God seeks. Jesus seeks. What do you seek? Learn how growth in spiritual maturity involves cultivating godly desires through prayer and also putting to death unholy ones.
Welcome to the Two Journeys podcast. This is Sanctification Monday, and my name is Andy Davis. In this podcast, we seek to answer the question, what is spiritual maturity? We believe that spiritual maturity can be broken into four main sections: knowledge, faith, character, and action. Now, today we’re going to continue our focus on the section of character to try to understand character. And last week we defined that as heart, biblically. The Bible, I don’t think, talks a lot about character, but it uses the word heart. But it has to do with what kind of person are you? And last time we talked about how vital it is that we appear to be what we really are, that there’s no deception, that we’re not hypocritical, we’re not putting on a mask, we’re not whitewashed tombs. We are genuinely following Christ. We are genuinely, genuinely what we appear to be.
One of the words that we use for that is the word of integrity. You are the same person no matter what the circumstances are. You are the same person in private you are in public. And so, for us as Christians, sanctification is a matter of transformation of the inner man, transformation of the heart. Now, last time we talked about the first and greatest aspect of the heart, and that is what you love and what you hate. We said it’s the greatest because it comes down to the two great commandments, to love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. Love is a matter of the heart. So, we talked about that last time. Now today we’re going to talk about part two in terms of the heart, and that is what you seek, desire. We’re going to talk about desires. The Christian life on this earth is a life of deep longing.
The Christian life on this earth is a life of deep longing.
Since so many of the promises of God are as yet unfilled, we should be filled with desires, godly desires. Paul says, “If we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently,” Romans 8:25. We wait for it expectantly. We are people who are filled with longings and desires. If you were to ask a strong mature Christian, “What do you seek? What are you desiring?” He wouldn’t say “Nothing. I’m totally satisfied.” No, not at all. There are so many promises that are as yet unfulfilled, and we want all of them. We want the good things that God has planned for us. Now, we, as we’re talking about desires, we’re talking about good things that we do not have. We want to have them, but we don’t have them. We might have them to some degree. We could say, “I want godliness.” And we’re not saying I have no godliness, but we want more godliness.
We want a godliness we don’t presently have. So, desire honestly has to do with things that we do not yet possess. And more than that, Christian desires are patterned after scripture. So, we are yearning for things that God has told us we should desire. God has told us that we should seek. So, our desires should be patterned after God, for there are things that God seeks. There are things that God does not yet have that he wants. It’s really an interesting concept, isn’t it? But God desires many things. He is sovereign, he rules, he has made a plan, and that plan is being executed. And everything that his heart desires, he will get at some point. But God is going to continue to desire those things until they are fulfilled. So, David reveals that our God desires our integrity, our godly character. He says, “Surely you desire truth in the inner parts. You teach us wisdom in the inmost place” (Psalm 51:6).
So, God desires that we be holy through and through, and that we are not yet. Again, Job noted that God’s desires govern his actions. Job 23:13 says that “God is unchangeable. Who can turn him back? What he desires that he does.” So, in other words, the first in the sequence, God desires something and then he acts based on his desires. So, our God is a God who desires. Psalm 132 also reveals that God is a very passionate being filled with desires. It says,
For the Lord has chosen Zion, he has desired it for his dwelling place. This is my resting place forever and ever. Here I will sit enthroned for I have desired it. I will bless her with abundant provisions. Her poor, I will satisfy with food. I will clothe her priests with salvation. Her saints will ever sing for joy. Here I will make a horn grow for David and set up a lamp for my anointed one. I will clothe his enemies with shame, but the crown on his head will be resplendent. Psalm 132:13-18.
That’s God desiring Zion where David, ultimately fulfilled in Jesus, will reign forever. So, God is a God who yearns, and I think ultimately he yearns, as we do, for the consummation of the age. He yearns for the new heaven and the new earth and the new Jerusalem, and for all the elect to be resurrected, glorious, radiant, and in his presence. He wants to be with his bride. He desires that. That’s something he yearns for. And so, Jesus said to the Samaritan woman, it’s amazing, in John 4. He talks to her about living water and all of these things, and she brings up a controversial topic between Samaritans and Jews, namely the place of worship.
And it’s fascinating because she actually changed the subject. She didn’t want to talk about her sin, which was her relations with a series of men, and the man she was now with was not her husband, all that. She changes the subject, said, “Our fathers say, Samaritans say that we should worship on this mountain and you Jews say that we should worship in Jerusalem” (John 4:20). And so, it’s amazing. She goes actually exactly where Jesus wants to go, talking about worship. And Jesus said this, very powerfully to her, “A time is coming, and has now come, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and truth. For they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.” The Father seeks those kinds of worshipers. “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship him in the Spirit and truth.” John 4:23-24. So this passionate longing of God for people who will worship him in spirit and truth drives his sovereign plan and thus all history.
