Far To Easily Pleased

What is the purpose of desire? Is it put in us by the Creator or is it something that is born of our self-centered focus? Through it, do we honor God? Or through it, do we spit in His face? C.S. Lewis writes, in The Weight of Glory, "Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinate joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased."

My heart resounds with that message. Yes! We are far too easily pleased. Yes! We spend our energy and time either pursuing or trying our hardest to abstain from drink, sex, ambition, and all that is considered "worldly". Whether it is in the pursuit or refrain from such things, it is so half-hearted! Why do those who don't know God point their fingers and shake their heads at followers of Jesus? It is because we have so often missed the mark of what it means to live Christ and have become adept and checking off a list of do's and don't. Is that what being a follower of Christ has come to? Is it a list? There has to be more. My entire being aches for there to be more!

If my desire is something I try to suppress, than I am missing the purpose of what God hopes for me, what He has planned for me. We were made for desire. We were made to be more than half-hearted beings. We were made to live a life of passion and desire and reckless abandon. God created that ability within us because He knew that it was only in the act of handing that desire back to Him that we would be overcome by Him. Elizabeth Elliot writes, in her book Passion and Purity that it is not in the erradication of our desires that we will find a life pleasing to God, but it is in the submission of our desires to God. "How would we learn to submit to the authority of Christ," she asks, "if we have nothing to submit?" In our true desire, our desire for the One who created within us the ability to burn with desire, we find true fulfilment. It is in pouring our all into that--into Jesus Christ--that we will find a purpose.

The catch is that often our half-hearted desires are for silly things that have no lasting value. We throw ourselves into whims because they give us a moment's pleasure. And we don't see that over the horizon life is so much more full! What is the object of our desire? WHO is the object of our desire? "Whom have I in heaven but you? Earth has nothing I desire apart from you!" (Psalm 73:25) Each and every desire we have apart from God is just a shadow of what true fulfillment can be. We are so often like the church in Laodicia whom God speaks to in Revelation 3:14-22. We are neither hot nor cold, we have no passion and our desires are lukewarm. We go about our days doing this and not doing that, making and spending money, trying to keep an even keel. And our God says, "Is this what I came for? Don't you thirst for more, deep down? Are you fulfilled by stuff or by checklists or by looking like you have things together?"

I for one will shout loudly, "No!" I for one will stand up and say that my desires are so often too weak. I am far too easily pleased. But the thing is, I am not even really pleased because I know that this is not what Christ came for. This is not what I was created for. Yet somehow I have lost sight that my God has created me to be passionate, desirous of Him, a woman of lived-out faith! It stirs something deep within my soul that has been sleeping. Awake, my soul! Stop sleep-walking through your life! If and when there are true desires that tear at the soul, let us pour those desires out as a fragrant offering before our God and see what He will do. He is a God who longs to do more than give us temporal pleasures. He is a God who longs to bring us to a place where we trust Him enough with the most difficult things in our lives to say, "Yes God, I even give you this." It is there that He will meet us every time.