Desire

In Psalm 73 we find Asaph lamenting the power of the wicked. He watched with horror as evil men lived comfortable and prosperous lives, enriching themselves by doing terrible things. What disturbed him the most was that, far from being judged, the wicked actually breezed through life with fewer problems than other men. Asaph could not understand why the wicked were prosperous and happy while the righteous were suffering. “Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain,” he laments. That was when he realized that there was another side to the issue. The wicked may have been leading comfortable lives, but they were only one breath away from death, judgment, and the wrath of God. In an instant the Lord would end their lives, and when that happened all their riches and power would mean nothing. They would be cast into Hell and tormented for all eternity, while the righteous would be given eternal life and unending joy. The righteous may suffer in this life, but after death everything changed.

At the conclusion of all this there is a very striking verse:

Psalm 73:24: “Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory.
25 Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.
26 My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.”

Verse 25 is easy to miss, but stop and think about what it’s saying. “There is none upon earth that I desire beside thee”. Who does Asaph want? God. In fact, God is all he wants! Asaph doesn’t care about riches, power, fame, a comfortable life, or the esteem of others. What he really wants – what his heart truly desires – is the Lord. God, and God alone, is enough for him. The wicked can have their riches and prosperity; Asaph would rather have God.

In fact, he is not alone in this. In another psalm we find David echoing this very same thought:

Psalm 27:4: “One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to enquire in his temple.”

What is it that David desired? It was just one thing: to be where God was, so he could behold His beauty and learn from Him. That’s what David wanted out of life. He just wanted to be near the Lord and hear what He had to say.

This brings up an important point: what do you want out of life? We all know what the ‘right’ answer is, but honestly, what is it that you really want? What are your hopes and dreams? What are you striving to accomplish? What things disappoint you? If you were honest with yourself, what is it that you really want out of life?

The truth is that there are a lot of things that we’d like to have! Sometimes God is on that list and sometimes He’s not, but usually God is not the focus of our time. We may serve God on occasion, but our life is spent trying to get all kinds of other things. In fact, we usually have a long laundry list of the things that we really want: more money, more influence, more respect, more love, more stuff, and just more of the good things in life. We want a better car, a better house, a better job, a better family life, better friends, better social connections, better appliances, and so on. We want all the best that life has to offer, and we want it now. David and Asaph, though, had very short lists. All they wanted was God. He, all by himself, was enough for them.

I admit that sounds pretty extreme. Isn’t it possible, one might argue, that David and Asaph were just being poetic? Surely they didn’t actually mean that God was all they wanted! After all, there’s nothing wrong with wanting a better job or trying to make a better life for yourself. Yet, take a look at this:

I John 2:15: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.
17 And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.”

These verses get overlooked all the time, but they’re actually astonishing. What is it that verse 15 is commanding us to not love? The world. What else are we supposed to avoid loving? Everything in the world. Just in case we missed it, the point is repeated in verse 16: we are to avoid the things our body desires, the things our eyes desire, and “the pride of life”. That covers pretty much anything you could conceivably think of! New cars? New houses? More money? More power? All covered and all condemned. As Christians, we are not to love any of those things. Instead, Jesus tells us that we are to love just two things:

Mark 12:29: “And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord:
30 And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.
31 And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.”

In other words, God wants us to not love the world, and He also does not want us to love anything that is in the world. Instead God wants us to love Him with all of our heart and with all of our being, and He wants us to love our neighbors. That is how God wants us to live. Don’t love the things of this life; instead love God and care for your fellow man.

That is not to say that it’s a sin to buy a better car, or to move into a larger house, or to leave a bad job for a better one. What it is saying is that these things must not have our heart. God doesn’t want us to go through life with the goal of trying to accumulate all of the stuff we can possibly get our hands on; He wants us to go through life passionately seeking Him, and passionately loving Him with every fiber of our being. He wants to be the desire of our heart. He doesn’t want to be on the list of things we desire; He wants to be the list. He wants us to be so passionately in love with Him that nothing else really matters.

Yes, God may give us all kinds of marvelous blessings – families, relationships, and so forth. There’s nothing wrong with having these things and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying them. But as nice and wholesome as these blessings may be, they must never have our heart. They must never be the true object of our desire. As Jesus warned:

Matthew 10:37: “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

Jesus will play second fiddle to nothing. God wants us to be so dedicated to Him that we are willing to sacrifice everything that we have for Him, if necessary – even the blessings that God has given us. For example, there was one time when the nation of Israel had departed from God. The Lord had been sending them prophets to warn that judgment was coming, and that judgment was now very near. In fact, the judgment was going to be so severe that people would not even have the chance to mourn for their lost love ones. Death, judgment, and despair would be everywhere. It was going to be a horrifying time, and the only way to avoid it was for the nation to repent.