So, our God is a God filled with wonderful holy desires. Jesus Christ, as the perfect reflection of the Father, “He is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3). He also is characterized by desires, and he also seeks things that he does not have. For example, Psalm 40:7-8 says, “I desire to do your will, O God, your law is within my heart.” Every moment Jesus desired to do the will of God, which as yet hadn’t been done. He was constantly seeking to do the Father’s will. That was the burning mission of his life. And after Zacchaeus’ marvelous conversion, remember the chief tax collector who climbed up the sycamore tree to see Jesus, and then Jesus invited himself over to Zacchaeus’ house and Zacchaeus was so moved and so transformed, born again, that his idolatry over money and the luxurious lifestyle that it bought was broken, decisively broken.
And he said, “Here and now I give my money to the poor, needy, and if I’ve defrauded anyone, I’ll repay fourfold.” And Jesus said, “Salvation has come to this house for the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” It’s Luke 19:10. And so Jesus was in the world as a good shepherd seeking wandering sheep. He was going after people, trying to save them. He also uses the same kind of language, amazingly, concerning just having a meal with his disciples, the Passover meal, what we know as the Last Supper was a Passover meal. And Jesus says this, it’s amazing. He says in Luke 22:15-16, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for I tell you I’ll not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.” In other words, Jesus was saying, “I couldn’t wait to sit down with you, men, and eat with you.”
It’s amazing too, because they were such sinners. That very night they were bickering about which of them was the greatest. And one of them was going to deny him that night and one of them was going to betray him. But still Jesus said, “I have eagerly desired to eat this meal with you.” Well, I would say, if that’s true of that night, how much more does he eagerly desire to sit with us at the banqueting table in heaven? He desires things that he does not yet have because a huge number of the elect are as yet unconverted, and he desires that they be with him too. So, he is seeking that. I love what he says in prayer to his Father. “Father, I want those whom you have given me to be with me where I am and to see my glory” (John 17:24). He wants that. It’s not happened yet.
It’s a desire that fills his heart, and he puts it in prayer up to his Father. And we know this, everything Jesus prays for he gets. So, all the elect are going to be eternally with him and see his glory. So, Jesus was a man, is a man, the Son of God filled with holy desires. Now desire describes the soul. You want to understand a human being and their soul, their heart, tell me what they desire. As a matter of fact, no one made this clearer, this link between desire and the state of the soul than Henry Scougal. He wrote a book entitled The Life of God in the Soul of Man. This one book changed the great preacher, George Whitefield’s, life, and it’s been used mightily in the hearts of many others. Now, Scougal made this profound statement, “The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its desires.”
So, what that means is if we desire worthless things, it shows something about the excellence of our souls, namely, we are not excellent. If we desire excellent things, then our soul is excellent. Along these lines, then, John Piper wrote these words, “The heart is a desire factory. The human heart produces desires as fire produces heat. As surely as sparks fly upward, the heart pumps out desire after desire for a happier future. The condition of the heart is appraised by the kinds of desires that hold sway. Or to put it another way, the state of the heart is shown by the things that satisfy its desires. If the heart is satisfied with mean and ugly things, it is a mean and ugly heart. If it is satisfied with God, it is a godly heart.”
sin, a yearning for something that is not granted by God. In the first motions of desire that’s where sin is conceived within the human heart.
So, the question before each one of us now then must be simply this, what do you want? What do you want? Now we are very tormented every day by evil desires. Our hearts are actually divided. We have very godly desires put in us by the Holy Spirit, but we also have evil desires that flow from the flesh. Now before conversion, our hearts were set completely on unholy desires. We lived our daily lives gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts (Ephesians 2:3). That’s how we lived. We were dead in our transgressions and sins (Ephesians 2:1). First John 2:16 talks about the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the boastful pride of life. That’s what we live for. Now, James tells us that these desires are the origin of sin, a yearning for something that is not granted by God. In the first motions of desire that’s where sin is conceived within the human heart.
“Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire, when it is conceived, gives birth to sin and sin when it is fully grown, gives birth to death.” It all starts with evil desire, James 1:14-15. Therefore, a Christian is constantly battling to root out, not only bad actions, but the bad desires that give them birth. The great nemesis of our Christian lives is that even after conversion, the same evil desires continue to plague us, to battle us every step of the way. Galatians 5 makes that plain, “The flesh wars against the spirit and the spirit wars against the flesh. They’re in conflict with each other so that you do not do what you want” (Galatians 5:17). In other words, we’re never pure in what we want. We don’t have pure desires in any direction. As unglorified, but genuinely converted Christians, we are weird.
