God is pro-desires
I'm currently reading John Ortberg's 'The Me I Want To Be,' and part of Ch.7 discusses this subject of desires. Some highlights:
God is a desire-creating, desire-satisfying God.
God doesn't plant wrong desires.
It's God's delight to fulfill the desires He's created in his creation.
Every time we experience an authentic desire (from God) we come to understand more deeply what a good God he is ... we find ourselves loving this great God more and more.
I think Ortberg nails it (& you can read further by picking up a copy of his book). When we try to be "good little Christians," the trap is to suddenly think desire is wrong or bad or - worse - a sin. Hear me out: there are wrong desires that can cause us to sin, but placing every desire on that altar - come on? Where does that idea come from?
Certainly not the Bible: Abraham desired a son, David desired God's heart, Jesus desired to show people the Way, the disciples desired Jesus to stay & Paul desired a lesser life because he saw the promise of eternal life.
Definitely not God: He had a desire to create a world & place humanity in it, a desire to spend time with Adam & Eve in the garden, a desire to lead Israel toward a promise land, a desire to rescue us from eternal life so that we could fulfill his other desire to spend eternity with him.
When we're focused on building a relationship with God, our desires become his desires. We naturally move toward good desires because we are doing & being what we were created for. Ortberg calls it "in the flow."
And God doesn't just desire a relationship with us, he simply desires us. That's called "in love."
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