stable, beautiful and completely happy? When you find your true heart’s desires, you will have found your God. Deep within us, we have the natural pure desire; the desire to be happy, to be successful, to live forever in everlasting happiness. Our true natural desire (the force that pushes us to all the struggles of gathering much of earthly successes) is the life we hope to live. In other words, our desire is eternity!

When we look deeply into our hearts, we shall soon discover that our desires are actually not money, cars, power, education and high class degrees; our true desires are love, peace, happiness, and all things exceptionally beautiful. That is our struggle. And since these eternal and life fulfilling desires cannot be found, we resort to chasing after money, power, fame, business success, women and sex as a diversion of our disappointments. Our hearts remain with such emptiness that everlasting peace, joy and happiness remain a myth in our world.

Let me explain this: On surface or shallow observation, we perceive our desires as sex, money, power, prestige and high education or classical social status, which are actually our weak desires. So we DIRECTLY search for money, go for higher studies, search for beautiful women and have sex, find power and influence, chase marriages and cars while we are INDIRECTLY trying to quench our thirst and hunger for love, people, and true everlasting happiness.

But this misery we suffer as we chase such ‘small’ desires is not useless; it reminds us of something. Let us use Blaise Pascal’s words:

“Man is so great that his greatness appears even in knowing himself to be miserable. A tree has no sense of its misery. It is true that to know we are miserable is to be miserable, but also to know we are miserable is to be great. Thus all the miseries of man prove his grandeur; they are the miseries of a dignified personage, the miseries of a dethroned monarch… What can this incessant craving, and this impotence of attainment mean, unless there was once a happiness belonging to man, of which only the faintest traces remain, in that void which he attempts to fill with everything within his reach?”

What happens as we chase after those fake desires?

We suffer more, we sin more, and we break down as we try to chase after thin and weak animal meat while leaving fatty chickens behind. Have you ever pondered on Jesus’ words to the woman at the well? The woman had come to fetch water, and Jesus interrupted. She was irritated, and Jesus said, “I wish you could know who I am and come to me and get eternal water. You would never be thirst again” (paraphrased). Oh how about the words in Isaiah, “Come to me and find yourself eternal bread and water and you will be thirst or hungry no more. Why spend money, silver and gold on worthless water and bread that won’t satisfy you?” (Paraphrased).

To settle at that chasing is to settle for less. To hide our desires is suicide. God is not angry with our chasing, or our daily small desires. He is unhappy that we are on the wrong track. We are trying to meet our desire from the wrong things or person. God is the creator of our desires, even the smallest like ones, and He is the true one to fulfill them. Meeting God is meeting our desires.

How about those who are saved but are still longing? Our longing goes on as before but this time with hope for full recovery in Jesus Christ in the days to come. Today, we sip on the glimpses of heaven through the daily joys only God can provide.

What is the point today?

The point is this: Diverting attention from your true deeper desire is sinning even more. God does not punish us for longing for more, but for longing for less. And the truth is, nobody, on earth and heaven can satisfy our true longing but our God, the creator of our desires.

That is why we have chased money, sex, power, education, influence and fame but have remained empty. We have trashed our true desires of our heart and lost the way to satisfaction. What did Jesus mean when he said that those who hold onto their life will lose it? How about those who keep riches on earth where insects destroy them? It was all about our weak desires, settling for less, the earthly riches!

We are not helping God by believing in Him, but ourselves. To desire less is to settle in life without Him, and to desire more and demand inconceivable things about life is to be in God. God knows our heart’s desires, and finds His glory in fulfilling them. He may not necessarily provide us with the woman we want, the money we hoped for or the power that we need, but He certainly provides something much better; HIMSELF!

Draw closer to God today with your heart open in prayer. Open up your desires to Him. Remember, our God’s glory is in fulfillment of our desires, OUR TRUE DESIRES FOR HIM.