M2-S5: ATTENDING TO WHAT DRIVES US
SUMMARY
- Every habit is doing one of three things: inhibiting our pursuit of the Kingdom, fueling that pursuit, or it’s neutral.
- Very, very few habits are neutral (especially habits of mind).
- We tell ourselves all the time that most of our habits are neutral.
- Purging old habits of mind is necessary—but it might make the problem worse if we don’t fill the space with the right things.
- Because our habits help determine our destiny, they are a key battleground in spiritual warfare.
- Habits (good and bad) form out of what we desire.
- We are not primarily thinking things but desiring (wanting) things.
- Our desires are “little kingdoms” that we must yield to God for their transformation.
- Knowing the desires that drive us is the first step toward cultivating a desire for God and his kingdom.
PRACTICE: WHAT IS DRIVING ME?
- Set aside 20 minutes or so for this exercise.
- Begin in prayer, asking God to reveal your desires so that you can offer them back to him.
- Remind yourself that you are approaching the throne of grace and that God loves you and is at work for your restoration.
- Think through what is driving you in the last few weeks. What do you really want?
- What do your habits reveal about what desires have been driving you?
- Thank God for his presence deep within and his ability to transform.
- Ask him to lead you toward cultivating a desire for him and his kingdom.
SCRIPTURE FOCUS
Luke 11:14-26
- A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.
- After clearing the house, what fills it back up matters.
HABITS AND SPIRITUAL WARFARE
We’ve been talking about distractions. Distractions from outside of us which are not limited to, but which have distilled–in our culture and throughout the world–around, screen technology. It is useful technology; the more useful the more insidious. Then last week we talked about distractions from inside of us: our “habits of mind”.
In all this we have distilled a sort of very specific definition of what we mean by a distraction: A distraction is anything which diverts our attention from, or inhibits our pursuit of, the Good Life of the Kingdom of God.
Every habit in our lives is doing one of three things:
- It is inhibiting our pursuit of the Good Life of the Kingdom.
- It is fueling our pursuit of the Good Life of the Kingdom.
And, in very rare instances and usually only in the case of the simplest life-tasks…
- It is neither inhibiting nor fueling.
- There are very, very few habits which we are conscious of about which we can make this claim. But…
- There are far too many habits which inhibit our pursuit over which we rationalize by claiming they are this third sort.
On the one hand, we have been talking about purging habits (which inhibit us from our pursuit of the Good Life of the Kingdom). And tonight we begin the discussion of cultivating habits (which fuel our pursuit of the Good Life of the Kingdom).
And right smack dab in the middle of that discussion we are plopping a Scripture that discusses spiritual warfare. And not just any Scripture. But one which directly discusses an evil spirit being purged from the mind and heart of a person. One which further describes the condition of the person’s mind and heart when nothing useful and good and fruitful is added to the person’s mind and heart to replace the evil presence.
In our culture it’s audacious to equate the importance of what we are talking about to the direct influence of spiritual beings in our lives–evil and good.
And with good reason, because that is what is happening!
Let me put it another way. Why do you think all these stories of spiritual warfare are in the gospels? How about because they directly relate to something happening in our lives?
We in first-world western culture don’t take the notion of demon possession all that seriously. And we tend to look down on those in second-world and third-world environments who still do take such things seriously as backward and anachronistic.
So we don’t naturally and intuitively make the connection between the habits of body and mind which distract us (AKA the stuff we have been talking about) and the direct and aggressive work of enemy spirits hell-bent (literally, not a pun) on thwarting our pursuit of the Good Life of the Kingdom. In short, we don’t see our lives and our inner life as a battleground–much-less the battleground–of spiritual war.
So yes. We are daring to suggest that “a house swept clean” of practices and habits of mind which distract us from our pursuit of the Good Life of the Kingdom of God is a dangerous place if those practices and habits of mind are not replaced with practices and habits of mind which fuel our desire for and set us in pursuit of the Good Life of the Kingdom of God.
OUR HABITS ARE THE BATTLEFIELD
What we see in the church in America that concerns us is a lack of focus on this area. The focus is on “getting people into church.” We hope that by sitting them down in front of a sermon or a worship song or a small group video or book that we can entice them away from all the compelling offerings the world is tempting them with. The world–the forces of evil–are piggybacked on to highly sophisticated tools which we use for entertainment and communication and electronic socializing like Netflix and Twitter and InstaGram and Facebook and Tiktok et cetera, et cetera. Which the church cannot compete with and shouldn’t try. The church doesn’t have the world’s budget or reach.
What the church has is Jesus. The question of whether Jesus is compelling to our neighbors and our cities and wider culture is a question for another day.
The question for us is this: is Jesus compelling to us? Do we want Jesus? Do we desire Jesus and his kingdom?
