Love can wait and worship endlessly; lust says, “I must have it at once.”
~Oswald Chambers (1874-1917)
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world— the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.
~ 1 John 2:15-17
Oh beloved, it is true… We are, as Joseph Joubert said over 2oo years ago, burdened with the unbearable weight of ourselves. Oh maybe it is just me… but i doubt it.
We want what we want, when we want it. And any idea we come up with must be right and true – simply because we were the one who came up with it.
Our bodies and our brains scream for comfort… and sometimes we listen.
We see that beautiful body, or machine, or money, or other bright and shiny object… And we want it.
We feel that people misunderstand us, or won’t give us our due… and we get anxious or angry.
Why?
We miss the antidote to lust. The antidote is hope.
Yeah, hope. The kind of hope we see in the “Hope sandwich” Paul writes about in Romans. We have a G_d of hope who fills us with His joy; Who fills us with His peace. And in this filling, we too can abound with the very hope of the One who started all of this.
Are we catching this? All is well. All of it. Every single bit of it. We are absolutely swimming in an ocean of grace-born hope.
He is real.
His Glory is real.
His Blood is real.
His Love is real.
His Grace is real.
His Peace is real.
His Life is real.
In light of the above (and this is only the beginning of the list), could we not just learn to rest in Him? Rather than trying to resist our lusts, might we just abandon them and simply wait quietly in His powerful Presence when these lusts raise their ugly heads in our being?
Lust? No thanks. i’ll take Hope!