We are almost like insane. We don’t purely desire God and we don’t purely desire evil or sin. And so, we’re conflicted all the time. When we’re seeking God in prayer we want God, we want to be close to him, but our flesh is fighting it at every step of the way. If, on the other hand, we go after evil things and lust, the Holy Spirit is fighting that the whole time, and we’re not totally integrated and harmonious in that drive either. In heaven, we’ll be pure and fulfilled in God. But that’s the battle that we have in sanctification, a battle with evil desires. Now above all things we should yearn for God. God sets within our hearts, after conversion, a yearning for the highest blessing in the universe. And the highest blessing is God himself. He is our reward. I love Psalm 73. What a masterpiece of a psalm.
That’s a psalm in which the psalmist begins by talking about how he had stumbled over the prosperity of the wicked, and it truly bothered him that the wicked seemed to always be doing well. Their bodies are always healthy. Their children always seem to be doing well. And he knows that they’re corrupt. They’re getting all their money by corruption and by evil and crime. And so, he almost wanted to not be a Christian anymore. Actually, Old Testament, a follower of the true God. But then he went into the temple, and as he pondered it, he realized what their final end would be, and he knew that they would ultimately be condemned. And then he utters this incredible confession of sin to God, and it’s one of the most beautiful passages of scripture in the whole Bible. It’s in Psalm 73:21-26. He said,
When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered, I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute beast before you. Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand, you guide me with your counsel, and afterward you’ll take me into glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire beside you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
What an incredible statement. “Whom have I in heaven but you, and earth has nothing I desire besides you.” Now, that’s perfect desire there, that I want nothing more here on earth than what I will have in heaven, and that’s God. So that’s something in sanctification we have to go after. We have to be saying like Moses did, “Please show me your glory. Lord” (Exodus 33:18). We have to be seeking after it as though it’s the greatest thing that there is. As David wrote in Psalm 27:4, “One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.”
As Christ comes into our hearts by the Spirit and we continue to grow, the redeemed have learned to seek the presence of God by seeking Christ. And Christ, to be with Christ is to be with God. And compared to that, anything that we would ever desire in this world turns to rubbish. As the apostle Paul said in Philippians 3,
Whatever was for my profit, I now consider loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings becoming like him in his death, and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead.
The apostle Paul, who wrote the book of Romans, who saw Christ, the resurrected Christ in glory on the road to Damascus, who was caught up to the third heaven, all he wanted was to know Christ. We’re not saying he didn’t know Christ, but his yearning, his desire was to know him better. I just want to know Christ better. That was Paul’s greatest desire. So therefore, we should feed that desire in sanctification, a desire to know God and to know Christ. We should seek God’s face now by the Spirit. It is the unique ministry of the Holy Spirit to pour out the love of God into our hearts, Romans 5:5, and to testify with our hearts that we are children of God, Romans 8:16. The Spirit does this by moving us again and again to seek God’s outpoured affection in prayer, like a child seeking good from his Father.
Jesus taught us about prayer in Luke 11, and he surprises us by saying that we should ask him for the Holy Spirit, but listen to what he says. Luke 11, “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for fish, you’ll give him a snake, or if he asks for an egg, you’ll give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” I think that means that we should be asking the Father to pour out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us. We should do it every day. Say, Lord, I want to know more of your love for me. Would you please tell me again how much you love me? Would you please pour out your love into my heart by the Holy Spirit?
Martin Lloyd-Jones wrote an entire book, Joy Unspeakable, about the astonishing ways that God has gifted his people, here on earth, with foretaste of heavenly joy, supernatural, even ecstatic experiences of the presence of God here on earth. And Lloyd-Jones argues that we should seek them. We should yearn for him to pour this sense of his love for us into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. He talks about the Puritan, Thomas Goodwin, who wrote a lot about this out poured experience of God.
Goodwin describes a man and his little child, a son walking down the road and they’re walking hand in hand, and the child knows that he’s the child of his father and he knows that his father loves him. And he rejoices in that. He’s happy in it. There’s no uncertainty about it at all. But suddenly the father, moved by some impulse, takes hold of that child, picks him up, fondles him in his arms, kisses him, embraces him, showers his love upon him, and then puts him back down again, and they go on walking together down the road.
So, in other words, Lloyd-Jones says, before the father did that to the son, the son knew that his father loved him. He knew that his father was there for him. They were walking hand in hand. There was no doubt in the son’s mind that the father loved him and cared for him and would protect him and provide for him. But after his father picked him up and hugged him and did all that and put him back down, his heart is aglow with the amount that his father loves him. It’s a whole different experience. And what Lloyd-Jones says, we should seek that in prayer. We should go to God in prayer and say, “God, would you do that for me? Would you please just pick me up and pour your love into my heart?” Many, many examples of this in church history that Lloyd-Jones cites.
For example, DL Moody. Moody said,
I began to cry as never before for a greater blessing from God. The hunger increased. I really felt that I did not want to live any longer. I kept on crying all the time that God would fill me with his Spirit. Well, one day in the city of New York, oh, what a day, I cannot describe it. I seldom refer to it. It’s almost too sacred an experience to name. Paul had an experience of which he never spoke for 14 years, I can only say God revealed himself to me, and I had such an experience of his love that I had to ask him to stay his hand.
