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.