Unearthing Our Deepest Longings

All of our desires become idolatrous when we distort the character of God in our seeking to fulfill them. All of our desires become sinful when they discredit the goodness of God in our lives.

Our Desires Matter

Let me offer another example. Maybe your desire is for marriage. You long for it during years of singleness. You follow the rules you were taught about morality and faithfulness. You expect that doing the right thing will result in God providing you with a perfect mate. You pray and you wait. When it doesn’t happen, you feel disappointed, and that disappointment festers.

You start to silently wonder about the goodness of God in your life. You’re too afraid or ashamed to ask anyone about it. You wonder if it makes you sound desperate to do so. Soon you become disillusioned with God. Your faith starts eroding but you ignore it until you wake up one day and realize you’re not sure you believe in God any longer.

But perhaps you’ve missed the real desire in your heart as you’ve focused on your longing for marriage. Every human has a God-given longing for intimacy. It’s a longing that is meant to be filled not by a spouse but by God Himself. Hordes of married people will tell you of their post-honeymoon disappointment and the discovery that the person they married failed to meet their heart’s deepest longings. Our culture has convinced us to believe that our future happiness depends on whether we find “the one.” But God’s purpose for our intimacy is deeper. Sadly, most of us have formed our desires not by what God’s Word promises, but based on perceived cultural ideas. We were made for more. Spouses were never meant to meet our deepest longings. Only God can. Even if marriage never happens for you, your longing for intimacy is assured in Christ. Your desire for intimacy is forever secured in Christ.

“The biggest mistake we make in Christianity is to make ourselves the center of our story.”

Maybe your desire is to go to graduate school. You’ve worked so hard for it and prayed about it. Despite all your best efforts the door to your dream has closed. At first, you cut God some slack. You put a bandage on your wound and hoped for a better outcome next time. You even made excuses for God. But one day, you wake up in a career you hate, and find yourself crushed by the weight of your dead dreams. You take it out on God. He’s the reason you’re unhappy. He could have helped make your dream a reality but He didn’t. By that point, it’s easier to run from Him than to trust Him with your broken heart.

God’s plan has never been for us to hide our desires from Him. He’s never asked us to ignore our desires. On the contrary, God puts our desires in our hearts for a reason. God Himself is the dream-giver and the dream-maker. His relationship with humans starts with His promise to fulfill Abraham’s desire for a son, and later Joseph’s desire for his dream, and much later Moses’s desire for his calling. God puts in each of our hearts the desire to be kind and to help others. God places in our souls a longing for more, a desire for harmony and success and unity with other people. God wires us to desire comfort and security. God even puts in us a longing for perfection.

Ah, that longing for perfection.

Wired for Perfection

Ever since that day in Eden, when Adam and Eve blew it and were escorted out of perfect Eden, we’ve been wired for perfection. It’s a longing for something better, something more. That “more” that we crave is our heart’s longing for God. Every one of us is plagued with a restlessness that can only be filled by God.

Most of us have wrestled with feelings of disappointment in our Christian life. We live with the notion that if I do my part, God should do His. Instead of rightfully developing a healthy understanding of who God is, we’ve developed a Christian model where I am the center of my world and God is a puppet, waiting at my beck and call to fulfill my every whim.

We can tell the depth of the lie we’ve embraced by the level of disappointment we experience in our lives. For me, the lie seeped deep into my soul and it has taken God decades to dismantle it. But if I’ve learned anything about God in this lifetime, it’s that He won’t let His children believe lies about Him. He’s a God of truth and that truth includes the truth about who He is, and who we are, and what He expects for us in this lifetime.

The biggest mistake we make in Christianity is to make ourselves the center of our story.When we limit our longings to our own personal success stories, we limit perfection, beauty, and harmony. When we limit our desires to our own understanding, we miss out.

That perfection that we long for is ultimately found in only one place: the person of Jesus Christ. All of our God-given desires are ultimately met in Jesus Christ. Our desire for intimacy and healing and freedom and shamelessness, our desire for security and provision and perfection, are only met in Christ.