Has anything like that ever happened to you? God can pour out an almost immeasurable quantity of his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, giving us a sense of his presence with us. We should yearn for that. Thomas Goodwin said, “Sue him for it. Ask him for it. Don’t ever give up until God pours out his love into your hearts.”
Well, beyond that, there’s some other things we should desire. We should hunger and thirst after righteousness. We are never going to attain perfection in this world. The power of indwelling sin is so great. But one of the greatest indicators of the new birth is that deep yearning that we have for perfect righteousness. We want to be righteous, actually righteous, in our hearts, and we yearn to live in a perfectly holy world where there’s nothing but righteous people. We hunger and thirst for righteousness, Matthew 5:6. And Jesus said if we do, we will be satisfied. Now we know that presently we are divided, deeply divided because of our sin. Like Paul says, “What a wretched man I am. The very thing I hate I do. The thing I want to do I do not do. What a wretched man I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death” (Romans 7:24-25).
So, we yearn to be rescued. We yearn to be free from sin and never sin again. We want to be holy. This hungering and thirsting for righteousness feeds an ever-increasing hatred of our own sinfulness, a crying out against it, a yearning for heaven. And then that yearning, that desire feeds the fight in mortification, putting sin to death. We also yearn for the consummation of Christ’s kingdom. We yearn for the day when we will see redeemed people from every tribe, language, people and nation standing around the throne. We want, like Jesus did, all that the Father had given him in election to be with him where he was and to see his glory. We want that to happen. And we want to be involved in missions and evangelism. So, we hunger and thirst for the kingdom of God. We seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and we don’t care as much about physical material things.
That’s a godly desire. Now, how do we grow in our godly desires? Well, I think prayer is a big part of that. We should be stoking our desires white-hot through prayer. If we go to a place like Williamsburg and we see a blacksmith. And the blacksmith takes a piece of black cold iron and puts it in the coals, and then he gets this bellows going like, whew, whew, whew, like that, and there’s this big wind blowing on the coals. And the iron, the black iron’s in there, when he pulls it out, it’s not black anymore. It’s glowing. It’s red-hot. That’s what prayer does to Godly desires. You go into the prayer closet and your desire for the conversion of a lost person that you’re praying for increases. Your desire to be faithful to God in evangelism increases. Your desire to put sin to death increases.
how do we grow in our godly desires? Well, I think prayer is a big part of that. We should be stoking our desires white-hot through prayer.
Prayer stokes desires hot if it’s done properly. There are cold prayers, that’s true. But real prayer actually stokes up godly desires. We should yearn for it. Beyond that, we should have, I think, an overriding ambition in life, a desire that focuses our attentions. “What should I do with my life?” Ambition, if I ask you, “Is ambition good or is it bad?” You would not be able to answer. It’s like “Ambition for what?” Ambition, which is a life-consuming desire, is a good thing if it’s after a good thing, if after a godly thing. For example, Paul said, the apostle Paul said, “It’s always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not named so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation.” So, he had an ambition to be a frontier, trailblazing, church-planting apostle to the Gentiles. That’s what dominated his life.
You need to have a life calling, an ambition, which focuses your spiritual gifts, which focuses all of your attention in life. It is your drive. It’s what you want. It’s how you desire to spend the rest of your time in service to God. Your spiritual gifts are going to be a big part of that. We’ll talk about that, God willing, later. And so those are some aspects of godly desires. Let me sum up now what the godly seek. What should we be desiring in our lives? Well, we should seek God above all things. We should seek Jesus Christ whom he has sent. We should seek God’s glory. We should seek that his name and renown be spread to the ends of the earth. We should seek Christ’s kingdom and his righteousness. We should seek our own personal holiness. We should seek wisdom and understanding as the Book of Proverbs says many times. We should seek protection from the judgment day that is coming in Christ.
We should seek heaven and things above. We should set our minds on things above, not on earthly things. We should seek God’s word and hunger and thirst after God’s word. We should, in God’s word, seek God’s will. What is God’s will? What does he want us to do? We should seek the good of others, especially their eternal good. We should seek their conversion, but we should seek their temporal good as well as the good Samaritan did when he saw the man bleeding by the side of the road. We should seek and save the lost like Jesus did. We should seek to be at peace with all people as far as we can.
We should seek glory, honor, and immortality, Romans 2:7. In other words, we should seek our own glory, that we would be glorious in heaven. We should seek our own honor in that the Father will honor us for serving him, and we should seek immortality. Glory, honor and immortality are all things that he will give to us. Apparently, we should seek them in the biblical ways. These are things that should organize our lives. We should seek justice and relief for the oppressed and for the needy. Well, friends, we’ve had a chance to look at godly desires, and as we conclude today, I want you to go into your week knowing that God has gone ahead of you and will be using everything you experienced this week to sanctify you and bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.
