The Death of our Desires

And how might they resurrected?

[Note: I am taking a one-week break from my Thursday Theology series about children to share some thinking I’ve been tinkering with around the topic of desire as part of my recently released book The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War for our Wants. I wish these thoughts could have made it into the final text. But that pesky word count must be honored. Still, hopefully, this awakens a desire for you to read the full-length book. Lord willing, we will return to the kids next week. But for now, on to this week’s piece.]

Last week, I stepped into the adjacent office of one of my colleagues at the University. Professor Joshua Little is one of our resident gurus on Christian formation and a favorite of our students. More than most, Joshua has his finger on the pulse of our students’ lives. Rattling off a few fresh thoughts about my recently published book on desire and formation, he shared an observation of something he’d noticed among our undergraduate student population. “While we’re on this topic of desire,” he commented, “I can no longer tell what my students are into anymore. They almost seem to be equally passionate about nothing.”

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Stepping back into my office, I found myself pondering this observation for the rest of the day. As I thought about it, I realized that he’d struck a chord with my own experience. The passion among many young adults I serve seems to have died or been diffused. I usually roll my eyes at whatever comes out of someone’s mouth right after they say, “You know when I was young…” I don’t want to be that guy. But I do remember, even just a few decades ago, how most (if not all) college students were into something: frisbee golf, hacky sack, college basketball, camping, the great outdoors, or bird-watching. Everyone at my hippy college was into their ‘thing.’ But I grieve what feels like a numb fog in many of today's college students’ lives, desires, and passions—as if something astounding is needed to arouse one’s desire or motivation. I began to wonder: given that every passion is available to everyone, is it possible that our hearts and minds are being overwhelmed to death?

Sociologists have talked about this very thing for years. As the late modern person has been presented with an array of endless choices and freedoms—to do and be whatever we want—the infinite horizon of possibility has had the opposite effect than we might assume. The proliferation of choice has not made us come to life. Instead, it often stifles us. What’s been dubbed “choice paralysis” by sociologists and psychologists is that phenomenon by which one’s capacity to choose a single thing is undercut by the possibility of endless options.¹ Walk through the cereal aisle at your local grocery store. You know what this is all about. It is as though we are searching that long aisle for the perfect cereal that may deliver the happiness and fulfillment our soul desires. I’ve wandered that aisle. I know it well. But, more than anything, it has become the metaphor of our time: we wander through our dizzying, consumer lifestyle searching for a breakfast that may be the thing that provides joy. Yet, rather than finding what our hearts long for, we simply find a box of empty carbs that leaves us wanting more.

Could it be that all these limitless options are killing our desires?

It is inhumane to not desire. The most challenging day of the year for me is my birthday. I deplore it. There are two reasons. As a young child, first, I have one memory of a birthday party thrown for me. I remember very few people showing up. Even as I begin my swan dive into a midlife crisis at 42, part of my disdain for my birthday is rooted in the suspicion that I’ll have no one come even if I do have a party. And so, rather than see who wouldn’t show up, I’d rather no one show up.

More than this, however, is that I never know what I want for my birthday. Literally. I can’t put my finger on it. No matter how much I think and reflect on it, it’s as though my heart cannot seem to find what it wants. This experience is something many of us live our lives with. We have everything at our fingertips, but our desires have no idea what to choose. I recently listened to a financial planner talk about his industry’s challenges. He shared about the most significant challenges he faced in helping people plan their financial future. He had no problem assisting people to save their money. The problem, he shared, is that people don’t know what they want when they have it. Saving is easy. Knowing and naming our desires around what we want is often impossible. He worked in a culture where people had access to anything but a desire for nothing. 

So what is wrong? We were created to desire. Wanting, longing, desiring—these are operative functions of the human heart. God created us as desiring creatures. Even the most rudimentary reading of the creation story in Genesis reveals that God created humans with a whole array of good and godly desires within our human vocation. We were made with the desire to name animals, create culture, establish God’s rule and reign, and steward the good garden we were put in. We were made to desire. Why? Because our Creator desires. Our desire is one of the ways we are image-bearers in this world. As such—and you wouldn’t know it from some prominent thinkers and writers—desires are good and made by God. They undoubtedly get tangled up in the serpent’s desires after Genesis 3. But the original desires God gave us are glorious and good far before they become perverted.

After the fall, we all know, those original desires become profoundly corrupted. Paul often speaks about what he calls ‘the flesh’ (Gr sarx).² In my book, I define this as godly human desires unhitched from God's loving and sustaining presence. Our flesh is that place within where the evil one appeals to our desires, twisting and contorting them into his grotesque image. But we mustn’t confuse our good desires with our evil flesh. We often spend all of our time focusing on the flesh, and we ignore the cultivation of good desires. In fact, following Jesus should begin untangling those twisted desires to restore them to their original glory. We are called to crucify the flesh, not our good desires. Why? Because it would be a tragedy to spend our lives trying to kill the very thing God’s Spirit wants to heal. 

