The devil is crafty. He is not a creator.
I’m almost afraid to mention this, it feels like a dangerous truth to utter, but I think that all of my sin is a perversion of the God-given longings embedded in me. I long to be included as part of a community. I long to be heard and valued as a creature of purpose. I long to be loved, to be cared for and adored, and to love in return. These are beautiful longings. Longings that point to the gospel. Kingdom-filled longings. These longings are the seeds of a fruitful life, they are the shadows of the imago dei implanted within me.
All of my sin is a perversion of these longings. Sin is when these wonderful desires are taken, repackage in a worldview I can comprehend and believe that I can control, and pursued via avenues that are at war with them rather than at home.
As I evaluate sin in my life, I too often curse my desires. The truth is, I am not acknowledging my desires on a deep enough level. I don’t really want to be famous so that everyone knows my name. I want to be famous because I want to be a part of something that matters. The sin is in my perversion, not in the natural desire. The longings of the flesh are the longings of the spirit made crooked. I want sex because I can’t understand love. I want money because I can’t comprehend worth and I want to accept easy measures of value. I want to abuse substances because I want to feel in control, I want to feel aligned with the powers that determine things – and because I want to escape our world of pain for a world of peace.
Too often, I throw out the baby with the bath water when evaluating my sin. I don’t know if I know how to separate my sin from my longings, although they are two different things. I’ve believed the lie that they are too connected to detach. The truth is they are too opposite to coexist, which is why sin never truly fulfills and why there is so much pain in my life of sin.
The danger, of course, is that I decide not to throw out the bath water at all, that I justify my sin by gluing it irrevocably to my longings. Therefore, I find it much safer to distance myself from my desires altogether. The result is a complacent life afraid to feel what God has called me to feel. And I am so tired of being afraid.
Biblically, the idea of eternity is not a measure of time, but of grandness. It is not forever; it is infinity. We have done the gospel a disservice by viewing the Kingdom of Heaven as a long one rather than as a great one. We need to take an eternal view of our lives, and an eternal view of our sin, in order to fully live the life that is truly life. For most of my life, I have been afraid to pursue my dreams, afraid to acknowledge the desires burning deep within me. I felt like I had to quiet myself in order to please Heaven. I felt this way because I viewed my longings as friend to my sin. I felt like I was driving an inadequate vehicle, when the truth is I was driving a more-than-adequate vehicle on the wrong side of the road.
Sin is difficult to eradicate because it is based in longings that are good and pure and so connected to our identity that we can never escape them. This is a reason for joy, not fear. We simply need to change the avenue in which we pursue the fulfillment of our longings, rather than try to change our longings themselves. We’ve got to take the hard road, the path of submission, surrender, humility, faith, and hope. We have to dig deep to the root of our desires, to see them in their purest form. We have to figure out how to match those deep longings with their purest fulfillments rather than their easiest ones.
I am tired of being afraid of myself. I’m tired of living in a superficial arena with divine longings. I’m tired of quieting the latter for the sake of the former. I want to rise up to the depths of intimacy and love. Peace is the place where my longings feel at home. I want to be in that place.
