Travis Weber & Nathanael Breeden
Staff Writers
A mother once asked her young son what he wanted for his birthday. Being a thoughtful child, he considered all the possibilities. He thought of that new bike he saw in a magazine and the video games he wanted, and the fact that he lost his football and needed another one. He thought of all the things he would like to have, straining his mind to come up with the one thing he wanted more than anything else.
Finally, unable to come to a decision, he said, “I don’t know. What should I want?”
The mother smiled and said, “Only you can answer that question. That’s what it means to want something.”
Perhaps the word most often misrepresented in church sermons and other extensions of Christian doctrine is “desire.”
We are told to suppress the desires of the flesh, to prevent our sinful desires from emerging to the forefront of our lives. We are told to be wary of our human desires lest they interfere with the desire God has for us.
While none of these assertions are necessarily wrong (in fact, they are quite true), there lies within them an inherent danger. In our zeal to purge our lives of evil desires, to cleanse ourselves of our wants and let God take the reins, we run the risk of destroying our ability to desire.
Clearly we can never deny our desire, as our desires are very much a part of what it means to be human. We can never deny our humanity and any attempt to do so is an act of self-sabotage.
Scripture is quite clear that we are created by God, crafted by his hands, molded and shaped “in his own image.” So if even our desires were placed in us by God, there must be a purpose for them, aside from being what we as Christians try so hard to suppress. Our desires are integral to the human experience.
In fact, it might be said that our desires, our dreams and aspirations, are the most important things about us. They are what set us apart from all other forms of life; they are wrapped into the very notion of being human.
So to crush that part of us, to fervently wipe away our inherent desires is to contradict the nature of our creation.
Does this mean we are free to let our desires take control, to do whatever we want and rely on the blood of Christ to make us clean? Of course not. We must realize that our tendency to sin is not a problem of desire – it is a problem of misplaced desire.
When the Bible speaks of suppressing the desires of the flesh, it does not mean to destroy the ambitions and dreams we hold so dear. Instead, it means we must realize those dreams can only be fulfilled in Christ, that to place them anywhere else is to misunderstand what it means to be human.
God has given us our wants, our desires. To surrender our lives to him is not to abandon them, but to fulfill them. It’s precisely with our desire, with our entire being, that we passionately seek relationship, seek understanding, and ultimately seek God himself. At their root, our desires are beautiful, something to be admired.
11-18-2004
