The Desires of the Heart: The Unholy Imagination

Transcript (edited for readability).

Two mysteries. Secular mysteries. And if I knew the answer to both of these, I think I could make a fortune. The first is, why is it—and this is a mystery that's engaged the minds of almost every woman that has ever existed, or at least every wife that's ever existed—why is it that men want only one thing? Corresponding to that, and an even greater mystery that has perplexed every single male, let alone every single husband, is: what do women want? On the one hand, I think if I could answer those questions, I could make a fortune. But I think I know. And this is given to you for free now: they don't know.

Just a short while ago we watched a Woody Allen film called Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Have any of you seen it? It's a rather engaging Woody Allen film, set in Barcelona, in Spain. Now, the basic premise of this film is about what is it that these two women want. They're young girls. On the one hand—I forget the name—so woman A knows what she wants. She wants a husband and a house. And she's got her husband. She's engaged. She's about to be married. And as a kind of last fling, she goes with her friend to Spain. Okay, she knows what she wants, until she gets married, and then she discovers, well, she's not sure this is exactly what she wanted. Sounds familiar. On the other hand, we have the Scarlett Johansson woman, who doesn't know what she wants, but she knows what she doesn't want. And so she goes through life looking to find and to discover what is it that she, as a woman, wants—the fickle nature of desire. And it's nowhere more fickle and distorting and distorted than in the area of sexuality.

Now, there's a close connection between the two things I've been speaking about: imagination and vision, and desire. We live in a world that's saturated with visual imagery, a whole video world, the world of virtual reality. So on the one hand, we live in an intensely visual society. But what it's done is, in fact, numb the imagination—so much so that we find it difficult to see what is beautiful, attractive, desirable about the natural world, ordinary things. And so we hive off into the area of fantasy. Have you seen how big fantasy is everywhere? That's something that we need to reflect on. It's a very important part of the makeup of young people, and, I think, people all the way through to my age. The desires of the heart, the unholy imagination.

Now, Aquinas and the tradition that he represents defined a human being as a rational creature, a rational animal. Luther, however, begged to differ with Aquinas and said human beings are basically creatures of desire. Creatures of desire—that's what characterizes us as human beings. That's what makes us tick. Our thoughts are governed by what we desire, and how we feel about what we desire, whether it's good or bad. Now, if something's good, and we feel it's good for us, we think about it. And that's governed by our imagination. Our desires are governed by what we imagine is good for us—not morally good for us or spiritually good for us, but good for us in the sense of giving us enjoyment or happiness or satisfaction. Both our feelings and our desires are governed by our physical senses. So it is what we see and what we receive in our senses that governs the way we feel, governs what we desire. So all of those are closely interconnected.

Now, you don't need me to tell you about the power of desire. I have a lot of married couples in front of me. If it wasn't for desire—the strange, mysterious desire of a man and a woman for each other—there'd be no marriage, or marriage just couldn't work. So you are living testimonies to the power of desire. Or you can see the power of desire most clearly in advertising. I don't know if you've ever spent any time analyzing television commercials—very, very interesting. There's very profound psychology and understanding of what makes human beings tick by the people who construct these things. Now, what you need to ask when you analyze an advertisement on television is: what does this advertisement appeal to? And usually it appeals to a number—a handful of basic desires that every ad man, every psychologist, basically knows. Now, Bev could give you a lecture on this, the anatomy of desire—that's part of the handbook of every ad man. So good advertisements appeal to our fundamental human desires, our basic desires. And likewise, they appeal to our desires through the imagination.

Now there's got to be a hook to catch us, and it's very often not directly linked to the product. So Coke is sold not as a thirst quencher and as tasting good, but as: if you want to have fun and be with it, enjoy life to its full, you've got to drink Coke, and then you're in with the in crowd. So there's a very powerful connection between imagination and desire. Now they're closely connected. You see that most powerfully in sexuality. Positively, you can see it in sexual arousal. Sexual arousal is not just physical—although it is intensely physical—but it also involves the imagination. At least it does for me. I don't know how it works for you. But that's a good thing—imagination and desire, unless my imagination is involved. Likewise, my feelings are involved too, but imagination, basically, is one of the drivers of sexual desire.

And you'll see it, however—quite often we can see things most clearly about us negatively—you see the link between imagination and desire in pornography. Now, that's perverted imagination and perverted desire and perverted sexuality.