Since Israel was not listening to God’s warnings the Lord decided to give them a graphic example of what was to come. So, this is what the Lord told Ezekiel:

Ezekiel 24:15: “Also the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
16 Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke: yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down.
17 Forbear to cry, make no mourning for the dead, bind the tire of thine head upon thee, and put on thy shoes upon thy feet, and cover not thy lips, and eat not the bread of men.
18 So I spake unto the people in the morning: and at even my wife died; and I did in the morning as I was commanded.”

Do you see what happened? The Lord wanted to illustrate the judgment that was about to strike an unrepentant Israel, so He took Ezekiel’s wife – whom Ezekiel dearly loved – and killed her, then told Ezekiel to not get upset over it and act like nothing happened. And that is exactly what Ezekiel did.

Would we do that? When the Lord takes away our loved ones, do we look past the immense pain (as Ezekiel did) and say “God is good, and I will still trust Him”, or do we angrily yell at God and tell Him that we’re never going to forgive Him? It’s very common for people to get angry with God for taking away their jobs, or careers, or children, or spouses, or wealth – but in doing so they demonstrate the emptiness of their faith. Some people trust God as long as He keeps them from disasters, but when trouble comes they reject Him and walk away. In other words, their faith in God was never actually real. They didn’t really trust Him, or His plan, or His faithfulness, or His love, or believe that all things work together for those who love God. They would believe that God was good in the good times, but not in the bad times. Tragedy revealed the emptiness of their faith – not to God, who knew all along, but to them.

C S Lewis put it this way:

God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t… He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.

What Lewis is saying is that he had spent his life thinking that he was a man of great faith, but when tragedy struck he realized that his faith was hollow. He didn’t really trust God as much as he thought he did – which is why God brought tragedy into his life in the first place. It showed Lewis that his faith was a “house of cards”, and moved him to replace it with something firmer.

If God is all that we desire – if He is all that we really want – then when God takes things away we can still say “blessed be the name of the Lord”, as Job did. That’s not to say that it will not hurt. Yes, life is hard – but Jesus told us that it would be. Yes, it hurts when we lose loved ones. It even hurts Jesus; He wept at the grave of Lazarus. But there is a world of difference between saying “God, you took something away from me so now I hate you” and “God, you took something away from me, and it hurts a lot, but I love You and I trust You. Even if You take everything away I will still love You, because You are enough. You are everything that I need.”

What we have to realize is that setting our heart on something other than God is very dangerous. Jesus warned us that the things of this life can easily make us unfruitful:

Mark 4:19: “And the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful.”

Notice that Jesus lists both the cares and the riches of this life as things that can destroy us! Suffering has destroyed many people’s faith in God, as they run away from Him after tragedy strikes. However, wealth can be equally dangerous. The pursuit of money, or the desire for fame, or even seemingly innocent things like a career or having a family can crowd out God or stifle our desire for Him. We don’t have to be hit with a great tragedy to lose our faith; we could also be hit by tremendous success.

The great danger is in setting your heart on something other than God. Once we start trying to find our happiness in the blessings that God gives us (instead of the God that gives the blessings) then we set ourselves up for trouble. God may give us many wonderful things in this life (or He may not), but He wants to be what we are really after.

This is how the Westminster Catechism puts it:

Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

The phrase “chief end” is an old one; it means purpose, or primary goal, or focus. The Catechism puts it very well; the point of our existence is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. It is why we were created, and it is all that the saints of God will be doing for all of eternity. There simply is nothing else.

As Jesus warned, it’s very easy for the things of this life to distract us from that purpose. God is the greatest thing that we could ever desire; He is the source of all goodness, the giver of all blessings, and the wellspring of joy. To shove God aside and spend our lives trying to get other things – lesser things – is not only foolish; it is sinful.

“Love not the world” is not a hard commandment, although it may seem like it. What John is urging us to do is to run away from things that seem nice but can easily choke our faith and clutter our lives. Instead of chasing after things that can never satisfy us, we are told to seek after God. Nothing less can satisfy us. There are no other fountains that can quench our thirst.

As C S Lewis once pointed out, we are too easily satisfied. We spend our lives seeking after the things of this world, when God is offering us something infinitely better and infinitely more satisfying. God isn’t telling us to give up the things in life that are really fun so that we can live a boring life of sadness and pain. Instead God is telling us to abandon things that aren’t worth our time in order to seek something of infinite value.

Paul put it this way:

Philippians 3:7: “But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.
8 Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ,
9 And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith:
10 That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death;
11 If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.”

When Paul was still a Pharisee named Saul he was a powerful, influential, and highly respected man. He had a lot going for him, but when he became a Christian he gave it all up. As verse 8 says, he counted it all as loss and it ceased to mean anything to him. When he was saved his life was changed and, after that moment, there was only one thing that he wanted. Verse 10 tells us what that thing was: he wanted to know Jesus. He no longer cared about money, or power, or fame, or influence, or being a respected member of the community. He just wanted Jesus.

Can that same thing be said of us?