Cultivating Godly Desires
In this series, I take our law homily from our church gathering each week (The law homily is where we read from the law of God and let His law examine our hearts so that we can be a tender-hearted and repenting people), and I post them here for your edification. Here is this week’s law homily on the prohibition against mental idolatry.
You shall have no other gods before Me. - Exodus 20:3
The Bombardment of Disordered Appetites
When we examine the landscape of our culture, we're bombarded on every side by forces aimed at stimulating and stoking our disordered appetites. It's not just the apparent spheres of sexuality and sensuality - our hearts are being relentlessly seduced to lust after a wide array of idols, which itself is idolatry.
Think of the incessant advertising, marketing, and social media messaging relentlessly beckoning us to crave status symbols, luxurious possessions, and the trappings of wealth and financial security as sources of identity, worth, and happiness. Consumerism cranks the idolatrous longing for more and more stuff.
In the entertainment industry, we're fed a wholly unbiblical narrative that self-actualization, self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement, and the unrestrained pursuit of our felt needs is the path to fulfillment. The cult of individualism stokes prideful self-exaltation.
In professional spheres, the god of shallow ambition and upward mobility is ever-tempting, luring us to make work an all-consuming idol. The trappings of career success, acclaim, and social positioning can become cruel masters.
Even the domestic sphere presents snares. We're prone to covet the picture-perfect family, making loved ones into idols that must cater to our egos' needs. Selfish appetites distort marital and parental roles.
Our depraved hearts remain factories of insatiable, disordered lusts and desires. Greed, gluttony, sloth, the lust for power and control - there's no end to the profusion of potential idols vying for ultimate allegiance. We're hardwired to allow these hunger pangs to go perpetually unsatisfied by giving them what cannot profit them, seeking to quell the cravings with things that will never satisfy us.
The Biblical Answer: Cultivating Holy Desires
Thankfully, Scripture beckons us to an altogether different path—the cultivation of holy desires set on God himself. You see, the Bible does not approach desire in the same way as the world, the flesh, and the devil. Those enemies come to you... and they attempt to stoke the sinful, carnal cravings that already burn within us. But God does not join that unholy chorus vying for our disordered affections. He is not one voice among a litany of spectators competing for our attention.
Instead, the living Lord calls us to actively craft new desires - wholesome longings and appetites that propel us toward Him rather than away. Rather than just waiting as passive victims for external forces to inflame our flesh, we're commanded to purposefully nurture internal yearnings that align with God's will. This process is not merely reactive to temptation's overtures but proactive in replacing illicit desires with sacred, powerful affections for our Maker.
Cultivating Holy Desires Is a Discipline
Scripture makes clear that such holy desires are not alien implants but cultivated disciplines. Psalm 37:4 instructs, "Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart." In the original Hebrew, the verb "delight" suggests an active, energetic choice to seek fulfillment in one's relationship with God over the external siren calls of the world. We're to earnestly pursue our satisfaction in Him. Not passively, but actively.
And as we delight ourselves in the Lord, He reshapes the desires of our wandering hearts. As we seek Him, our appetites will be transformed, and our disordered longings will be replaced by cravings for Christ's supremacy. The very dreams we once directed toward earthly idols get mercifully re-centered on the only reality that can truly satisfy - the glory of God.
In the face of such continuous cultural brainwashing, we must shut out all of the voices jostling for our affections. Instead, we must take the offensive in disciplining our disordered desires toward godliness. We must actively cultivate new hunger by feasting on God's Word, delighting in His manifold perfections, and gulping down the soul-reviving truth about His all-surpassing beauty.
As we have seen, every one of us stands guilty before God of violating the First Commandment through idolatry and disordered desires. We have all allowed our minds to wander like a boat whose owner forgot to tie off to the dock. Whether that comes from falling into sexual immorality, material possessions, human praise, status, or any other false idol, we have all drifted into and cherished, prioritized, and served created things instead of the Creator himself.
Our hearts manufacture idols ceaselessly, as we're willfully led astray by our evil desires that battle against our souls (1 Peter 2:11). We make good things into ultimate things, perverting God's gifts into pseudo-saviors. This idolatrous stance cuts against the very grain of reality and the reason for our existence—to glorify God and fully enjoy him forever.
A Call to Repentance
Instead, let us corporately and individually confess this sin and misery within our hearts. Let us feel the weight of our transgression against our loving Creator and Redeemer, who is worthy of all our worship and obedience. Let the words of Jeremiah 2:13 sink in: "For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water."
We stand justly condemned, having arrogantly turned from the all-satisfying God to bow the knee to every cheap and brittle substitute, broken cisterns that can never satisfy the desperate thirst of our souls. With that, we need this day to repent, to lay down our broken affections, and to ask the Lord to help us actively cultivate affection for Him! Let us confess our sins to Him and receive His pardon for us.
