| I Quit Wanting |
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I. “I Need It!” They say the acorn does not fall far from the tree. In the case of our granddaughter, Naomi, that is certainly true. For some time now I have been telling stories about Naomi and the Thursdays we have spent together this past year. But today I want to tell you a story about her mother, our daughter, Rachel, when she was Naomi’s age. Cindi and her sister, Lisa, had taken little Rachel shopping. Somewhere along the way, in one of the aisles, she picked up a little stuffed animal. Rachel always had a soft spot for stuffed animals. Still does. But it was a while before Mom and Aunt discovered the toy; and when they told Rachel she would have to put it back, well, Rachel was quite upset. So rather than make a scene, they decided to let her hold the little creature until they finished shopping. Besides, neither of them knew where the stuffed toy had come from and Rachel wasn’t giving them any clues. So for the next twenty minutes Rachel was happy as a clam and the adults were thankful for the distraction. But eventually the deed had to be done. So while they were paying the bill, Rachel was required, in spite of her tears, to turn her new found friend over to the nice lady behind the register. Then, as quickly as they could, Mother and Aunt whisked crying Rachel out of the store. Unfortunately, the drama continued thru the parking lot, into the car and, like the wee little pig, all the way home. Rachel was beside herself with grief. At first Cindi tried to reason with her, reminding Rachel that she had many stuffed animals waiting for her at home. But Rachel would not be consoled. She just loved that little creature and kept insisting she needed it. I need it! She cried. I need it! By this time Mom was becoming frustrated. No, Rachel, you do not need it. You have other stuffed animals. This stuffed animal does not belong to you. You cannot keep it. There was a moment of silence in the back seat. Not complete silence, mind you but wailing did give way to whimpering as three year old Rachel tried to catch her breath and take her mommy’s words to heart. Then she made a statement we will never forget. Choking back the tears, she said to Cindi, But Mommy, didn’t you ever want something so bad you felt like you needed it?” Yes, Rachel, we have. How many times have you and I wanted so much we were convinced we needed it? We needed that person to like us, to admire us, to listen to us, to love us. How many times have we wanted a few more hours in the day or a few more dollars in the bank and we were sure we needed them? Do you know the difference between what you need and what you desire? Even more to the point, are you able to be happy, to be content, to not cry or pout or react with irritation when you don’t get what you want? Exodus Chapter Twenty, verse 17. Read. II. “Do Not Desire…” Have you ever noticed how strange this tenth commandment actually is? All the other commandments make obvious sense. No other gods; no idols; no misuse of God’s name. Don’t murder; don’t steal, don’t testify falsely, and don’t commit adultery. But…do not covet? To covet simply means to desire, to want, to set your heart on something. So when God lays the moral foundation for the Nation of Israel, when he speaks ten words of command from the midst of fire and lightning, thunder and smoke, when he engraves His will on tablets of stone, the last thing God says is, Do not want, do not desire, do not set your heart on your neighbor’s house, or his wife, or his servants or animal, anything, anything, that belongs to your neighbor. Really? Is that even possible? You’re struggling at home. Your husband is preoccupied with work. He doesn’t seem to understand you or even care to understand you. He doesn’t compliment you, he doesn’t appreciate you. It’s like pulling teeth to get him to help out at home. Then you go to church. You hear someone talk about how wonderful her husband was this week. You watch them walk down the hall, hand in hand. He opens the door for her. He smiles at her and his eyes obviously say, I love you. You say to yourself, “Oh, if only I could have her husband, or someone like him.” God says, don’t do that. Don’t say that, even to yourself. Don’t desire your neighbor’s husband. Or let’s say you make $30K a year, maybe a little more or a little less. Your children are young, still at home during the day. You and your wife have decided that she should stay home until the kids go to school; besides, even if she went to work, the difference between what she would make and the cost of child care isn’t enough to justify being away from the kids. As a result money is incredibly tight in your home. Maybe you can’t even afford to buy a home. So you’re renting a 2 bedroom apartment. Then you are invited over to a friend’s house for dinner. It is beautiful, four bedrooms, two stories, nice furniture, plenty of room, two late model cars are parked in the painted garage. You want it. Oh, how you want their house and their salary, and their situation. God says, don’t do that. Don’t let that desire grow in your heart. Don’t covet your neighbor’s house or car or salary. Anything he has. I could multiply the scenarios almost without number, couldn’t I? You see a guy with athletic ability or good looks or natural talent; you want it. The girl with the perfect boyfriend; you want him or someone just like him. The family with obedient children or maybe just the families with children, and you have been trying for years to have a child of your own. You want to be married, you want to be further