Now, my text, if you like, for my presentation this afternoon, is the wonderful words of Psalm 37, verse 4—one of my favorite passages from the book of Psalms. The psalm issues this call to all the people of God. He says, delight yourself in—now, what would you expect—delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of the heart, the desires of your heart. Now, this is rather paradoxical: delight yourself in the Lord, and then you will have satisfaction—your heart's desires will be fulfilled. This is a call for us to reorient our imagination, a call to reorient our imagination to the right source of enjoyment. What this call says is that we will find true enjoyment not in any creature, not in anything that God has made, but in the Creator—God himself is the source of joy and enjoyment. And apart from him, there is no lasting enjoyment.

Now, what I find interesting in this little verse is that the Hebrew uses a most unusual word for desire. I think it's found only here in the Hebrew Old Testament in this particular sense. It's a word that means something that you ask for and receive as a gift. So it's something that you wish to have, and you want it from somebody else, and you ask for it from that person in order to receive it—that's the basic idea. It's mish'alah, coming from sha'al, which means to ask. So the source of enjoyment comes from God, and seeking fulfillment from God.

Now, I don't know whether you've ever noticed how important both imagination and desire are in the story of the fall that we heard a sermon on yesterday—when was it, evening? They play a very important part in the temptation and the fall into sin. And the fall into sin affects both imagination and desire, profoundly, and distorts them most profoundly. The basic root of sin, as you all know, is mistrust of God and his word. That's the basic temptation: don't trust in God, his promises, don't trust his word. God's holding back something for you. There is more for you than God gives you. I mean, you've got to be kidding—they've got the whole garden, every tree. And Satan says, that's not enough. God's a killjoy. He's withholding something good from you. I don't know—that's how desire is, isn't it? He's withholding something good from you.

And I don't know if you've ever noticed the sequence of events in Genesis 3, verse 6. The devil unfolds his spiel to tempt Eve. And then we read: so when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, good to eat, that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desired, or desirable, to make one wise. We have here, leading into sin, into the fall, three kinds of seeing. There's the seeing that the fruit was good to eat—that's the sense of taste. That it was pleasing to the eyes. And that the tree was desirable to make one wise—knowing everything, knowing not just good, but evil as well. So it's desired for contemplation, in order to be like God in knowing good and evil. And that leads to the act, which is the fall, the eating of the forbidden fruit. All governed and driven by imagination and desire.

And something ironic happens, because, thinking about seeing again, Satan says the day you eat that fruit your eyes will be opened, and you'll be like God, knowing everything, experiencing everything—not just what God's given to you to enjoy, but you'll be able to experience everything, not just experience with limitations, but unlimited, uncreaturely enjoyment. Now, the result of the fall is that Adam and Eve do have their eyes opened. But what are they opened to? They are opened to their nakedness. Now, this is very, very profound—opened to the fact that they are naked, and they are ashamed of their nakedness. Their eyes are opened so that they become self-conscious rather than God-conscious. They become self-aware. The fall affects the way they see themselves. So they see themselves, they see their genitalia, and they feel ashamed of themselves, and so they cover up. So it affects not only the way they see themselves, but the way they are seen by other people, and most profoundly, the way they are seen by God himself. And the result of that is decay and death instead of health and life. The temptation is: go down this route and you'll really have a good time, you'll have fun, you'll enjoy yourself. What happens instead is the death of enjoyment, the frustration of desire, and the perversion of desire.

Now you can see our human perversion, I think, most clearly in the imagination—that's my contention. Just do a little bit of a mental exercise with me. When you have nothing else to do, and you're just daydreaming, and you go into imaginative mode, and there's nothing else that occupies your mind—what is it that occupies your imagination? What's the default position of your imagination? Or, putting it more crudely, what is it that turns you on imaginatively? That, I maintain, tells you a great deal about yourself. Not just you, but me. It's an exercise that I do every now and then, sort of a stock-taking spiritual exercise. Where does my imagination tend? What is its orientation? What do I desire more than anything else? Now, I've got many desires, but there are certain default things that it always slips back to.

