“May He give you your heart’s desire” (Psalm 20:5)

In my attempt to stay in shape during this cold and snowy New England winter I’ve retreated to the treadmill, mostly because I don’t like being out in the cold.  Truthfully, I find the treadmill extremely boring, so I’ve loaded my iPhone with some good talks to pass the time.

I’m a big fan of John Eldredge and I recently listened to the podcast from the Desire Conference that he gave with his colleague Gary Barkalow.
Eldredge and Barkalow’s point is simple but profound: God speaks to us through the holy and noble desires of our hearts, and so it’s important for us to become deeply aware of these desires because they point us toward our mission and union with God.

Some well-intentioned Christians, however, take the approach that we must kill our desires in order to be holy.  Some fear the power of desire or they mistrust it, and so they believe the best approach is to suppress or ignore it.  You may have met some of these people: they claim to have deep faith, but they never smile or laugh for example.  The truth is that God has placed good and holy desires within us to lead us closer to Him.

It’s important to understand that when I refer to getting in touch with desire I am not speaking about the sinful inclinations that we all experience–which, by the way, simply need to be tutored by God’s grace so that they can point us toward the good.  What I am referring to are those desires that exist in the deepest core of our being, those desires that we can only know clearly as we sit in quiet and open ourselves to experience the presence of God.

As Christians we believe in the existence of the devil, our enemy.  One of the devil’s greatest tactics is to kill desire within us (Barkalow makes this point brilliantly in the 5th talk).  The devil wants us to ignore desire, because he knows if we get in touch with the good and holy desires of our hearts, they will lead us to a deeper friendship with the Lord.

So what does the devil do? He keeps us busy: We find every excuse not to pray and not to listen to the voice of the Lord within us.  He also fills our lives with noise: television, radio, Internet, iPods, anything to keep us from being attentive to the desires of our hearts.  Or he makes us doubt: for a moment, we get in touch with the desires of our hearts, but then we think there’s no way that I can live this out…no way that God is asking this of me.

Have you taken the time to prayerfully reflect upon the holy desires of your heart?

Barkalow poses three questions to help us identify our deepest, God-given desires: What do I desire to bring to the world?  What contribution do I long to hear that I have made?  What am I doing when I feel God’s pleasure?

I encourage you to take these questions to prayer.

What is the holy longing in your heart?  What is God saying to you through it?  It’s in those desires that you will find what He is asking you to bring to the world.

Follow me on Facebook or Twitter

If you enjoyed this post, please share it: