The Painful Truth That If You Don't See It will Lead you to Disaster

It’s a nice scene isn’t it?  Here you have something that is beautiful, good even.   It gets you places.   It nourishes the soil.   It even brings pleasure.  But this good thing can become a bad thing.  That beautiful river is the Natchez River in Beaumont, Texas. Over the last week, its waters have ravaged homes, businesses, and even taken away people’s water.   

When this good thing goes beyond its boundaries, awful things happen like this. 

Houston, a great American city gets brought to its knees.  People lose homes.   They lose their lives.   These waters that brought life, we have seen them bring such death and destruction.   And our hearts go out to the people of Houston, to all those folks in Texas and Louisiana dealing with this awful storm.  It’s stunning what happens when waters push beyond their boundaries like that.  

This tragic news from Houston, as it stirred me to prayer and to aid, also reminded me of an uncomfortable, even painful truth in my own life, one I have seen lived out tragically in the lives of others.   When people don’t see this truth, it brings awful things, even disaster and destruction.  

What is this painful truth?  In these words, God shows you.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

I John 2:15-17

In these few short sentences, God is saying something terribly important.   God is giving a warning that if you heed it will bless your life.  And more crucially, it will you away    It keeps you away from a life that will cripple your life.   What is God telling you?   God is saying.  Beware the danger of desire.   

But before you and I can understand that danger, we need to understand what beauty and blessing desires bring.  

God created you to have desires.   Why?  Desires bring you life.  Desires expand your horizons.  Desires open you to new experiences.   Desires give you all sorts of good things, from delicious meals to romance, from success in work to joyful pursuits at home.  

In fact, God cherishes desire.  God cherishes desire so much that God put it at the center of Communion, the Lord’s Supper.   Do you know what Jesus said to his disciples before he broke this bread, and shared this cup?   He said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; (Luke 22:15).    Jesus didn’t just kind of desire it.   Jesus eagerly desired it.   Desire drove Jesus to the cross; desire for our salvation; desire for our freedom; desire for our healing.  

So if God loves desire so much, how do you explain these words in I John? 

“For all that is in the world – the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches – comes not from the father but from the world.”

Here’s the problem.  When the Bible talks about desire, it talks about in two different ways, but the way this translation puts it, you don’t get that.   The old-fashioned King James got closer to the truth.  It says.  

For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.

And that word lust gets closer to what God is telling us.   John intentionally uses a particular Greek word here; epithumia.   John could have just used, thumia.   That word means desire too.   But epithumia means a huge desire, an epic one so to speak.  In fact, that’s where we get the word epic from.  

Now epic desires can be good desires.  Jesus uses that word, epithumia, when he talks about desiring to eat the Passover with his disciples.    If you have an epic desire for God, that’s a good thing. 

So, what makes epic desire a bad thing here?   It’s because these epic desires will always derail your life.   Why?   They go beyond the boundaries of desire for which God created them.  Do you see how that connects to the awfulness of this week.   When those rivers and bayous stayed within their banks, they brought life and beauty to the world.   But when the rain drove them beyond those boundaries, omigosh, the destruction and death they brought instead. 

And what’s true of those waters in Texas, that’s true of certain desires.   For example, it’s fine to eat to live.   But if you live to eat, then your desire has become epic.  It has blown past the boundaries.  And it has taken over your life.  

That’s an example of an epic desire of the flesh.   And other things fall into this category.   Desire for sexual intimacy, desire for alcohol, even desire for leisure and the list could go on.   All of these desires, in their place, bring good things.   But when they go epic, when they go past the boundaries, they bring destruction, even death.  

But John isn’t finished talking about epic desires.  As bad as these desires of the flesh can be, he brings them up first because they are the least dangerous.   Even more dangerous is the epic desires of the eyes.   So what are these?  

It’s when you live your life for how you look, how you appear to others.   And this desire can lead you to plastic surgery or eating disorders.   But it goes beyond that.   Two years ago, the Federal Reserve did a study that showed almost half of Americans, couldn’t handle a $400.00 emergency.   Now some of those folks certainly have that problem due to serious financial hardship.  But in the most affluent nation in history, something more has to be going on.  Again and again, I see people spend money to keep up an appearance even when it risks financial disaster.   Maybe that’s why in another survey this past week, only one in ten Americans felt fully financially prepared for a natural disaster.  But this epic desire goes beyond finances. 

How many times do you get so caught up in appearances, how someone or something looks only to discover how that person or thing was far less than what they appeared to be?   Or how often have you lied or got defensive about something because you didn’t want to look bad, because you didn’t want to admit you were wrong?

And that leads to the worst epic desires of all, the pride of life.  

Have you ever had a martyr fantasy?  You feel someone has done you wrong or hasn’t appreciated me enough.   And you think to yourself.   What if I got some dread disease, or better yet keeled over from a heart attack while doing something nice and selfless for them.  Oh, then they would see, my goodness, my saintliness. How bad they would feel.   I admit it.  I’ve had something like that, more than I’d care to admit.   And when you do that, you are caught up in the pride of life.  

This epic pride leads you to self-righteous resentment at how others have mistreated you or simply not appreciated you.   This pride makes you smug at how clearly you are better than other folks around you.   Do you know what I felt when I first read that statistic about half of Americans not being able to handle a $400.00 emergency.   I felt superior.  I thought.  Well, that’s not me.  I’m better than that.   This pride leads you to gossip about others. It’s gets you caught jealousies and petty judgments. 

And what makes it deadly is it captures your heart and you don’t even realize it. You think you’re just fine.  Religious folks fall into this trap so easily.   This past week, our church elders wrote a pastoral letter to our city commission about the issue of certain street names in Hollywood, and the pain it had brought to members of our community.  If you’d like a copy, let me know, and I’ll send it on to you. 

The day after that commission meeting, I went to be part of a gathering of churches of all ethnic backgrounds uniting to make our county a better place, and give witness to the gospel.  I heard all the great things they were doing together.  But do you know what I was thinking?  Why didn’t any of them show up at that city commission in Hollywood like our church did?  Maybe they should have. Who knows?  But I wasn’t thinking that out of any sense of godly love or concern.   I was jealous of the church facility that I was sitting in.    So, I came up with something to help me feel that our church was still better than theirs.  But I cloaked my jealousy and my insecurity in righteous concern.   

Something similar happened with Lakewood Church and Joel Osteen this week.  People, including Christians, jumped to harsh judgments on why their church arena wasn’t open for flood victims.  Yet the picture was more complicated than folks realized.   During the last Houston flood, the church, then at a different location, housed 5000 flood victims.   During this crisis, the city did not request their help, possibly because they were aware that this arena has had flooding problems in the past, another reason Lakewood was reluctant to open its doors out of concern that they would create more problems if their building flooded.    As it was, no one who sought refuge in Lakewood Church was turned away, and as the week progressed, the church did open its doors to victims.  But that’s what epic pride will do. 

In your life, epic pride will blind you to your own faults.  It will lead you to judgments of others that completely miss what is actually going on with them.   Epic pride when it runs amok wrecks families.  It wrecks churches.  It even wrecks nations.   

So how do you escape from these epic desires that yearn to capture you, that desire to destroy you.   You look to Jesus, to the one who epically desires you, who broke through every boundary, even death, to bring you life.    And as you let his epic desire, his epic love for you, grasp and hold you, it will fill you like nothing else can.   Then, in that love, all your desires will find their rightful place.   You will not look to them to give what they can never give.  Why?  You will have already received that from this One whose epic love is always there to meet you where you are.   What desire or desires have become epic in your life?  Let them go.  Leave them with Jesus.   And let Him feed you until you want no more.