Desire

I just got back home after listening to a very good sermon about fighting sin (one in a series our church is doing on building a stronger church), and thought I would share something that stuck out to me quite a bit, maybe because I have never thought of sinful desires in this way before. Most of this will be quotes. But they are good quotes so it’s ok.

 We read out of Jeremiah 2

Be appalled, O heavens, at this  be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. 

– Jeremiah 2:12-13

At one point in the message, there was a quote by C.S. Lewis that I found particularly good. I could try to rephrase it in my own words but, come on now, it’s C.S. Lewis, why would I do that?

“If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that 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

And he is absolutely right, now that I think of it. Our problems with sin are not because we cannot tame our desires, but that we do not have strong enough desires. If we were to see for a moment what infinite joy we can experience in Christ, we would see the objects of our sinful desires for what they are – Muddy water. What a pitiful, disgusting, temporary replacement for the living water we are offered. Why do we continue to drink it?

 “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.  Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good.  So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.  Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being,  but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.”

 –Romans 7:15-25

“You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you;I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water.”

Psalm 63:1

I feel like a mixture of Paul and David. One minute I am one, the next I am the other. Thankfully, we have a Savior that makes up for all of our imperfections with His own perfection. Sin had left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow.