Articles
Is Desire Wrong?
Desire by itself is not wrong. God created us with an innate desire for beauty, discovery, and the desire to grow. The fact that a person has desire is not wrong. No one grows without it.
Eve looked at the fruit. She saw it was pleasant to the eyes. She realized it could satisfy her hunger. She even thought it would make her wise. Were any of those things wrong? God had given her and Adam all that was in the Garden that was pleasant to the eyes. He had provided for the satisfaction of their hunger by giving them every other thing to eat. As they walked with Him, they would be wise. So, the very things she saw in the fruit were things she already had. Desiring those things was not what was wrong. It was that she went after what she had no right to have. She satisfied those desires outside the means God had given her and Adam. She left what God provided and pursued her own desires. She thought she had a better way. Her problems were not her desires, but how she went about fulfilling that desire.
How do we control those desires? If we are ever going to deal with them successfully, we first must recognize them. If we are blind to the desires that draw us away from God, then we will not be helped. Recognizing that, we must have a greater desire to remove it from our lives.
Next, we must see Satan for who he is. He is a liar and murderer. He has been that way since the beginning. He desires nothing for our good. All we are to him is a disposable commodity. He uses us, wads us up and throws us away once he is done with us.
We must also have a greater desire to please the Father than to please the adversary. Jesus did all things “always” that pleased the Father. We must have greater love for the Father and His will than the world. If the love of the world dominates my desire, the love of the Father is not in me (1 John 2:15-17). Whatever separates me from my Father must be removed. Even at great personal cost (Matt. 5:29).
Finally, whether we seek God or not is a matter of choice. As creatures made in the image of our Creator, we have a natural desire for God. But we may fail to acknowledge our need for Him, and even if we acknowledge our need, we may fail to do anything about it. Seeking God is not an automatic process; it requires both deliberation and decisiveness on our part.
We must see that our deepest need is for God, and then we must seek the fulfillment of that need in God alone. The first of these is perhaps the hardest to do. On the surface, we seem to desire so many more visible and more immediate things, that it’s hard to understand how deeply we need God. But deeper than all our other wants is this ultimate desire: our longing for God. We long for Him because we were created for Him, and when we honestly and humbly recognize the importance of this need, then we are ready to seek God. We must devote ourselves wholeheartedly to finding Him. Our most fervent hope is to come into His presence and enjoy His fellowship.
Rickie Jenkins
