DesireA Conversation About

david v. Smith

Theodyssey Group, San Jose, California

excurSionS 1.0/ God’s desire.....................9The story of God’s desire for us.

2.0/ HearT’s desire.................33Understanding what we really want.

3.0/ Hijacked desire..............43avoiding religious cul-de-sacs.

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think a little bit of Winston Churchill rubbed off on my mom. Growing up in England during the “German War,” she developed the moxy to carve her own path through life. One New Year’s Eve, following a rash of seductive holiday meals, she formally declared a diet: A war to end all wars against food.

With an inner resolve forged in the air raid shelters of Manchester, England, she turned to cottage cheese and paper-towel-dried iceberg lettuce. Every meal became a press con-ference with talking points about progress in the “Battle of the Bulge.” My mom laid down the gauntlet: no quitting, no matter what. She sounded like Churchill himself, declaring with conviction, “I will never, never, never give up.”

Fast forward a few weeks. Coming home past midnight, I noticed a spray of bright white seeping from under the kitchen pantry door. Someone had left the light on.

When I opened the door, to my horror, there stood a woman in my mother’s robe, one hand clutching a half-empty bag of chocolate chips, the other desperately cupped over a bulging mouth.

AOL Keyword: busted.

Unable to speak, she gargled some kind of muffled plea, but I could not be bought (this time). I dragged her, chortling, down the hallway in search of an impartial judge to hear the case. As the overhead light flickered in my parents’ bedroom, my father sat up to see the pride of merry old England.

We laugh about it just as hard today.

The tricky business of desire Wanting and choosing are worlds apart. That’s what makes desire a tricky business.

While our heart’s desire is the surest guide to knowing God, it is just the beginning. Desire can only point the way; it has no feet to move us forward.

Only desire that is acted upon and energized by the will gives birth to new life.

Knowing God starts with an honest conversation about what he really thinks about us. At some point, we also have to be honest about whether we really want God. And lastly, a heads-up about religious cul-de-sacs.

The journey begins.

about deSire

Exaudi, deus. vae peccatis hominum! et homo dicit haec, et misereris eius, quo-niam tu fecisti eum et peccatum non fecisti in eo. quis me commemorat pec-catum in- fan-tiae meae, quo-niam nemo mun-dus a peccato coram te, nec in-

fans, cuius est unius diei vita su per ter-ram? quis me com-memo-rat? an quilibet tantillus nunc pa vulus, in quo video quod

non memini de me? quid ergo tunc peccabam? an quis

uberibus inhiabam plorans? nam si nunc faciam, non quidem uberibus, sed escae cong ruenti annis meis ita in-hians, deridebor atque reprehendar iustissime. tunc ergo reprehenden-

God’sDesire

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very respectable story has a plot. The God story is no ex-ception. And when you discover the plot, you will understand the heart of God.

As far as I know, only one place in the Bible explains why God created human beings. The apostle Paul, preaching to the Greeks in Athens, says God created us, “. . .so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.” 1

God created people so that he could have a relationship with them.

Let’s walk through the God story together and explore this basic plot line. Let’s ask hard questions that surround it: Why did creation happen in the first place? How does God deal with people who blow it? What is God trying to accomplish in human history? And, why does this matter to me? The Bible has an interesting take on all of this.

OPENING SCENE: How it all got started “In the beginning,” God kneaded together human flesh from the raw stuff of creation.

Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.2

Right away we notice that we’re more than a bag of chemicals simply responding to stimuli. We’re not just random scraps of carbon and calcium that emerged out of some primordial soup.

There is design. Special, sacred design.

God had names already picked-out: adam, Hebrew for “man.” He then pulled a piece from the prototype and produced a work of beauty and awe called, ishshah, “woman.”

So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.3

Humanity was made in the very image of God himself.

At creation, mankind was perfect. All systems—including thinking, emo-tions, conscience, and will—were unblemished.

The mind was crisp, creative, and uncontaminated. Emotions were fully

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Excursion 1.0

expressive and responsive, yet balanced. The conscience was unhindered, neither hardened nor overburdened. And the will firmly bent toward the Creator.

God now had characters for his story.

NEXT SCENE:

Hardwiring the worldHunched over his workbench, the Almighty made a landmark decision: His creation would be free to make authentic choices.

There would be no puppets on a string.

God decided against a world of prepro-grammed perfection for his creation. Man and woman were created free to either choose or reject a relationship with God.

That was a big decision.

It would unleash consequences never desired nor intended. But take your pick—puppets, or the real thing?

Love is only love when it is freely given.

And so the human experiment was launched.

On the stage of life, God allows the future to unfold with each and every decision. For better or for worse, for good or for evil, we make choices about who and what will have our affections.

Meanwhile, God vowed to work backstage, behind the curtain, to guarantee that at the end of the day his ultimate purpose would be accomplished.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.4

Life often resembles the tangled mess on the back side of an embroidered pattern. It looks like a random, meaningless mess. Yet, on the front side is a tight, intricate design with the power to both puzzle the mind and move the heart.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”5

You might call life “God’s beautiful mess.”

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NEXT SCENE: The problem with choicesThe physical world is an engineer’s wonderland. Precision. Balance. Beau-ty. God is meticulous about what he makes. Over time, inquiring minds have teased-out some of the details: Gravity, thermodynamics, quantum physics, and the like.

Everything operates according to laws.

If we break these laws, “stuff” happens. Call it consequences. And no one is immune. Anyone can get cancer, die in a car wreck, have a rebellious child, or go bankrupt. No one gets a free pass—not even Christ-followers. Freedom has its price.

Soon after Creation, the God story details humanity’s first disaster. It was predictable. And while God didn’t create it any more than he did NASCAR® or Krispy Kreme® donuts, he did allow it. It’s the price of free will.

First generation man and woman decided to do life on their own without God. Sound familiar? It created quite a mess.

Somehow it got named “sin.” At least it’s easy to spell.

Sin affects everything about us. Our entire inner life is now distorted and impaired; it no longer fully functions as originally designed.

Our thinking, once fixed on God, is now distorted. Our desires, once inclined toward the Creator, are now bent toward the created.

The conscience, now compromised, is blurry about the limits and implications of our choices. The will, once resolved to selfless action, is now mired in procrastination and hopelessly bent toward self.

When the door of sin swung open, humanity welcomed guilt, shame, depression, lust, hatred, obsession, addiction, and selfishness for the first time.

And worst of all, sin isolated us from God.

Gvox humana The Bible, and Christ, speak with a severity that is the source of much misunderstanding, because it seems to be contrary to the love of God. This severity can only be understood if we are aware of its ultimate aim. Its aim is not to suppress the arrogant sinner, but to arouse his sense of guilt, and so to humble him, thereby opening for him the way to grace. The aim of Operation Severity is not the crushing of the sinner, but, instead, his salvation. For that, God must pull the sinner out of the vicious circle of his or her natural attempts at self-justification. Seen from this perspective, guilt becomes a saving grace, a way for God to break the cycle of rebellion— shame —estrangement, which goes around and around. Paul Tournier Guilt and Grace