The Danger of Desire

This past Monday, as I came into the room, I saw it there, resting on the table.    The staff had bought me a gift for the New Year.  I was so touched.  And I wondered.   What could it be?    I took off the ribbon.  I ripped off the wrapping paper.    Then I felt the warmth.   I caught the wonderful aroma.   Oh, they knew me so well.  They had given a gift close to my heart.  They had given me a box of Publix Fried Chicken. 

 

I know.  It’s not good for me.  That’s why I always eat a big salad with it.   I kinda hope that the salad will cancel out the fat and cholesterol.   I’ve tried to walk away many times.  But what can I say?  I love fried chicken.   I can stay away for a few weeks, but I always end up succumbing to that brown box full of caloric, crunchy chicken deliciousness.  

Now my desire for fried chicken, I don’t think will kill me, at least not right away.   But that doesn’t mean that our desires can’t be deadly.    In reality, our desires are the deadliest thing we face.   They capture us.   They blind us then bind us.   Nothing will destroy you more completely, more profoundly then your desires.   

And I’m not simply talking about “bad” desires.  I’m talking “good” desires, heck even “religious” desires.   All of them have the power to drive you over the edge.  And here’s the scary part, you’ll likely be over the edge before you realize it’s even happening.

Are you thinking to yourself, really?  How can desires be that deadly?   Does that make any sense?   And if it does, if desires can devastate you like that, how do you stop it?  How do you enjoy your desires, cultivate them even, but not allow them to take over, to hold you hostage?   In these words from Romans, God shows us the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Romans 1:18-25    

How can desires be so deadly?   How can they drive you over the edge?  In these words, God shows us.    Desires, unchecked, will first of all delude you, then they will dominate you, then they will finally diminish you, even dehumanize you.    But it doesn’t need to be this way.   When desires find their proper place, then you become free to grow into the very people you need to be, people who live out of the richly abundant life God created you to have.   That’s what Paul is trying to tell us in this densely packed thicket of words.   So let’s unpack what he’s saying.   

First, Paul starts out with a stunning assertion.   Everybody knows God.    Deep inside, they know that everything they have is a gift.    No one needs any special revelation to see it.  Why? The very world around them shows them the truth.   What is this truth?   The very unreligious writer, Kurt Vonnegut, put it stunningly well.   In one of his first novels, he had one of his characters give this dying speech. 

God made mud.  God got lonesome.  So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!’

‘See all I’ve made….the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars’

And I was some of the mud……That got to sit up and look around.

Lucky me, Lucky mud,

I, mud, sat up..And saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God!

Nobody but you could have done it, God!

I certainly couldn’t have.  I feel very unimportant compared to you.

The only way I can feel the least bit important…Is to think of all the mud….

That didn’t even get to sit up and look around.

I got so much.  And most mud got so little.

Thank you for the honor!   What memories of mud to have.

What interesting others kinds of sitting up mud I met!

I loved everything I saw!  Lucky me, Lucky mud!

This is the truth about God that people spend their lives avoiding, that they’re lucky mud.  Now they may not see that they’re avoiding this truth.  They may believe in God, but functionally they don’t live their lives by that truth.   They don’t live as if they’re lucky mud.  Here’s the problem.  We owe God everything, even the air we breathe, yet functionally, we give other things our functional allegiance, our ultimate trust.  And we don’t even see it. Why?  Our desires deceive us.   Instead of God driving our lives forward, our desires do the driving. Yet we can’t even see them in the driver’s seat. 

Human beings have to live for something.  We have to have purpose.   So if we don’t live desiring God, we’ll live our lives desiring something.   Paul gives examples here of two desires that he saw driving people’s lives in his world, pagan religious practices and sexual promiscuity.  But Paul isn’t saying, those are the only desires that qualify.   He’s simply giving examples to make his point.   In fact, in another letter, he talks about greed in this way. And in yet another letter, Galatians, he even gives the example of a desire to live by God’s law.  Now how can the desire to live by God’s law, to be a moral person, be bad?  

Here’s the crucial point.   It’s not desire in and of itself that’s bad.  God created our desires.  What creates the problem is how our desires get out of order.  How they become overwhelming desire, desires that end up dominating our lives.   To get across this point, Paul uses a very unique word in Greek, Epithumia, which means essentially super desire.     Now the translators use the word lust for the word here, which really misses the whole point.   Sure the desire can be sexual, but it’s not about the form of the desire.  It’s about the power of the desire.   That’s what the word means, an overwhelming, dominating desire, an epic desire. 

And if we are not desiring God like this, then guaranteed some other desire, often more than one desire is taking that place.  And that desire will begin to define us and diminish us, even dehumanize us.   We will become more and more our desires, and nothing else.  Now if you’re a Christian, then God has already broken the back of these desires.  But these desires still remain.  You’re hopefully just more aware of them so you can stand against their power.     But if you’re not a Christian, more likely than not, you’re missing these desires completely.  Why?  Your desires don’t seem all that dominating to you.  You don’t see their power.  But if something happens where you might lose them, then you’ll see.  You don’t just have your desires.  Your desires have you.  

