For those who may prefer to read rather than listen, the transcript of the message is below the video. It is our prayer that you are blessed by what you hear or read.
A Decision Driven Life
Those of us who are Christians all had at least one time before we surrendered to God and accepted Christ as our savior where we found ourselves desiring relationship with God, to be saved. The motivations for the desire vary. For some of us who heard more about the great love God has for us, the motivation may have been to get closer to that love and to experience and know it more. Those who heard more about the effects of sin and the judgment that comes as a result of our sin may be motivated more by fear and the idea that eternity in heaven sounds a lot better than eternity in hell. The motivation may have even been less spiritual. There are times we come to God for reasons that we are less comfortable with later, such as to fit in, to belong and be accepted by others, or to please our parents. There are other possibilities as well. But the motivation doesn’t really matter.
Surrendering to God and living a spiritual life in relationship with Him is like wearing a seatbelt. We can put our seatbelt on out of fear, fear of injury and death, fear of getting a ticket. We might buckle up to make those we love happy. I must admit I wear my seatbelt more because it makes Leah feel better. We can strap ourselves in because we believe it’s the right thing to do or because it just makes sense. But our motivation for wearing a seatbelt is far less important than the decision that is born from the desire that motivation is tied to. What really matters is when we have that wreck, when life happens, were we wearing the seatbelt or not. And when life happens, it’s less important why we first came to God than it is that we have learned to run to Him rather than away from Him. So whatever our motivation, that desire for salvation led to a decision, a decision to follow Jesus, to surrender our lives and will to God’s care, will and plan.
Our desires grow or diminish and evolve as we go through life, and our spiritual desires are no exception. What may have started as a desire to escape hell develops into a desire for a richer, deeper, more satisfying relationship with our Creator. Out of that desire can come the decision to develop a more substantial and effective prayer life, to study God’s word to get to know Him better, etc. But our desires can also take us to places outside of God’s will for us, lead us away from deeper relationship, inspire new decisions that are contrary to the decision we made to follow Christ, especially in areas where we are or used to be in bondage. Our desires get messed up due to sin. We often experience a type of spiritual Stockholm syndrome.
Addiction to drugs and alcohol led to decisions in my life that were devastating to me and those around me. I came to the place where I realized that I had to get cleaned up, locked up again or covered up by the grave. It’s not a fun place to be, and the desperation of that darkness and hopelessness in my life gave me the desire to do what I needed to do to give up control and let Him set me free from the bondage that experience told me I could not beat on my own.
Early in my recovery though, this caused a confusing conflict. Part of me still wanted to drink and use, despite the danger and the full understanding of the devastation it would cause. Even though part of me wanted relationship with God and to surrender to His will for my life, another part of me wanted to do my will, and my will was distorted. My desire for a drink or drug would build until it was stronger than my desire to do anything else, despite the consequences.
Psychology would tell those of us struggling with destructive bondage, such as drugs and alcohol, compulsive spending, sexual addictions, whatever, that we need to understand the motivations behind the desire. That we need to find other, more safe and healthy ways to meet the needs in our lives and to avoid people, places and things that trigger those harmful desires that lead to horrible decisions like voluntarily going back to our captor’s embrace. But I propose that we already did all that was necessary in that regard when we realized that we were powerless over whatever had us in bondage, and that the only hope for us is found in a loving God who has and can supply us with the power to overcome that enemy. We made a new decision based on desires to be free, a decision to surrender and do what God wants us to do.
Then the old desires woke up. We want the old bondage, maybe we don’t want all the pain and trouble it caused, but we want something tied to it. Like the Israelites desired to return to slavery in Egypt when life became uncomfortable in the desert of freedom, we actually desire to leave the road to deliverance God has lead us to and return to the life we had before. This causes questions like, “How can I pray for God to help me overcome this obsession, this desire, to engage in my area of bondage when I don’t want Him to save me, when I want to go do that thing?” “What right do I have to ask for help from God to do His will, when my will is not to do His will but to do my own?” The answer to those questions and others like them is in that first decision we made to accept Jesus and surrender to Him. That decision made us children of God, and being a child of God is what gives us the right to ask for help when we don’t want it, to ask God to fight for us when we want to surrender to the enemy.