along in your career, you want to be free from chronic pain, you want to be young again; you want, you want, you want. And so do I. Honestly, so do I. I think this is a strange command, stop wanting what you see next door. Quit coveting. Quit savoring in your heart the desire for what you see. It is a strange command, indeed, but a command nonetheless; and a surprisingly important one. For with this tenth and final command God shines a light into our heart of hearts. Most of the other commands, do not lie or steal or commit adultery, are about behaviors, about things that can be seen from the outside but this command, this one is different. This one is about the hidden attitudes of the heart. It is about something as invisible and elusive and irrepressible as desire. May I suggest that this command gave Jesus the interpretive key for his Sermon on the Mount? Because this was the command, I think, which showed Jesus that obeying God’s Law was a matter of the heart. Stealing begins with a desire to have what belongs to someone else. Committing adultery is acting upon the desire for someone else’s husband or wife. So the desire, Jesus said, is just as much a violation of the law, as the action which comes from the desire. To look at a woman lustfully is to commit adultery in your heart. To hate your brother or sister is akin to killing them. What Jesus shows us in the Sermon on the Mount is that the battle for our souls is waged in the valley of desire. Better to cut off your hand or gouge out your eye than lose the battle with desire. Not my words, Jesus’ words. Because Desire is the gateway through which sin and its destruction enters our lives It was when Eve saw, or thought she saw, that the forbidden fruit was pleasing to the eye and desirable, that she took it and ate it. It has been the same sad story ever since. To be tempted, wrote James the brother of Jesus, is to be lured away by our own desires. When these desires conceive, they give birth to sin; when sin is full grown it produces death, and everything that smells of death in our lives. So God says, do not covet, and do not even desire what belongs to another... III. This Dangerous Thing Called Desire But wait a minute, wait a minute, some one will say. Is it even possible to not desire what we see all around us? Denying our desires isn’t that like trying to push a balloon under water? It is certain to pop up somewhere. If we spend our lives trying to deny our desires won’t our inner world begin to feel like a losing game of psychological Whack-a-Mole? Aren’t some desires good, and others, inevitable? The answer is, yes, they are. Desire is a natural, even divinely created, dimension of every human life and desire can be a good thing, a very good thing. There is nothing wrong with the desire for food or shelter or love, for example. What negative thing can possibly be said about the desire for beauty, or truth, or the desire to be or do something good? Try to imagine life without desire, without passion, without attraction, without hunger. It’s not a good thing; it’s certainly not life the way God created it to be. So the problem is not desire per se. The problem is when we desire the wrong thing or the right thing, perhaps, for the wrong reasons or in the wrong ways. Fire is good, right? It is good when it is kept within bounds and directed in the right ways. When it burns in our fireplace, for example, and warms our house; or when it is contained in a lantern and lights our way but when fire is allowed to go wherever it will it becomes a dangerous thing. Outside the fireplace a fire can burn our house down. As with fire, so it is with our desires. The desire for food, hunger, is a truly wonderful thing. It moves us to eat and the satisfaction of hunger is one of the pleasures of life. But hunger directed to a diet of fast food and sugar can destroy our health. Hunger out of bounds is the sin of gluttony. It is addiction, enslavement to the desire for food. Sexual desire is a good thing, too, created by God for our pleasure and for the propagation of the human race but outside the bounds of the intimacy and security of marriage sexual desire can wound our souls and destroy our families. So God says, Watch out. The desire that leads to sin is a sinful desire. If you find yourself wanting something that is leading you to disobey God, and then stop it, turn from it, let it go. If you find yourself desiring something that belongs to your neighbor, repent and turn away because that desire will turn you against your neighbor and eventually lead you away from God. It will lead you to be jealous of your neighbor, or to despise your neighbor or to figure out a way to hurt your neighbor, to give false testimony in a court of law, to lie or gossip in the streets; to cheat or steal; maybe even, if the opportunity arises, commit adultery. So beware the desire that arises when you look at what your neighbor has. Be aware that any desire that leads to sin is sin. Be aware how much the world is seeking to stimulate those desires in your soul. IV. Beware the Drug Dealer Last week I compared the men and women of this world to mice on drugs. Research has shown that a very small dose of amphetamines, if administered to a group of mice in a cage, will kill them. It will kill them, not because the amphetamine is too much for their system, but because, when they are on the drug, they begin to hop around. They hype each other up so much that the hyperactivity kills them. Now imagine with me for a moment that you are the devil, the enemy of our souls. You want to destroy the men and women and children whom