Now, we have an echo of all this in 1 John, chapter 3—sorry, chapter 2, verses 15 and 16—which has had a profound influence on the understanding of desire and the perversion of desire in our Christian tradition. John says quite simply: do not love the world or the things of 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, physical desire, the desires of the eyes, and pride in possessions—is not from the Father, but from the world. Three kinds of desire: coming from the flesh, our physical humanity; coming from the eyes, having to do with the imagination; and lastly, coming from something that's closely linked to the imagination—pride.

Well then, that's the original story. That's where the trouble starts. That's what needs to be undone by Christ. But before I get there, I want to review for you very quickly what effect original sin, the sin of Adam and Eve, had upon human imagination and desire. There are two passages in Genesis that touch on this, and they are basically identical, but there's a slightly different nuance to each. And they're both in connection with the flood. The story of the flood says that one of the reasons for the flood is not just violence—that's the obvious problem, the breakdown of order, cosmic order, order at every level—but the most profound breakdown of order is order in here: the disordered heart, the disordered mind, the disordered desire.

Now, before the fall—and then after the fall—God says… before the fall, God says every inclination of the thoughts of his heart—that the human heart is only evil all the time. Now, the word "inclination" is an interesting Hebrew word—for those of you who have some Hebrew, yes. Yatzar means to shape, to form, so this has to do with the shape that the human heart takes—the inclination, the disposition, the character. But it contains in it, and if you follow the usage of this in the Old Testament, it quite often has the sense of imagination. Then in Genesis 8:21—that's after the fall. The problem still exists. God hasn't solved the problem by the flood. And he says, every inclination, or every imagination of his heart—that's the human heart—is evil from childhood onwards.

Now, inclination, as I said, here has to do with the shape, the disposition, the inclination, the cast of our imagination—not the particular things we imagine, but the whole way our imagination is shaped. It's translated as dianoia in the Greek Bible, which has to do with the mind, with its ability to understand what's shaped by the five senses. So it has to do with our habitual mentality, our way of thinking and seeing things. It's the term that Paul uses in Colossians 1 and Ephesians 2 and 4, for the fallen mind, the mind of human beings that is darkened after the fall, instead of being enlightened—alienated from God, and hostile to him. The mind that's set on getting its own way, the mind that's set on getting what it desires. So instead of the mind being oriented towards its right ends, it's fixed on the wrong things—the imagination is perverted.

C.S. Lewis ponders a strange paradox, and it's a very interesting one—I forget where he says this, I was going to chase it up but I forgot to do it before we came over. He says it's strange, but—and he's talking about literature—he said that all the depictions of virtue and goodness in literature fail to arouse our interest, our imagination. It's hard to present goodness imaginatively. It's very difficult. And I think he was talking about Milton's poem Paradise Lost. We have—and then we have Paradise Regained—Paradise Lost, the hero of the story is the devil. Paradise Regained is Christ. And he says that the poetry of Milton hums and is vivid when he talks about the devil, but it's bland when he talks about Christ, or it's bland when he talks about Adam and Eve before the fall.

However, he says, though to the imagination virtue, goodness is unattractive, undesirable—so imaginatively it's undesirable—but when you are confronted by human beings, when it's embodied, it's very attractive. So a virtuous person, a good person, is very—you know, we are attracted to good people normally. And when it comes in concrete form, we are repelled, unless we are utterly perverted, by evil people. Usually even evil people are repelled by evil people. So Lewis—not Luther, Lewis—comments on the perversion of the imagination, so that imaginative evil is attractive and imaginative good is unattractive.

Now, if you don't believe this, just turn on the television set any night. And it's getting worse. There are fewer and fewer films, there are fewer and fewer novels that depict good people. I've really got to scratch my head to think of one. However, almost every single film and novel shows us evil people. Think of the attraction not just of pornography, but of violence, and of violent people.

Okay, I don't know whether you've ever noticed—that's for your pastors—that the Augsburg Confession gives a very interesting definition of original sin, not so much in intellectual terms, but in affective terms, in terms of the effects on the emotions. Original sin is defined as being without the fear of God—that's an emotion—love of God—an emotion—and with concupiscence. There's a tongue twister: concupiscence. Concupiscence means wrong desire, lustful desire, disordered desire. And in case you're interested in pursuing this a bit further, there's a wonderful discussion on concupiscence—now I've really got to twist my tongue to get around that, let me practice—there's a wonderful discussion on concupiscence in the Apology, Article 2, paragraphs 3 to 41. And Melanchthon there says that concupiscence, which means disordered desire, comes as a result of the fall, and it's the result of our inability to fear God, love God, and above all, trust in God above everything else. This comes in the train of that. And he defines, in classical terms, concupiscence as misplaced, disordered desire.

