From Lust to Love: Redeeming Desire Toward God

The gospel is that Jesus entered the fire to rescue you from it. And because of that, something new is possible. The same spirit who raised Jesus from the dead now begins to do something inside of us. He begins to change our desires, makes our desires more centered on what is real, what can actually satisfy them slowly, sometimes painfully, sometimes through what feels like an amputation, but always he's directing us towards life, which means the Christian life is not about pretending desire doesn't exist. It's about bringing our desires to Jesus and letting him heal them, letting him kill the lizard, letting him turn the whispering lie of lust into something stronger and more beautiful, into a stallion that carries us where? Towards God. [00:37:48] (54 seconds)  #GospelRescue

Jesus is not trying to shrink your world. He's trying to enlarge it. He's trying to free you from mirages that keep you wandering in the desert so your heart can learn to desire what is actually real. Because the deepest desire of our hearts is not sex, it's not power, it's not pleasure, it's God. Which means all the mirages we chase are really signs pointing somewhere else. And the promise of the gospel is that one day we will see God and every illusion will vanish, and every lesser hunger will fall silent, And our desire, healed, will carry us like a stallion towards the mountain of God. The lizard was never the real desire. It was only a distorted shadow of the stallion God meant to give us. [00:39:50] (46 seconds)  #DesireForGod

Like, that's the strange thing about samples. They stimulate appetite, but they don't satisfy you. They make you want more, but they never actually feed you. It tastes like food, but it never nourishes you. That's how lust works. It stimulates desire but never satisfies it. It promises life but never actually feeds our soul, which means the problem with lust is not that our desires are too strong. Again, the problem is they've been trained on something too small, and our soul begins to burn itself out, which is exactly the image Jesus gives us when he points at Gehenna, a place where everything that has been used up is thrown away and set on fire. [00:28:51] (39 seconds)  #LustNeverSatisfies

The strange thing about the gospel, the only person who truly deserved to avoid Gehenna went to Gehenna. On the cross, Jesus enters what? That place of rejection. He enters the place of our shame. He enters the place where our sin burns. And scripture says what? He went outside the city rejected, forsaken, thrown away. Why? So that those of us whose hearts are not pure could be forgiven, so that those of us whose desires are disordered could be healed, so that those of us who chased mirages could finally have the real thing, and it wouldn't just blow us away. [00:37:01] (47 seconds)  #JesusInGehenna

He knows the lizard is ruining him. He's terrified of losing it. He begins to offer excuses. Maybe the lizard will quiet down on its own. Maybe I can control it. Maybe it will go to sleep. The angel asked again, may I kill it? The man grows anxious. He asks the angel if it will hurt. And the angel says, yes, it will hurt. The death of the lizard will feel like an amputation. The man sweats. The lizard screams and pleads for mercy. But eventually, the man whispers the only prayer he can manage. And hear this, redeemer. God, help me. [00:34:49] (44 seconds)  #KillTheLizardPrayer

Because the promise of the gospel is not just forgiveness, it's transformation. One day, every disordered desire will be healed. Every illusion will vanish, and the deepest hunger of our hearts will finally be satisfied. Blessed are the pure in heart. Who makes you pure? Who makes your heart pure? Jesus does. For they shall see God. And when we see him, we will discover every lesser desire was only a shadow of the joy we were made for. The Christian faith is not about the death of desire. It's about the resurrection of desire, which is why he speaks so dramatically. [00:38:42] (52 seconds)  #ResurrectionOfDesire

We we hide them, hide from them sometimes. We manage them. We pretend they aren't there. But healing begins when shame loses its power to tell our story. When we begin bringing our desires, even our confusing ones, even our disordered ones, to God in the light of grace, something can change. When we bring them before God, when we bring them into honest community, when compassionate witnesses see, hear them, and pray for us, and walk with us safe with our vulnerabilities, we begin to discover something surprising. Our desires were never meant to be destroyed. They were meant to be redeemed. [00:27:07] (40 seconds)  #DesireRedeemed

So hear this. The problem is not desire itself. The problem, like Keller would say, is taking a good desire given to us by God and making it ultimate. A desire that has grown too large, a desire that begins to rule us rather than serve us. And the problem is not that our desires are too strong, it's that they become attached to things too small. [00:24:09] (30 seconds)  #DesireNotIdolatry