Welcome to the Two Journeys podcast. This is Sanctification Monday, and my name is Andy Davis. In this podcast, we seek to answer the question, what is spiritual maturity? We believe that spiritual maturity can be broken into four main sections: knowledge, faith, character, and action. Now, today we’re going to continue our focus on the section of character to try to understand character. And last week we defined that as heart, biblically. The Bible, I don’t think, talks a lot about character, but it uses the word heart. But it has to do with what kind of person are you? And last time we talked about how vital it is that we appear to be what we really are, that there’s no deception, that we’re not hypocritical, we’re not putting on a mask, we’re not whitewashed tombs. We are genuinely following Christ. We are genuinely, genuinely what we appear to be.
One of the words that we use for that is the word of integrity. You are the same person no matter what the circumstances are. You are the same person in private you are in public. And so, for us as Christians, sanctification is a matter of transformation of the inner man, transformation of the heart. Now, last time we talked about the first and greatest aspect of the heart, and that is what you love and what you hate. We said it’s the greatest because it comes down to the two great commandments, to love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. Love is a matter of the heart. So, we talked about that last time. Now today we’re going to talk about part two in terms of the heart, and that is what you seek, desire. We’re going to talk about desires. The Christian life on this earth is a life of deep longing.
The Christian life on this earth is a life of deep longing.
Since so many of the promises of God are as yet unfilled, we should be filled with desires, godly desires. Paul says, “If we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently,” Romans 8:25. We wait for it expectantly. We are people who are filled with longings and desires. If you were to ask a strong mature Christian, “What do you seek? What are you desiring?” He wouldn’t say “Nothing. I’m totally satisfied.” No, not at all. There are so many promises that are as yet unfulfilled, and we want all of them. We want the good things that God has planned for us. Now, we, as we’re talking about desires, we’re talking about good things that we do not have. We want to have them, but we don’t have them. We might have them to some degree. We could say, “I want godliness.” And we’re not saying I have no godliness, but we want more godliness.
We want a godliness we don’t presently have. So, desire honestly has to do with things that we do not yet possess. And more than that, Christian desires are patterned after scripture. So, we are yearning for things that God has told us we should desire. God has told us that we should seek. So, our desires should be patterned after God, for there are things that God seeks. There are things that God does not yet have that he wants. It’s really an interesting concept, isn’t it? But God desires many things. He is sovereign, he rules, he has made a plan, and that plan is being executed. And everything that his heart desires, he will get at some point. But God is going to continue to desire those things until they are fulfilled. So, David reveals that our God desires our integrity, our godly character. He says, “Surely you desire truth in the inner parts. You teach us wisdom in the inmost place” (Psalm 51:6).
So, God desires that we be holy through and through, and that we are not yet. Again, Job noted that God’s desires govern his actions. Job 23:13 says that “God is unchangeable. Who can turn him back? What he desires that he does.” So, in other words, the first in the sequence, God desires something and then he acts based on his desires. So, our God is a God who desires. Psalm 132 also reveals that God is a very passionate being filled with desires. It says,
For the Lord has chosen Zion, he has desired it for his dwelling place. This is my resting place forever and ever. Here I will sit enthroned for I have desired it. I will bless her with abundant provisions. Her poor, I will satisfy with food. I will clothe her priests with salvation. Her saints will ever sing for joy. Here I will make a horn grow for David and set up a lamp for my anointed one. I will clothe his enemies with shame, but the crown on his head will be resplendent. Psalm 132:13-18.
That’s God desiring Zion where David, ultimately fulfilled in Jesus, will reign forever. So, God is a God who yearns, and I think ultimately he yearns, as we do, for the consummation of the age. He yearns for the new heaven and the new earth and the new Jerusalem, and for all the elect to be resurrected, glorious, radiant, and in his presence. He wants to be with his bride. He desires that. That’s something he yearns for. And so, Jesus said to the Samaritan woman, it’s amazing, in John 4. He talks to her about living water and all of these things, and she brings up a controversial topic between Samaritans and Jews, namely the place of worship.
And it’s fascinating because she actually changed the subject. She didn’t want to talk about her sin, which was her relations with a series of men, and the man she was now with was not her husband, all that. She changes the subject, said, “Our fathers say, Samaritans say that we should worship on this mountain and you Jews say that we should worship in Jerusalem” (John 4:20). And so, it’s amazing. She goes actually exactly where Jesus wants to go, talking about worship. And Jesus said this, very powerfully to her, “A time is coming, and has now come, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and truth. For they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.” The Father seeks those kinds of worshipers. “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship him in the Spirit and truth.” John 4:23-24. So this passionate longing of God for people who will worship him in spirit and truth drives his sovereign plan and thus all history.
