The Desires Battle

The Desires Battle

“What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God.”
James 4:1-2

For the past few days, God has been speaking to me about the effect of desires. I am not quarreling with anyone, but God called me to check my desires and to examine any desires battle in my mind. In today’s Scriptures, James is saying that fights and quarrels are the result of the desires that battle inside of us. Inside of our minds, desires are fighting for their position. Desires live inside of us. God created us with a soul and gave us desires. We can desire many good things. However, we can twist a “good” thing into a harmful desire.

We can desire a husband, a home or for a bigger home, children or for the ones we have to grow up to be “good,” money for the lifestyle we want, “better” job, “more” ministry, and the list could go on and on. None of these things are necessarily wrong. God created us to accomplish, achieve, and strive toward goals. It is when these desires get out of order, when they get excessive or disproportionate to what our truest desire should be - God,- then we see this disorder breeds fights and quarrels. We fight, quarrel, kill, and covet because we can’t have what we want.

Fighting can be just that - fighting with words, punch to a punching bag, or a fist to the table. It can take the form of rudeness, bickering, irritableness, or unkindness. The battle within has a way of leaking out past our masks. Somehow, our faces will reflect the battle within. Either they don’t bear true joy, or they bear our struggle in the form of scowls, clenched teeth, or a tightened brow.

I believe that many people – even believers – covet a lot more than they realize. Coveting is one of the biggest sins in our time. Think about how we are constantly being bombarded by advertising. If advertising did not make us desire to buy the products, then it wouldn’t be working. Instead, advertising is a billion dollar business. Even if we don’t purchase the products, advertising drives our culture and shapes our minds more than we realize. Marketing occurs in such clever ways that we are drawn to it. Before we realize it, we covet. Television shows, magazines, internet stories, and many other forms of media shape our culture, lure us, and we fall prey to coveting. We compare our lives and our possessions to others’. We covet careers, husbands, kids, friendships, personality, ministry, beauty, talents, God-experiences, and on and on. Then, it feeds the battle within. Our desires shift and are twisted.

While many of us may not be committing murder of another person, how many marriages and friendships do we see ending? Marriages end in divorce sometimes because wives set expectations too high for their husbands to meet their every need, replacing God for him (and vice versa for men to do it, too). Additionally, wives can wish their men were more loving, more godly, or a more Christ-like father. They try to shape them into what they want them to be instead of letting the Holy Spirit do His job. They get frustrated because they don’t have the power to change them. It drives a wedge between them. Gosh, Have I lived this one! We can also kill friendships. Or we go into debt and make ourselves slaves to it. We can figuratively kill our relationships or our financial freedom.

When our desires are misshaped, then we have trouble resisting sin. James 1:14 says, “but each one it tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.” The evil one tempts us by our own evil desire. The desires within us lure us into being hunted, baited, and dragged away into his lair (according to the Greek words in this Scripture).

God’s Word tells us in Psalm 37:4, “Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.” In other words, when we make God our truest desire and we make Him our God with no other gods before Him, then our desires are rearranged in the proper order. He is released to give us the desires of our hearts. Our desires grow by what we feed them. If we feed our desires our relationship with God, then our desires grow more godly. However, without an intake of perfect truth, we struggle to know what the bottom line is and don’t see things – our lives, problems, information, messages from the world – properly. Then disorder of our desires is prevalent. The battle within rages.

Beloved, I invite you to ask God to show you this year what are your deepest desires? Ask the Holy Spirit to search your heart and do a desires check. May we be able to say that in 2009 we know that our desires are in the proper order and positioned so that God can give us the desires of our heart.

Pray with me: Oh, Lord, our God, we love You, and we adore You. Search our minds and our hearts. Reveal to us our desires. There may be areas where we are weak, and it may be difficult for us to give up our desires. However, we cry out to You to help us to rid ourselves of harmful desires, to untwist a desire out of shape, and to make our desires pleasing to You. It’s in Jesus’ precious name that we pray. Amen.

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