This brings us to a crucial point: human desire can only flourish so long as it operates under the rule and reign of God. Part of this includes accepting the boundaries and prohibitions God has put in place for this life in things like food, the Sabbath, sex, wealth, relationships, and even time. Even as we look at God’s original commandments to humans, we see God permitted them to eat from all the trees in the garden except one—the tree of knowledge of good and evil.³ They had nearly total freedom. But there is one single prohibition. As the serpent slithers into the garden, his line of attack toward the humans is to cast aside that one boundary. The serpent tempts them to have everything. In so doing, he says, they would be like God. 

The one word that seems to be at the root of the serpent’s deception is the word ‘more.’ That we need more than what God has given or permitted. It is the belief that nothing should be (or is) off-limits to our desires. Ironically, it is as the first humans throw off God’s boundaries and seem to achieve total freedom—removing the moral fences established at creation—that they die. Death, as such, is the result of the human project of getting everything we want. It killed them.

And it is killing us. 

Photo by Felicia Montenegro on Unsplash

There’s little question that this is what Jesus was after with his disciples. “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world,” Jesus would teach in Matthew 16.26, “yet forfeit their soul?” Jesus knew one could take for themselves everything in the world and the result would be the same as the garden of Eden: we’d lose our soul. Death always follows. This is why Jesus eventually rebuffs the temptation of the same serpent who offers to give Jesus the “kingdoms of the world with all their splendor.” (Matt 4.8) Kingdoms, it should be noted, which were already his. Still, this is the serpent’s crafty work. The serpent offers us the whole world. All we have to do is cast off God’s ordained limits. 

Could this be why we see a desire for God dying in many parts of the Western world? This explains, I’m convinced, why those who have the most in this world (economically and socially) are the least likely to pick up their cross and follow the way of Jesus. And it is why those who are the least in this world—on the same account—are most likely to be drawn to the way of Jesus. Jesus goes where he is wanted. It’s as if Jesus knew what he was talking about when he said: “It is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matt 19.24) Indeed it is. Having everything we want can be the death of the soul. The most joyful people I know (children, the poor, the simple) are the ones who don’t own smartphones.

Some of our wisest luminaries have written about this. In a quiet little chapter entitled “Nietzsche vs. Jesus Christ,” the theologian and philosopher Dallas Willard raised this question. Willard outlines some of the core features of how Western society shifted due to the thinking of 20th-century atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. For Willard, that period offered technological and moral advances that promised to give people what they wanted. In that post-Nietzsche world—where we still find ourselves—the idea of freedom is cast solely in terms of “freedom from.” That is, the only forbidden thing is to forbid. Restraints are dissolving. “What we want,” Willard laments, “is our only conception of human fulfillment and well-being.” Take what you want is our culture’s first and greatest commandment. 

Which he argues is what is killing human desire. Willard makes the case that a boundary-less and limit-less society can only lead to an experience akin to a prison: one in which our only response to “do what you want” is increasingly “I don’t know what I want.” With the desire paralysis of having everything at our fingertips—no longer abiding in the God-given boundaries of creation—we are left chasing after whatever has momentarily aroused our desire. Far from Eden, we become a parched people crawling desperately toward whatever might titillate, awaken, and arouse our dead desires again. Willard’s oft-forgotten wisdom speaks for itself:

We are a Viagra society. What is Viagra? It is about desiring to desire. And in addition, in its many forms, it is an attempt to escape the loneliness enforced by a will uprooted from a world of truth and reality.⁴ 

The death of desire begins with the lie of limitlessness. Human desire can’t handle the possibility of getting everything it wants. Our world's endless cereal aisle can’t but cause our desires to shrivel away in exhaustion—unless we return to the ‘no’s’ of God. At that very moment we handed out smartphones like candy—making the possibility of achieving whatever we want—we fell for the same old trick of the serpent. Because many have the power to get everything they want whenever they want (from sex to experience to food), we end up killing our God-given desires. Desires can only flourish when our desires have boundaries. True freedom is only possible with a clearly defined ‘no.’ God’s law is the trellis of our desire.

We need the “no’s” of God. They are gifts to our souls, bodies, world, and desires. As we embrace those limits, our desires begin to breathe again. This is what the cross becomes for us: a sabbath for desire. I am so grateful that Jesus won’t let me get everything I want. How exhausting that would be! And only in so doing—by embracing the limited little world of faithfulness God has given to us—can we learn to play in our desire again. As G.K. Chesterton would say about God’s commands and the truth of orthodoxy,

They may be fences...but they are always fences around a playground.⁵

1. The best summation of this principle can be found in Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Revised Edition (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2009).

2. For example, see Romans 8.5, 13.14; Galatians 5.16-17, and 6.8.

3. Read all of Genesis 2 to get the whole story.

4. Dallas Willard, “Nietzsche vs. Jesus Christ,” in A Place for Truth, ed. Dallas Willard (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2010), 153–68.

5. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York, NY: John Lane Company, 1908).