Now, misplaced desire means that it doesn't focus on the right things, but on the wrong things—so I desire what other people have rather than what I myself have, I desire other women rather than my own wife. It's misplaced desire. But more profoundly, it's disordered desire, and that, I think, is one of the keys to understanding it—it has to do not with external disorder, but disorder within the heart and the soul. So it's misplaced, disordered desire that's contrary to God's word—the desire that seeks and loves carnal things as ends in themselves. This goes back to Augustine—it's one of Augustine's great insights about desire, that we see physical things as ends in themselves, as goods in themselves, rather than as means to ends. So the result of misplaced desire is idolatry. We idolize physical things, we set them up as idols, and we see physical things as idols rather than as a means by which God gives his gifts to us. So instead of physical things being the means by which God gives us his many blessings for us to enjoy, we see them as ends in themselves. You can see that happening most profoundly in the area of sexuality, but you can see it everywhere if you examine it closely.

Now, God recognizes how profoundly the human imagination and human desire have been perverted, disordered by sin, and so he gives not just one commandment but two commandments, which are basically put there to diagnose the problem for us. He prohibits us to covet—two commandments—and by doing so, he points out what the root of so many of our problems is: the last two commandments, the ninth and tenth commandments.

Now, what's interesting for me is that in Deuteronomy 5, verse 21, the same verbs that are used for the sin of Adam and Eve are used for the ninth and the tenth commandments. So the ninth commandment says, you shall not covet your neighbor's wife. And the tenth commandment, you shall not desire your neighbor's house. Now, those two verbs are used there in the story of the fall—that's just by the way, those of your language buffs can look that up. Now, this is not exhaustive, but what God does in these commandments is point us to two of the problem areas when we come to desire. What are the two basic problem areas? Number one, it's the area of sexuality—desiring your neighbor's spouse rather than enjoying your own spouse. You think things would be so much better sexually if I had a different spouse, and I'd really enjoy life to the full. What a lie. The other area is the neighbor's house, your neighbor's possessions—so you desire your neighbor's property, his livelihood. The house is a summary of everything that he owns, rather than enjoying the things that God's given to you in your own house.

So can you see what lies behind here? The fact that I think, I fancy, I imagine that I will find more enjoyment with another woman, and with other possessions, than what God's given me in my station and vocation. However, you know, God gives this commandment and he puts his finger on the problem, but the prohibition itself, Paul says, is counterproductive, or it has an ironic effect. As you know, any prohibition merely arouses desire. Now, why is this forbidden? Forbidden fruit is always more desirable than given fruit—I can make a pun. It arouses our passions. And God deliberately uses the law to arouse our passions, to bring them out into the open, to show them, so that in this way he can diagnose the depth of sin, and show and reveal the nature and extent of sin—particularly sin in the first commandment. Okay, what's the most devastating effect of breaking the first commandment, putting some idol in place of God? It's that our desires are disordered and perverted. And the funny thing about it is that the law then—God's law—instead of dampening desire, in fact arouses wrong desire, which is passion.

Now, next I'd like to touch on the teaching on disordered desire in the New Testament. And I'll mention quite a number of passages, but I don't have time to look at them fully. I give them here so that if you're interested, you can dwell on them further and reflect further on them.

Now let me make quite clear—and this is one thing that the Christian tradition has not always been clear about—desire in itself is not evil, it's not bad. In fact, it's one of God's great good gifts to us. God gave us not only our thoughts and our feelings, our imagination, but also our desires. He himself is not a zombie, but he himself, if you read the scriptures closely, is moved by intense desire. Just do a concordance search once and look at what God desires—very interesting. So God is a desiring God, and since God made us in his image, we desire as he desires. Now, desire is God's good gift to us, and like any of God's good gifts, it can be rightly used or abused. Desire is good if it's rightly ordered, according to God's will for us, and focused on God's good gifts to us. However, desire goes off the rails, it's off kilter, it goes amiss, if it's wrongly ordered, if it's misplaced. Then it becomes disordered, distorted, perverted. And that's what happens in the fallen world—that's one of the effects of sin, most profound in sex, this twisting of desire. And it's not only something that happens as a result of sin, but Satan uses it, as you all know, in order to tempt us. So just as he started his temptation with doubt and then led to wrong desire, so he focuses in temptation on doubt of God's goodness, focusing then on desiring what's wrong for us.