There are times in our lives when we have to live by decision rather than desire. It’s not easy, or fun, and we can’t do it on our own strength. It feels like every part of me wants to dive into, or perhaps the illusion of control makes me ease into, these ungodly things that have ruled my life so mercilessly. I lie to myself and propose compromises that the past make clear will not work. I have seen those whose DWI issues have led them to recovery from alcohol go back to drinking after the desire to drink became so strong that they convinced themselves it would be ok as long as they only drank at home and therefore wouldn’t need to drive drunk. It may even work for a while. But sooner or later that slave boss takes the little control we give back and runs with it, making all our promises to control and not let things go to the danger zone about as effective as blowing on dice before taking our gamble. I’ve seen men struggling with sexual desires actually try to save their families and relationships from what those desires might lead to, by turning to porn as a compromise. Soon they realize that they only added to their bondage and in addition to gaining a new merciless master also find that by feeding that area they eventually still did the very things that they were hoping to avoid in the first place.
Not everything we think and feel is real or true. And not everything we desire is what we really want. What we want deep down is often much more silent than our selfish desires that live closer to the surface. The voice of desire that held us in bondage is so often much easier to hear and to feel that we must obey, sooner or later, than the still small voice that brings freedom. Then we try to fight the desire. We are fighting ourselves. We try to tell ourselves that we don’t want to do what we want to do, and therefore, we are lying to ourselves which robs us of our will to fight. We’re going to lose sooner or later, and the desire is actually beginning to cause us to hurt and ache for whatever we are trying not to return to. We feel like failures, or worse, like deserters. We made a commitment and now we want to abandon it, to return to our sickness, even though we know we’ll feel horrible and guilty afterwards if we do. And that’s if we’re lucky and we can get back to where we need to be before our slave boss drives us to destruction.
The key is not in learning how to fight our old desires or how to replace our old desires with new and better ones, but in remembering our decision. We don’t have to be led by our desires. Our lives can be decision driven. This is not natural, but it is better. It means we stop and evaluate our options based on the decisions we have made rather than following wherever our desires, which change moment to moment, take us. Our will, our desire resurfaces to do that old thing, whatever that old thing is. We can’t fight it. The act of fighting it keeps our focus on the bondage and lessens our chances of victory. Sooner or later we will fail. We might as well go ahead and get it over with so that we don’t have to keep feeling twisted inside because of the desire. Then we get to feel twisted inside over our failure and our weakness and how incapable we are of walking with God.
Or we can acknowledge that we want to do the wrong thing. We want to. We really really want to. But we remember the decision, and because of the decision we can pray something like, “Father, I don’t want to do what’s right right now, I don’t want to surrender to Your will over this, I want to do what I’ve always done or learned to do when I feel like this. But I remember my decision to turn my will and my life over to You, and that includes my desires. I can’t fight this. I don’t want to fight this. And right now I don’t even want to honor my decision, but I won’t turn back, I won’t welch on our agreement. I am making a decision to stay on the path of my earlier decision. But that means that You’ll have to do something here, because I can’t do this on my own now any more than I could before. I need You to give me the grace and power to stay true to the decision I made to let You free me from this bondage. Help me not to do what I want to do, help me not to be governed by my desires. Help me to do Your will in this matter at this time.”
Changing the desire is less important than changing our reaction to the desire. Instead of making the desire based decision to return to our own private Egypt, we can let the desire drive us to our provider and deliverer and to make the decisions birthed from that desire be decisions to stay faithful to the first decision we made for God. Doing this gives God the opening to remove the obsession of our mind, our desires, in our areas of bondage, and in time, we can walk unshackled and free filled with awe that we ever listened to the lies our former masters tried to feed us in the guise of desire.