Let’s take a few examples of how this works from a talk I recently heard.   Anxiety comes from super-desires mapped onto the future.   Anxiety becomes paralyzing to the degree that I have
some finite desire as the dominating desire for my life (what the Bible would call an idol.)  Let’s say my epi-desire, where I get my functional meaning in life centers around politics, either the Democratic or the Republican Party.   When my party suffers defeat, I’m not just glumly disappointed.   I’m shaken to the depths.  I want to leave the country.  And I’m too furious to speak to anyone who voted for the other side.    (from a sermon by Tim Keller - also in his book Counterfeit Gods)

Guilt comes from super-desire mapped onto the past.   Guilt becomes pathologically intensified to the degree that I have idolized or super-desired finite things.   Let’s say I have a dominating desire for a happy family, and therefore my performance as a parent is valuable above everything else.   Then if my child goes wrong or has big problems, I’m not just sorrowful and grieved.   I’m stricken with neurotic guilt.   I cannot forgive myself.   I hate myself.  I may even become suicidal. 

And lastly anger and bitterness is our super-desire mapped onto the present.  Anger becomes pathologically intensified when someone or something stands between me and what it is I ultimately value.  Suppose my career is the source of my worth, and someone at work is harming it.  I will not just be angry.   I will be so deeply bitter and capable of doing things to this person that I may blow up my career in ways more thoroughly than this person ever could.

Do you begin to get what Paul is showing us, how deadly an out of order, a super desire can be?  And oh how subtle it can be in holding us!   You can see a place that it grabs onto me in the bulletin today.   Under my schedule, I noted how I was going to work tomorrow even though literally no one else on staff would be.   Now why did I decide to do that?   Would the church collapse if I actually took MLK day, if some things got delayed in getting done as a result?   No, of course not.  My decision to work betrays all sorts of super desires, to be seen as the pastor always on the job, my anxiety about successfully doing my job.   Working tomorrow wasn’t about serving God.  It was about serving my own out of order desires.   So I’m going to honor Dr. King, and do something life-giving with my family tomorrow.      

Now what God does do when God sees these desires dominating our lives?  Does God send lightning bolts down?   No.  Paul gives us a far more chilling answer than that.   He says, God just gives us over to them.   This word gives over is one used to describe surrendering to an enemy. God surrenders us to our desires.    The worst thing God can do to you is give you what you want.  It’s why Oscar Wilde said.  When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

Almost 400 years ago, the Puritan preacher Richard Baxter acutely described what this looks like when it comes to wealth.   He described how if you set your heart on money, and actually get it, that it will actually spiritually devastate you.  First of all, you mistake wealth and money-making savvy for character.  Why?  Because you’re smart, and you’re savvy, and you want to believe that it’s because of your character.  So for the rest of your life, you’ll make terrible mistakes in relationships because you mistake wealth and savvy for character.  Because of course, that’s not true.  And you’ll become proud.   Baxter said.  Wealthy folks like that, believe they’re smart about every area, that they’re experts on everything.   And folks around them see the foolishness of the belief, but of course they don’t say anything, because of the person’s power.  Their wealth makes it impossible for people to tell them the truth.   But what’s true of what Baxter says about wealth is true of anything that we make our super desire.   If we get it, it won’t deliver us.  It will destroy us.

So how do we escape?  How do we find a way out?  First, when life hands you hard things, setbacks and disappointments, those things can be gifts.   How you react will show you where your idols are, the super-desires that are dominating your life.    They will give you truths each of us desperately need to see. 

But once we see the problem, how do we become free of it?   In the very last words here, Paul gives us a hint, when he concludes by saying the God who is blessed or praised forever.    In other words, the way you stop worshipping all the wrong things is to worship the right thing. And how do we get there?   Well, who is already blessing and praising God forever?  It’s the angels.  And in 1 Peter 1:10-12, we read this:

¹⁰ Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours made careful search and inquiry.......in regard to the things that have now been announced to you… —things into which angels long to look!    

Do you get this?  Angels long to look at the gospel, at God’s grace towards us, his sacrificial love. They can’t get enough of the beauty of it, the glory, the wonder.   And what is this word, long to look.  It’s the word Epithumia, the word super-desires, what is translated as lust.  The angels lust after the gospel? What does that mean?  The deepest passions of angels’ hearts are satisfied by looking at the love and beauty of Jesus, by reveling in it, rejoicing in it, and it wasn’t even for them.  When the deepest passion of your heart is satisfied by loving and adoring Jesus, that’s what happens.  All the other passions find their place.   You can look at all these things you yearn to have, and say.   I can live without you because I have what ultimately matters, the love of God.    And if I can’t live without you, I’ll never be able to safely live with you.   So don’t dominate my life. Don’t inflict anxiety or guilt or bitterness on me.  I can live free of your power, because I have experienced the beautiful power of the One who died for me.