Although we cannot change our hearts’ desires on our own, in prayer we can take several steps to facilitate that change. First, we can feel the force of whatever desires we presently have, realizing that the root of them all is a longing for God. Second, we can focus on God’s promise to satisfy this primitive aching of our soul with the gift of the Holy Spirit. Finally, we can mentally prepare to go into our day with the goal of unceasing prayer so that we may be filled continuously.
1. Feel the Desire
One of the first moves in overcoming our resistance to loving like Christ is to bring our unrefined desires to God. In the safety of our place of prayer we may stand back and look at what is driving us. Often we do not take time to examine our hearts, but rush along through life carried by various compulsions, needs, passions, or ambitions. In prayer we can seize the initiative by identifying these inner motivators. By doing so, we position ourselves to decide which of them to pursue.
Our time together with God becomes the workshop where we allow him to take apart our hearts and refashion our desires. His word penetrates to our inner core, searching out the motives and desires of our heart—but we must let it. Sometimes Christians expect God to change them without doing anything themselves. Although minor, our part is not insignificant. The Bible speaks in picturesque language about this needed cooperation between God and us. “The human spirit is the lamp of the LORD, searching every inmost part” (Prov. 20:27). We rein in our thoughts from the many places they would travel and turn them to the inner recesses of our soul. There, we become a flashlight in God’s hand as we wait silently to sense the desires and feelings which normally enter our consciousness dimly, if at all. Spiritual transformation in Christ means confronting the truth about ourselves in the light of his presence and this entails honestly facing all our inner yearnings and impulses.
The Root Desire
Every individual possesses a mixture of desires. We want God and we want a lovely home, a good career, children, or any number of things. We have wrong desires in the mix too, but they all stem from the same root—primitive longing for God. The basic human condition is not one of self-sufficiency, but of need which powerfully yearns to be fulfilled. God created us this way. We are reminded of our physical need every moment that we live as our chests rise and fall with the life-giving oxygen we crave. Other physical needs cause us to desire water, food, sleep, and shelter. We were made with needs to be intimate and to procreate so we want sexual satisfaction. God built into us the need for love and companionship and thus the desire for family and friends. He created us with the need and desire for security, significance, and esteem.
Need saturates virtually everything about us and our physical, emotional, and social dependence mirrors the state of the human soul which, at its centre, possesses raw desire for God. Man does not live by bread alone. He also requires a life-sustaining relationship with the Heavenly Father (Matt. 4:4). If we find ourselves lacking desire or a sense of need, we are out of touch with both God and our true nature. Self-sufficiency is the ultimate deception. “You shall be as God,” the serpent whispered to Eve in the garden. No matter how much it hurts our pride to admit it, each of us is a sinkhole of need which craves satisfaction.
Continually tempted to forget God, we project our heart’s primal yearning onto substitutes, everything from fine dining to volume sales to movie stars. However, when our desires become disconnected from the root like severed branches, hope for their fulfillment withers and dies. For example, when we try to satisfy our desire for God’s love with love from another human being, disappointment inevitably ensues. We cling to someone in a desperate attempt to fill the void only God himself can fill. The result is a pathetic state of chronic unfulfilled need, the stuff of co-dependency.
Start Where You Are
Sometimes we think we must obliterate all other desires and somehow progress to a state of wanting nothing but God. However, things do not normally work that way. We cannot just cut the principle of desire out of our lives nor instantly do away with the lusts we seek to overcome. Walter Hilton states that, “Prayer is nothing else but an ascending or getting up of the desire of the heart into God by withdrawing it from earthly thoughts.” To get the longings of our heart “up into” God, we must start where we are. We do that by allowing ourselves to feel our inner life and bring whatever desires we find into the light. If the desire for companionship overwhelms us, we acknowledge that to God. If we are dominated by a longing to climb the corporate ladder or get the lead part in the play, we present this to God. If the overeating/dieting cycle ensnares us, we try to feel the force of this obsession, conscious that we are in his presence. As in deep massage where the masseuse gets below the surface muscles to those supporting them underneath, so in the stillness of prayer we seek to get below the desire for status, pleasure, or goods to our root need for God. As Goethe says, all human longing is really longing for God.
When we understand God does not want to condemn us nor annihilate our deepest passion, but rather fulfill it, we have courage to lay ourselves open honestly. In addition to sharing our wholesome wants with him, we may freely open the secret places where deep, hidden things lie—raw cravings, inappropriate sexual desires, fantasies of greatness, lust for money and power. We let all our hopes, needs, or lusts rise from our depths like water pumped up from a deep well. They originate ultimately in God though some may be so distorted we can hardly recognize their connection to him. Revenge, for example, though clearly not of God, is a misguided desire for justice. Longing for the world’s praise is quintessentially the God-given desire for glory. Wanting to simply feel good, the basis of so many sinful activities, is the desire for joy which God longs to fulfill in a healthy way. Vanity may be a warped desire for beauty, and greed, a twisted longing for security. Bringing our desires into prayer means bringing in this primordial force, whatever disfigured shape it has taken.
When we take the time to feel what is going on in our hearts, we may find emotions other than desire. Often what we experience feels nothing like desire (which has a somewhat pleasant connotation). However, the negative feelings we encounter likely do relate to it. For example, anger, resentment, and sorrow are often caused by longings that have gone unfulfilled. The young man seethes with anger because the love and security he felt when twelve years of age were wrenched from him by a father who abruptly abandoned the family. Now, he takes out on others the overpowering pain of losing what he longs for deep inside. Fear is an emotion associated with thinking about the future loss of something we cherish, perhaps our spouse, child, home, or job. The deep-seated fear of rejection is the flipside of desire for acceptance in a loving community. Then too, we may feel the primal fear of losing what we most desire— life itself, that is the fear of death. Sometimes we find our inner state is one of numbness related to a graveyard of long-dead desires. We may discover the feeling of inner suffering caused from the anguish of unfulfilled desire. Though past disappointments or fears for the future can cause us to erect barriers to protect us from being let down, in prayer we may allow ourselves to feel once more.
A word of caution may be appropriate here concerning the trap of excessive introspection. We do not need to understand what we feel or become amateur psychologists who figure out the causes of all our emotions and desires. We must simply encounter them, face them honestly and bring them into God’s presence.
Permitting ourselves to sense our hearts’ desires takes the first step in a process whereby we hope to recognize this fundamental aching for God from which all other desires flow. Because of our overwhelming need, we will inevitably feel this primitive throbbing at our core if we take the time to quiet ourselves.
excerpted from WHISPERS THAT DELIGHT:Building A Listening-Centered Prayer Life
Copyright © 2008 Andrew T. Hawkins
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