Well, what's the nature of desire in our fallen world—fallen desire, disordered desire? Let me take you through some of the expressions that are used in the New Testament, which I find very revealing and helpful. First of all, the word for desire used in this sense—and there's a whole range of terms, I won't go through them all, that are used for desire and various kinds of desire. Peter talks about human desires. Now, what he's saying is that all human beings basically have the same set of wrong desires—we are driven by certain desires that we have in common with all human beings. Paul talks a great deal about the desires of the flesh, or fleshly desires. That doesn't mean just physical desires, because there's nothing wrong with physical desire, but it has to do with disordered physical desire, wrong physical desire, perverted physical desire.

Then he also talks about the desires of the mortal body. Now, that's an interesting expression, because what happens when we realize, and it comes home to us, that we are dying, time's running out—what's the temptation? I've got to grab all I can, I've got a bucket list that I need to fill before I carc—to use in Australian terms, which means kicking the bucket. So I've got a bucket list before I kick the bucket. The desires of the mortal body, the dying body. And it's strange sometimes how the imminence of death can arouse a frantic hedonism, a grabbing for desire.

There's the desire of the eyes. You see, we don't just want to possess things, but we want to enjoy the look of things. You see that across the whole spectrum of human behavior—we want to look good, and we want people to admire us, to look at beautiful things or desirable things. The desires of the eyes—now, there's a whole lot there that I could unpack that I don't have time to do so. The eyes also means the way I appear to other people. Just think of it, how much you're driven by the desire to be attractive to other people. You know, makeup in the morning, right hairdo, right clothes, all that kind of stuff, right haircut, right suit, et cetera, to look good, to look cool.

There are worldly desires, which shows that the problem doesn't just lie in ourselves, but is a cultural, social problem. The world around us pushes desire and arouses desire—not right desire, but wrong desire. Just think, for example, of the way sexuality is portrayed in our Western society—the world itself pushes one view of sex to the exclusion of all others.

Where was I? Okay, worldly desires. Just as Peter spoke about God's multicolored grace, so St. Paul talks about multicolored desire. Oh, I love that. Desire paints what's desirable in lurid terms, bright flashing colors to attract your attention. And it's not just normal, but it's hypernormal, it's over-normal, it's overattractive—super-red lipstick, if you like, to attract attention. Multicolored, lurid desires.

Most profoundly, evil desire—and that doesn't mean just the desire that's evil, but the desire that desires what is evil. Now, this is a strange phenomenon: why is it that I don't desire what's good, naturally, normally, but I desire what is evil, and it's not that I'm ignorant, but I know it's evil, and still I desire it—evil desire.

Jude talks about unholy desires—desires that desecrate your holiness, that desecrate God's holiness, desires that, instead of building up your body and your soul as the temple of God, desecrate the temple. And then, lastly, the root of it all, Jesus in John's Gospel talks about the devil's desires. Now, in two senses here: what the devil desires from us and to do with us, and the desires that the devil tries to teach us and promote in us—the devil's desires.

Now, as well as that, there are some other terms for disordered desire. Pleasures—and where that's used, it's not pleasure in itself, but the wrong kind of pleasure, misplaced pleasure. Passions—now, there's a very interesting technical sense in the New Testament. Passion is a very interesting technical term in ancient Greek, as well as in the New Testament. It's a normal desire which you've lost control of, so that instead of you controlling it, it controls you. So you have sexual desire—that's normal, that's good. But sexual passion is not understood in our sense of intense love, intense attraction, but is disordered emotion, so that instead of sexual desire being controlled by us, it runs us, it controls us. So passions are sinful, shameful desires that take over and control us. Covetousness, greed, which is the desire to have more than what God has given us—or not to have more, but to have what God has not made available to us in our lives.