A quick story as we transition into a discussion of practices. Right around thirty years ago I was at Grad Student Care Group in the home of professor Ron Highfield. We weren’t doing what we usually did. We were just singing for a while and then we were going to have dinner. And we had just finished singing Psalm 42, “As the deer pants before the water so my soul longs after you….” And I said, “I cannot relate to this psalm or this song. I really wish I could, but I can’t. I don’t think I will ever truly be able to say that I long for God like a deer pants for water.” To which Ron Highfield, Systematic Theologian, replied, “maybe you’re closer than you think. Because every longing is a longing for God….” He was going to go on. But before allowing him to continue I said, “Stop right there. Give me a minute. I think you just got me through my mid-life crisis that I might have in 20-30 years.”
Ron went on to suggest–and I have since then always believed–that at the source of every desire of fallen humanity is a desire for something pure, something good, something Kingdom of God.
That notion that “every longing is a longing for God” is the segue to the first part of the practice of adding habits which fuel our pursuit of the Good Life of the Kingdom.
THE LINK BETWEEN HABITS AND DESIRE
So what do you think of that last whopper we just dropped? That at root, every desire is a desire for God and his kingdom. In what ways does it seem like it’s true? In what ways not?
Okay, why are we suddenly talking about desire?
Because habits (good and bad) form out of what we desire. They are the mental and physical embodiment of what we desire, grooves created by the activities our desires bring about.
We are not primarily thinking things, we are desiring things. We are creatures that want things. We become what we want.
This is why putting a surgeon general’s warning on a pack of cigarettes gets you nowhere—our minds know that smoking is bad for us. But we don’t care—we want to smoke anyway.
Desire drives us, embedding themselves in the core of our habits and moving us inexorably toward certain destinies. Just as Wilson said, our souls are a battlefield, contested territory. Competing desires are pushing and pulling us all the time.
Desire is a powerful force that runs like a deep undertone across our whole lives. Everything we do is driven by desire. From the so-called base desires for food, safety, and sex, to the so-called higher desires for beauty, recognition, friendship, and love, desire is the fuel that propels us from one action to the next, across the hours, days, and years of our lives. We may think and reflect on what drives us, or we may not—but in either case, desire drives us.
And the heart, where desire originates, is what Jesus cared the most about. Out of this cauldron, said Jesus, comes every thought and deed (Matthew 15). We see the fruit of this in the world all around us.
Most these days seem to think of Christianity as repressing or restraining desire. This is commonly seen as a bad thing, though anyone with a moment’s reflection can see that some desires must be restrained or transformed, and others should be cultivated and multiplied if we are to live with one another at all.
That’s kind of a weird thing to say, since our cultural moment is trying to tell us that our unbridled desires are the truest part of us. That whatever wells up from the unknown depths of our being must be brought out into the light, advertised on our social media profiles, and celebrated publicly. We are never to question our desires or that somehow makes us inauthentic.
But here’s what we are daring to suggest: that our desires need to be examined in the light of God’s love for us. Some of them we’ll find are well-ordered—our strong desire for justice we might never have connected with God’s love for us, but as we invite Jesus in to the deepest part of ourselves, we discover that justice is his heartbeat too. We might find that our desire to make things with our hands resonates with God’s infinite creative capacities and his desire for a creation that teems with beauty and wonder.
Or we might find that certain desires we have are disordered: the alcoholic desires freedom from pain, a comfortable escape from the insurmountable difficulties in his life. Disordered, maybe, but a desire for freedom from pain can also lead back into the channels of God’s grace. Behind the desire for alcohol is a desire for a savior, and that desire can put us on a very good path indeed.
WANTING TO WANT GOD AND HIS KINGDOM
What we’re trying to say is that our desires are one more little kingdom that must be yielded to the reign of God, for him to do with as he pleases—because what pleases him is our healing and restoration.
And we’re also saying that our desires can be trained through spiritual formation, by cultivating over time a growing desire for God and his kingdom. Not necessarily easy, but possible because it is Jesus that is at work in the deep places of our hearts. And as we cooperate with that work, we are transformed along with our deepest desires.
So the question for us at this phase of the Regnare Project is the one that Wilson posed: is Jesus compelling to us? Said another way, do we desire Jesus and the life he is offering?
We may think we have an answer to this, but I’m wondering how far down in our hearts that answer goes. Do we really desire the “life to the full” that God is offering? This is really at the crux of what the Regnare Project is all about.
Because when our desire for Jesus and his kingdom is strong, this makes habit formation (and habit re-formation) much easier—because remember, we become what we want.
The good news is, if you are like young Wilson some years ago, and you don’t pant as the deer pants, if tonight your soul isn’t longing after God like you wish it would, you’re in good company. As we’ve said before, sometimes we want what God is offering, and sometimes we want to want what God is offering. If that’s you tonight, we have good news for you. God can do a lot with “wanting to want” what he has for us. We can influence our desires. In fact, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can cultivate desire for God in his kingdom that is more transformative than almost anything else we can do in the realm of spiritual formation.