God loves. How might you do it? How about if you could get everyone moving so fast, keep them so busy, that they didn’t have any time for God? They were so busy that they forgot how to commune with Him, how to hear his voice in the rustle of the leaves, or see his face in the laughter of a child. Imagine if you could break the rhythm, the sacred rhythm that God Himself had woven into the fabric of creation, the rhythm of stopping and turning to Him one whole day in seven. Pretty clever plan, don’t you think? What is it that keeps us from spending a full day every week enjoying each other and our God? What keeps us from turning to God morning, noon and night and hearing His voice as He speaks to us in sacred scripture and the book of nature? What keeps us from doing what God has clearly commanded and what He has promised will restore our souls? Could it possibly be a drug called desire? We see our neighbor’s house and his fine furniture and his new cars and we want them. So we buy them on time, because we can, and because everyone else is doing it. Only, to pay for them, we have to work all the time. We have to find a job that pays enough money, no matter what it requires of us in terms of time and stress. Both husband and wife have to work to pay for this desired life style. It’s tough enough to just keep up with the chores and the children and each other. Who has time to pray and ponder God’s good world? Who has time to teach our children the word and ways of God, when we don’t even sit down together at the table and eat? Maybe it is not the house and the cars and the vacations that keep us going round and round like mice on drugs or gerbils in a cage. Maybe it’s just all the activities the world offers. We look around and see our neighbor’s children on the traveling soccer teams, or in the award winning marching bands, or in the youth choir or the symphony, or maybe all of them, and we don’t want our children to miss out. So we allow them to join or encourage them to join. Oh, my goodness. We had no idea that participating in the marching band would require that many hours a week, that much traveling, that many concerts. It’s only one of the things they do! With three kids going every which way all week long, we can hardly catch our breath, let alone find time to center our lives on God. But the question is: if living the life we see around us leaves no time for the rhythm of Sabbath rest, can it possibly be good? Or have we allowed our desire to be and do what our neighbors are being and doing to lead us beyond the bounds of what God calls us to be and do? Have we let the world around us, the world living off the drug of desire, to cause us to hop around in such a hurry that it may cost our children their spiritual lives? There’s more. Trying to keep up with the Jones’ may not only be robbing us of time with God; it may also be putting us deeper and deeper in debt. We see what other people have, what everybody seems to have; and we want it. So we buy it on credit. But we can’t keep up. We fall further and further behind. The pressure builds. Worry and fatigue set in. We fight with each other. We have allowed our desire to have what we see cause us to disobey God, who has warned us against debt and commanded us to tithe. We are suffering. Should I go on? One more example, if there is one desire this world of ours is constantly seeking to cultivate, besides the desire for more and more of what we have enough of already, it is the desire for sexual satisfaction. You can’t go to the mall without seeing scantly clad women on posters bigger than life. You can’t go the grocery store, without being assaulted in the check out line with sexy men and women wearing too few clothes. You can’t go to the movies, you can’t turn on the TV, you can’t watch music videos, you cannot look at the advertising magazines the department stores send to your home without seeing men and women wearing things that are meant to attract attention to their sexuality and appeal to our sexual desires. Yet Jesus said, if you even look at a woman lustfully, with sexual desire, you have committed adultery in your heart. I am sure that goes for women as well as men. As Mephistopheles once so proudly proclaimed, the devil has us by the throat and we don’t even know he is there. It is not a good thing, ladies, to allow the world’s fashion industry to cause you to wear clothes that are designed to arouse sexual interest and desire. If you do not know what those clothes are, ask your husband or your father. Men, if they ask, tell them the truth. It is not a good thing, parents, to let your children wear clothes that stimulate sexual desire especially among over stimulated teenagers and young adults. Why should we be surprised that more than 50% of Christian young people are sexually active when we allow the world to teach us how to dress and when we ingest a regular diet of sensual movies, TV and video? Be careful little eyes what you see. Be careful little hearts what you desire. For our father up above is telling us in love, be careful little souls what you want. Mommy, haven’t you ever wanted something so badly you felt like you needed it? Yes, honey, we have. But we have learned that you do not need everything you want and you shouldn’t want everything you see. What you need, and what you should learn to want, is what God wants for you and what God chooses, in His wisdom and love to give you. By the way, you might consider fasting from TV or videos or radio, or going to the mall for a season. If you do, I think you will be amazed how much time you have for God and each other. |
