Where does desire come from?

Where does desire come from?

(Are our desires good or bad?)

Why do we desire at all? It is because we are lacking; something is missing. We want because we do not have. 

What is it that we want/desire? We desire significance, meaning, importance, and pleasure - in a word, love. 

What gives us pleasure? Anything that makes us feel important, significant, desired, loved i.e. good about ourselves. We all long for this.

Why do we need to feel important, significant, and valuable? Because God designed us this way. In a word, He designed us for love; to be loved because He is love.

Why did He design us that way? 

To be in a relationship with Him. In order for us to be in a relationship with Him, we had to be like Him. We have to be able to receive and reflect back love to the Source i.e. God and in turn out of others. 

And what is He like? 

He is important, significant, and valuable, i.e. glorious. In order for us to appreciate His importance, significance, and value, we had to be designed to appreciate it i.e. to have the capacity to. 

Since God is this way and designed us for a relationship of love with Him, we can (and must be able to) appreciate and enjoy His importance, significance, and value. In order for us to appreciate this, we must derive a sense of importance, significance, and value from enjoying these qualities in Him. 

The very definition of relationship is two persons giving and receiving something from each other; interacting with each other. In order to give God glory i.e. recognize His importance significance and value and to receive and enjoy Him, we had to have the capacity to enjoy Him - His glory. In order to do so He designed us in such a way that we could be in a relationship with Him, hence our need for importance, significance, and value. 

To restate this simply, we cannot enjoy and appreciate God's great worth if we do not have the ability to appreciate it, feel it, and have the desire for or want it. The greater our capacity to appreciate and value (glorify) God, the greater our ability to appreciate and value Him.

Desiring to be safe and secure, loved, valued, happy, etc are all good desires. All desires put in us by God - so we might partake of him - and a significant part of us being created in His image, so we can have a relationship with Him. The issue is not our desires but who do we look too, to fulfill them i.e. where are our desires ultimately best met... who or where do they "land?" 

Our desires are:

·        A part of our being in God’s image

     But also the result of…

·        Being alienated or separated from God

So there is a good element to our desires - being in God’s image so we can enjoy, worship, and glorify God. But there is a broken element as well. We are not fully connected to (separated from) a loving relationship with God due to our distrust of Him and therefore now lacking what we were designed to experience in Him…love, joy, peace, pleasure, value, importance, meaning and so on. Because we are not fully connected to (separated from) Him - the Source of all true meaning and fulfillment, due to our distrust and rejection of our Father/Creator - we go about seeking to fill that lack with anything and everything but that which can truly and best fill it, God Himself. We need all the things God created but only because we were designed to be in a relationship with the Creator of those things. His creation and all that comes to us by and through it are gifts from God and evidence of His love, intended to point us to Him as the source of life, love and all things. To truly appreciate them as intended they are to be received as gifts and expressions of His love for us. They are the means by which God brings life, not life itself. To say it another way, our true God is the source of life and all things, not the things themselves. To look to these things exclusively as a means to life is to make them our god.

Because we have spent all our lives attempting to satisfy our desires with anything but that which can truly satisfy them, our desires are stymied, suppressed. C. S. Lewis said it this way,

“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.”

By weak desires, Lewis means we have the capacity for far greater desires (and joys) but there is nothing in this life to satisfy our strongest and deepest longings, so we just keep them in check with temporary pleasures. We anesthetize our deepest longings. To allow our deepest desires to fully surface would be too painful. We fear allowing ourselves to want something that might not be available, which we can't control or that could be lost or taken away.

This is only because we refuse trusting God to give us what we need and long for most, not realizing it is God himself we most need. 

However, as we grow to trust God and let go of those things we use to anesthetize our deepest longings, our capacity to receive His love expands. As that capacity increases, our longings also increase. We feel and enjoy more because we trust more and along with that trust our capacity to feel and enjoy more has grown. We are being restored to our original state of finding and enjoying God as the only and true satisfier of our hearts. 

For a discussion on how God proved his love for us & is worthy of our trust click here.

For a discussion on the internal struggle we all experience click here. 

For a discussion on how we were created for glory click here.