Our desires… Good or bad?

Our desires are:

·        A part of our being in God’s image

But also misdirected as a result of…

·        Being separated from God

-->So there is a good element to our desires. 

By virtue of being in God’s image we can enjoy, worship and glorify God. 

-->But there is a bad element as well. 

We are separated from God and therefore now lacking what we were designed to experience in Him…perfect love, joy, peace, pleasure, value, importance, meaning and so on. Because we are separated from the source of our true fulfillment due to distrust and rejection of our Father/Creator, we go about seeking to fill that lack with anything and everything (i.e. in or by creation) but that which can truly and only fill it, God Himself (the Creator).

Because we have spent all our lives attempting to satisfy our desires with anything but that which can truly satisfy, our desires are stymied, suppressed. As C.S. Lewis stated...

“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.”

I would add though we may be pleased on some level we are never truly satisfied. 

By "weak desires," I believe Lewis means we have the capacity for much greater desires. However because there is nothing in this life to satisfy our truest, strongest and deepest desires, we keep them in check with temporary things. We anesthetize our deepest and greatest longings. 

To allow our true longings to fully surface would be too painful because nothing exists in this life that can satisfy them. It might even cause us to look beyond the temporary things we use to the Creator of those things instead. But due to our rebellion we avoid looking to our Creator with everything that is in us. We refuse trusting God (in our rebellious state controlling feels safer than trusting) to give us what we need and long for which He alone can provide.

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

Free will? Our passions vs our will

The following is an excerpt from an article I had read somewhere online. Unfortunately, I did not save the link and do not recall the original source or author but it grabbed my attention so I saved it. 

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Excerpt:

“Choosing God’s will over ours makes good sense to me,” he said. “Anybody who has ever tried to change anything significant about themselves has to know how useless the human will really is. We are not losing much by giving it up.”

(The below excerpt continues apparently in response to the above comment)

"I was completely taken by surprise. I had assumed my friend lived by the strength of his will. But as we talked more about it, I came to see that he was right when he said his passions directed his life much more than his will. He drew his energy from the causes to which he was fervently committed. His will was in the service of the basic allegiances and directions of his heart—the things in which he most passionately believed and to which his life was devoted. His will, he said, could help keep him on track with things he already deeply valued but was quite useless for getting him things he merely wanted."

My thoughts/comments…

"..his passions directed his life much more than his will..."

Passions and will are not necessarily opposite each other. We choose (will) what we are passionate about. To separate the will from passions is not truly possible, as indicated by the following… 

"...His will, he said, could help keep him on track with things he already deeply valued but was quite useless for getting him things he merely wanted..."

Again, what we value and what we want are not necessarily separate. That which we value most we desire/want most.

However, we can want things simply because we "know we should" and not necessarily because we truly value them, i.e. They don't really hold value for us. We only say they do because God (or someone else) said they should. So we don't truly want them. We only think or pretend we do.

And of course, none of us, as God's children, want to admit openly that we disagree with Him. So we disagree "quietly" instead, i.e. we hide our true feelings and beliefs from ourselves (though not from God) and others thinking by so doing we can avoid dealing with them i.e. We don't have to look at and address our unbelief/distrust in God and our subtle/hidden commitment to valuing something more than God.

"..his passions directed his life much more than his will..."

This is true for both positive and negative passions. Fears are a kind of passion as well as anxiety and anger. And they are all rooted in a broken value system - we value (worship) created things rather than the Creator. Rom 1:21-23. 

These passions are what drive our actions. We choose to go after what we value most, and we value most what we believe will best give us what we need, i.e. what we value most is what we are most passionate about. A solid belief in what is valuable is obstructed by our spiritual inability to see what is truly valuable above all things; God himself. 

When all is said and done, we are driven to act by our passions, which are rooted in our beliefs, whether right or wrong. Our wills do not "lead" in this process, but are subject to our passions, which are tied to our beliefs. 

Our will is not free in the absolute sense, it is the servant of our passions.

Or to quote from the above excerpt, "...His will was in the service (or slaves) of the basic allegiances and directions of his heart..."