So, our God is a God filled with wonderful holy desires. Jesus Christ, as the perfect reflection of the Father, “He is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3). He also is characterized by desires, and he also seeks things that he does not have. For example, Psalm 40:7-8 says, “I desire to do your will, O God, your law is within my heart.” Every moment Jesus desired to do the will of God, which as yet hadn’t been done. He was constantly seeking to do the Father’s will. That was the burning mission of his life. And after Zacchaeus’ marvelous conversion, remember the chief tax collector who climbed up the sycamore tree to see Jesus, and then Jesus invited himself over to Zacchaeus’ house and Zacchaeus was so moved and so transformed, born again, that his idolatry over money and the luxurious lifestyle that it bought was broken, decisively broken.
And he said, “Here and now I give my money to the poor, needy, and if I’ve defrauded anyone, I’ll repay fourfold.” And Jesus said, “Salvation has come to this house for the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” It’s Luke 19:10. And so Jesus was in the world as a good shepherd seeking wandering sheep. He was going after people, trying to save them. He also uses the same kind of language, amazingly, concerning just having a meal with his disciples, the Passover meal, what we know as the Last Supper was a Passover meal. And Jesus says this, it’s amazing. He says in Luke 22:15-16, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for I tell you I’ll not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.” In other words, Jesus was saying, “I couldn’t wait to sit down with you, men, and eat with you.”
It’s amazing too, because they were such sinners. That very night they were bickering about which of them was the greatest. And one of them was going to deny him that night and one of them was going to betray him. But still Jesus said, “I have eagerly desired to eat this meal with you.” Well, I would say, if that’s true of that night, how much more does he eagerly desire to sit with us at the banqueting table in heaven? He desires things that he does not yet have because a huge number of the elect are as yet unconverted, and he desires that they be with him too. So, he is seeking that. I love what he says in prayer to his Father. “Father, I want those whom you have given me to be with me where I am and to see my glory” (John 17:24). He wants that. It’s not happened yet.
It’s a desire that fills his heart, and he puts it in prayer up to his Father. And we know this, everything Jesus prays for he gets. So, all the elect are going to be eternally with him and see his glory. So, Jesus was a man, is a man, the Son of God filled with holy desires. Now desire describes the soul. You want to understand a human being and their soul, their heart, tell me what they desire. As a matter of fact, no one made this clearer, this link between desire and the state of the soul than Henry Scougal. He wrote a book entitled The Life of God in the Soul of Man. This one book changed the great preacher, George Whitefield’s, life, and it’s been used mightily in the hearts of many others. Now, Scougal made this profound statement, “The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its desires.”
So, what that means is if we desire worthless things, it shows something about the excellence of our souls, namely, we are not excellent. If we desire excellent things, then our soul is excellent. Along these lines, then, John Piper wrote these words, “The heart is a desire factory. The human heart produces desires as fire produces heat. As surely as sparks fly upward, the heart pumps out desire after desire for a happier future. The condition of the heart is appraised by the kinds of desires that hold sway. Or to put it another way, the state of the heart is shown by the things that satisfy its desires. If the heart is satisfied with mean and ugly things, it is a mean and ugly heart. If it is satisfied with God, it is a godly heart.”
sin, a yearning for something that is not granted by God. In the first motions of desire that’s where sin is conceived within the human heart.
So, the question before each one of us now then must be simply this, what do you want? What do you want? Now we are very tormented every day by evil desires. Our hearts are actually divided. We have very godly desires put in us by the Holy Spirit, but we also have evil desires that flow from the flesh. Now before conversion, our hearts were set completely on unholy desires. We lived our daily lives gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts (Ephesians 2:3). That’s how we lived. We were dead in our transgressions and sins (Ephesians 2:1). First John 2:16 talks about the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the boastful pride of life. That’s what we live for. Now, James tells us that these desires are the origin of sin, a yearning for something that is not granted by God. In the first motions of desire that’s where sin is conceived within the human heart.
“Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire, when it is conceived, gives birth to sin and sin when it is fully grown, gives birth to death.” It all starts with evil desire, James 1:14-15. Therefore, a Christian is constantly battling to root out, not only bad actions, but the bad desires that give them birth. The great nemesis of our Christian lives is that even after conversion, the same evil desires continue to plague us, to battle us every step of the way. Galatians 5 makes that plain, “The flesh wars against the spirit and the spirit wars against the flesh. They’re in conflict with each other so that you do not do what you want” (Galatians 5:17). In other words, we’re never pure in what we want. We don’t have pure desires in any direction. As unglorified, but genuinely converted Christians, we are weird.
We are almost like insane. We don’t purely desire God and we don’t purely desire evil or sin. And so, we’re conflicted all the time. When we’re seeking God in prayer we want God, we want to be close to him, but our flesh is fighting it at every step of the way. If, on the other hand, we go after evil things and lust, the Holy Spirit is fighting that the whole time, and we’re not totally integrated and harmonious in that drive either. In heaven, we’ll be pure and fulfilled in God. But that’s the battle that we have in sanctification, a battle with evil desires. Now above all things we should yearn for God. God sets within our hearts, after conversion, a yearning for the highest blessing in the universe. And the highest blessing is God himself. He is our reward. I love Psalm 73. What a masterpiece of a psalm.