Now look at the next two categories: in what way are we influenced by wrong desires, evil desires? First of all, we are enticed by them. The devil uses it to tempt us, entice us. Enticing does not mean forcing us, but just leading us on, enticing us, wooing us. And then, as a result of that, we follow these wrong desires, and we become obedient to them, and we end up being led by them. Instead of us leading the desires along, controlling them, they lead us—they take over, they determine the way we live. We then carry them out—we do or enact the wishes of our flesh, the desires of our flesh, and our human way of thinking. So we enact it. So it starts off by being enticed, we follow the enticement, we are led by it, and eventually we carry it out.

Now, what are the bad effects that our wrong, misplaced desires have on us? There are a number of things that are mentioned in the scriptures, and I think I've got the holy number, or unholy number: seven.

First of all, they deceive us. They are illusory, they are deceitful desires, because they promise us a better life than the life that God has given us, a better life than the life that God has promised to give us. So they deceive us, they are deluding, and they are illusory.

Secondly, and most profoundly, they defile us. They make us unclean within. They defile our mind and our conscience, our whole soul, our whole being. We become dirty and unclean. They drag us away from God and his good gifts. James uses this very powerful picture of dragging an unwilling animal along—say a horse that wants to go one way, and you put the bit and bridle on it and drag it to the stable, or to harness it onto a chariot. So they drag us away from God, they drag us away from the gifts that God has given us, the gifts that God wants to give us.

Next one—and the thinkers, our fathers and mothers in the early church, reflected profoundly on this—the wrong desires corrupt us, so that we decay. They bring corruption into our innermost core, so that death comes there instead of life. And eventually that results in death.

They enslave us, so that we become controlled by them, in addiction to them. In case you haven't noticed, one of the big problems in our Western societies is the increase of many different forms of addiction. Bev's an expert on that. Do you actually have a session on addiction in—yes, I thought so—in one of the… how many of you have done Bev's session on addiction? Okay. If you get a chance to do that, do it, because we need to understand what's going on. And this is an area that's not static, if you like, in human behavior. There are certain things that are constant—say, for example, there was always alcohol and drugs in the ancient world, but we have new drugs that were not available in the ancient world. We have new forms of gambling that were not available in the ancient world, which are basically designed to get you addicted to gambling. Sure, the ancient world had pornography, but nothing like the stuff that we've got now. So we have new kinds of addiction because of the changes that have happened to our society.

Last two things: wrong desire, evil desire, wars against our souls by killing them. They war against our souls, and the aim of the evil desires—they promise life, but what do they deliver? Death, instead of life. They kill our souls, they are murderous, they produce a deadly harvest, not just in our souls but in our bodies. Now they murder our souls, and they end up wanting to murder us physically. Now, if you don't believe that, just work with people who are addicted to drugs, and you can see how that works out—it gradually takes over. There's a source of enjoyment, then it takes over, controls, enslaves, kills inside, and then ends up trying to kill physically.

How's time going? Yes, I think I've got enough time, I'll finish it. What time—4 o'clock, good, yes.

Now, the problem is not just individual, it's not just in our souls, in our conscience, but it's also a problem that is in the world around us. So it's a problem that involves our flesh and the world around us, and the devil at work both in our flesh and in the world around us. We live in a society which is basically driven by desire. You know, if people from Mars came here and analyzed the basic working of the social order in the USA, it wouldn't take them very long to see that this was—you know, it's a workaholic society, it's many things, it's a very puritanical society, but like puritanical societies, it tips over in the opposite direction. But above all, it's a desire-driven society, and most people have desire-driven ways of life. What drives your average Joe, and Josephine, is desire. People live—to use a New Testament term—they live in the flesh for the gratification of human desires rather than doing God's good will.

Just listen to what Saint Peter says, in chapter 4 of his first letter. First of all, a lead-in: since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh—that's in his humanity—arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, the same mentality, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions, but for the will of God. Now comes the verse: for the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do—living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. With respect to this, they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery. Strong language. What's the mark of a pagan, godless—not godless, but an idolatrous, pagan way of life? It's that that way of life is driven by desire. And the result is uninhibited indulgence of desires. If you want it, you chase it, and you chase it until you get it, and when you've got that, you chase the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, and you're never satisfied with what you have. It results not just in sexual indulgence, but sexual orgies—it's not just serial sex or promiscuity, but sexual orgies, so it becomes a social form, and social drunkenness. But above all, it's characterized by the kind of idolatry that is forbidden by God in his law.