That’s a psalm in which the psalmist begins by talking about how he had stumbled over the prosperity of the wicked, and it truly bothered him that the wicked seemed to always be doing well. Their bodies are always healthy. Their children always seem to be doing well. And he knows that they’re corrupt. They’re getting all their money by corruption and by evil and crime. And so, he almost wanted to not be a Christian anymore. Actually, Old Testament, a follower of the true God. But then he went into the temple, and as he pondered it, he realized what their final end would be, and he knew that they would ultimately be condemned. And then he utters this incredible confession of sin to God, and it’s one of the most beautiful passages of scripture in the whole Bible. It’s in Psalm 73:21-26. He said,
When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered, I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute beast before you. Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand, you guide me with your counsel, and afterward you’ll take me into glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire beside you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
What an incredible statement. “Whom have I in heaven but you, and earth has nothing I desire besides you.” Now, that’s perfect desire there, that I want nothing more here on earth than what I will have in heaven, and that’s God. So that’s something in sanctification we have to go after. We have to be saying like Moses did, “Please show me your glory. Lord” (Exodus 33:18). We have to be seeking after it as though it’s the greatest thing that there is. As David wrote in Psalm 27:4, “One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.”
As Christ comes into our hearts by the Spirit and we continue to grow, the redeemed have learned to seek the presence of God by seeking Christ. And Christ, to be with Christ is to be with God. And compared to that, anything that we would ever desire in this world turns to rubbish. As the apostle Paul said in Philippians 3,
Whatever was for my profit, I now consider loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings becoming like him in his death, and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead.
The apostle Paul, who wrote the book of Romans, who saw Christ, the resurrected Christ in glory on the road to Damascus, who was caught up to the third heaven, all he wanted was to know Christ. We’re not saying he didn’t know Christ, but his yearning, his desire was to know him better. I just want to know Christ better. That was Paul’s greatest desire. So therefore, we should feed that desire in sanctification, a desire to know God and to know Christ. We should seek God’s face now by the Spirit. It is the unique ministry of the Holy Spirit to pour out the love of God into our hearts, Romans 5:5, and to testify with our hearts that we are children of God, Romans 8:16. The Spirit does this by moving us again and again to seek God’s outpoured affection in prayer, like a child seeking good from his Father.
Jesus taught us about prayer in Luke 11, and he surprises us by saying that we should ask him for the Holy Spirit, but listen to what he says. Luke 11, “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for fish, you’ll give him a snake, or if he asks for an egg, you’ll give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” I think that means that we should be asking the Father to pour out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us. We should do it every day. Say, Lord, I want to know more of your love for me. Would you please tell me again how much you love me? Would you please pour out your love into my heart by the Holy Spirit?
Martin Lloyd-Jones wrote an entire book, Joy Unspeakable, about the astonishing ways that God has gifted his people, here on earth, with foretaste of heavenly joy, supernatural, even ecstatic experiences of the presence of God here on earth. And Lloyd-Jones argues that we should seek them. We should yearn for him to pour this sense of his love for us into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. He talks about the Puritan, Thomas Goodwin, who wrote a lot about this out poured experience of God.
Goodwin describes a man and his little child, a son walking down the road and they’re walking hand in hand, and the child knows that he’s the child of his father and he knows that his father loves him. And he rejoices in that. He’s happy in it. There’s no uncertainty about it at all. But suddenly the father, moved by some impulse, takes hold of that child, picks him up, fondles him in his arms, kisses him, embraces him, showers his love upon him, and then puts him back down again, and they go on walking together down the road.
So, in other words, Lloyd-Jones says, before the father did that to the son, the son knew that his father loved him. He knew that his father was there for him. They were walking hand in hand. There was no doubt in the son’s mind that the father loved him and cared for him and would protect him and provide for him. But after his father picked him up and hugged him and did all that and put him back down, his heart is aglow with the amount that his father loves him. It’s a whole different experience. And what Lloyd-Jones says, we should seek that in prayer. We should go to God in prayer and say, “God, would you do that for me? Would you please just pick me up and pour your love into my heart?” Many, many examples of this in church history that Lloyd-Jones cites.
For example, DL Moody. Moody said,
I began to cry as never before for a greater blessing from God. The hunger increased. I really felt that I did not want to live any longer. I kept on crying all the time that God would fill me with his Spirit. Well, one day in the city of New York, oh, what a day, I cannot describe it. I seldom refer to it. It’s almost too sacred an experience to name. Paul had an experience of which he never spoke for 14 years, I can only say God revealed himself to me, and I had such an experience of his love that I had to ask him to stay his hand.
Has anything like that ever happened to you? God can pour out an almost immeasurable quantity of his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, giving us a sense of his presence with us. We should yearn for that. Thomas Goodwin said, “Sue him for it. Ask him for it. Don’t ever give up until God pours out his love into your hearts.”
Well, beyond that, there’s some other things we should desire. We should hunger and thirst after righteousness. We are never going to attain perfection in this world. The power of indwelling sin is so great. But one of the greatest indicators of the new birth is that deep yearning that we have for perfect righteousness. We want to be righteous, actually righteous, in our hearts, and we yearn to live in a perfectly holy world where there’s nothing but righteous people. We hunger and thirst for righteousness, Matthew 5:6. And Jesus said if we do, we will be satisfied. Now we know that presently we are divided, deeply divided because of our sin. Like Paul says, “What a wretched man I am. The very thing I hate I do. The thing I want to do I do not do. What a wretched man I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death” (Romans 7:24-25).
So, we yearn to be rescued. We yearn to be free from sin and never sin again. We want to be holy. This hungering and thirsting for righteousness feeds an ever-increasing hatred of our own sinfulness, a crying out against it, a yearning for heaven. And then that yearning, that desire feeds the fight in mortification, putting sin to death. We also yearn for the consummation of Christ’s kingdom. We yearn for the day when we will see redeemed people from every tribe, language, people and nation standing around the throne. We want, like Jesus did, all that the Father had given him in election to be with him where he was and to see his glory. We want that to happen. And we want to be involved in missions and evangelism. So, we hunger and thirst for the kingdom of God. We seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and we don’t care as much about physical material things.
That’s a godly desire. Now, how do we grow in our godly desires? Well, I think prayer is a big part of that. We should be stoking our desires white-hot through prayer. If we go to a place like Williamsburg and we see a blacksmith. And the blacksmith takes a piece of black cold iron and puts it in the coals, and then he gets this bellows going like, whew, whew, whew, like that, and there’s this big wind blowing on the coals. And the iron, the black iron’s in there, when he pulls it out, it’s not black anymore. It’s glowing. It’s red-hot. That’s what prayer does to Godly desires. You go into the prayer closet and your desire for the conversion of a lost person that you’re praying for increases. Your desire to be faithful to God in evangelism increases. Your desire to put sin to death increases.
how do we grow in our godly desires? Well, I think prayer is a big part of that. We should be stoking our desires white-hot through prayer.
Prayer stokes desires hot if it’s done properly. There are cold prayers, that’s true. But real prayer actually stokes up godly desires. We should yearn for it. Beyond that, we should have, I think, an overriding ambition in life, a desire that focuses our attentions. “What should I do with my life?” Ambition, if I ask you, “Is ambition good or is it bad?” You would not be able to answer. It’s like “Ambition for what?” Ambition, which is a life-consuming desire, is a good thing if it’s after a good thing, if after a godly thing. For example, Paul said, the apostle Paul said, “It’s always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not named so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation.” So, he had an ambition to be a frontier, trailblazing, church-planting apostle to the Gentiles. That’s what dominated his life.
You need to have a life calling, an ambition, which focuses your spiritual gifts, which focuses all of your attention in life. It is your drive. It’s what you want. It’s how you desire to spend the rest of your time in service to God. Your spiritual gifts are going to be a big part of that. We’ll talk about that, God willing, later. And so those are some aspects of godly desires. Let me sum up now what the godly seek. What should we be desiring in our lives? Well, we should seek God above all things. We should seek Jesus Christ whom he has sent. We should seek God’s glory. We should seek that his name and renown be spread to the ends of the earth. We should seek Christ’s kingdom and his righteousness. We should seek our own personal holiness. We should seek wisdom and understanding as the Book of Proverbs says many times. We should seek protection from the judgment day that is coming in Christ.
We should seek heaven and things above. We should set our minds on things above, not on earthly things. We should seek God’s word and hunger and thirst after God’s word. We should, in God’s word, seek God’s will. What is God’s will? What does he want us to do? We should seek the good of others, especially their eternal good. We should seek their conversion, but we should seek their temporal good as well as the good Samaritan did when he saw the man bleeding by the side of the road. We should seek and save the lost like Jesus did. We should seek to be at peace with all people as far as we can.
We should seek glory, honor, and immortality, Romans 2:7. In other words, we should seek our own glory, that we would be glorious in heaven. We should seek our own honor in that the Father will honor us for serving him, and we should seek immortality. Glory, honor and immortality are all things that he will give to us. Apparently, we should seek them in the biblical ways. These are things that should organize our lives. We should seek justice and relief for the oppressed and for the needy. Well, friends, we’ve had a chance to look at godly desires, and as we conclude today, I want you to go into your week knowing that God has gone ahead of you and will be using everything you experienced this week to sanctify you and bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.