So then, we live in a society, in a world, in a society where people pursue a way of life that's governed in accordance with desire. It's not driven by the will of God, the word of God, but it's driven by human desire. And that can take many shapes and forms—it can be very benign, it can be just happy paganism, but it's characterized by the concern to make provision for the indulgence of the desire.

So, in Australian terms, Australians like to imagine that we are bludgers—that means that we don't work any harder than we have to. However, that's a bit of a con, but we have the phenomenon called the long weekend, which means that you put up with work because it's the weekend that you can do what you really want to do. So work is an unfortunate means to the real end in life, which is having a good time over the weekend. So we make provision for the indulgence of our desires. Or you work hard to build up a good superannuation nest egg, so that then you can really live it up, and empty your bucket list ten times over.

What people don't realize is how much pressure is on them to conform. Now, one of the features of a desire-driven life is that it wants to push everybody into that mold. Just think of the impact of television on us, and advertising, that pushes us into that desire-driven way of life. We are called to conform to the culture that's governed by desire, in many and various subtle and more obvious ways.

Now, above all, a desire-driven way of life is driven by greed—not just greed for possessions, but greed for everything, wanting to have more and more. And that, as you all know, is idolatry. Greed is idolatry, because you seek to find enjoyment from having, owning, people and things. If I have the right wife, then I will enjoy myself. If I have the right toys, the right house, the right clothes, the right friends, all that kind of thing, then I will enjoy myself. And so we turn God's good gifts to us into idols, and we see them as ends in themselves, rather than receive God's good gifts to us through people and things. So my possessions aren't an end in themselves, but they're the means by which God wants to give his good gifts to me, and through me to others—they're not ends in themselves. As soon as we turn them into ends, then we fall into Satan's trap.

Well, what's God's reaction to our desire-driven way of life? And I think I'm coming to the end, I'll do this very quickly. God's wrath is unleashed against the perversion of human desire—not because he's angry with us as such, but because he is angry at the effect that this has on us, that it's bad for us. Just as you are angry if your child is about to put its finger in the fire, so God is angry with us and the way we live when we follow our desires. Secondly, God frustrates the desires of the wicked. So the people who are right on the extreme end of the spectrum, who live a way of life that's contrary to God's law, who follow their desires, seeking to get their desires, will get what they want, but they won't enjoy it. Just think of Howard Hughes—what a miserable coot he was, and yet he had everything a human being could want.

Most profoundly, God treats us in a strange way, and he says, okay, you want this? Have it. And you can rub your nose into it, and you can see where it leads. So he hands us over to our desires, and the penalties, the consequences, the results of our desires. We become addicted to them, we become deluded by them, we live the lie, and that lie produces mental, emotional chaos. Above all, the result of it is a mind, a mentality, that's unfit for life with God, and unable to assess and experience accurately, because it disapproves of God, and is hostile to his will, his mentality, his gifts to us.

So let me end with putting to you the paradox of indulgence. To put it quite simply, what's the paradox of indulgence? The more you indulge your desires, the less you enjoy yourself. What a paradox. The more you indulge your desires, make them ends in themselves, the less you enjoy what you have, and the more frustrated you become. So instead of satisfying desire, all it does is arouse desire, to such a fever pitch that no human being can fulfill the desires. Once again, you can see that either in greed—people who want more and more and more possessions—or you can see it too in sexuality. So you have diminishing enjoyment from unfettered and disordered indulgence.

As Paul says in Ephesians 4, you must not walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. Now, that's not just intellectual futility, but the futility of thinking and seeing and feeling and imagining, desiring, in the futility of their minds, being blinded in their perception, alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, from the hardness—there's a spelling of their hardness—of their hearts, who, having become desensitized, surrender themselves in unrestrained indulgence in greed to the practice of every kind of impurity.

Notice the word desensitized. The more and more you indulge yourself, the more and more you become desensitized in every way, and the more and more you've got to indulge yourself to get a kick from it. So what happens is that desire is aroused without being satisfied, and that leads you into a futile loop, a futile, delusional way of thinking. If only this, then I'd be satisfied. If only this, then I'd be satisfied. I'll enjoy myself when I retire, et cetera—you know the way. So we become increasingly desensitized, not just emotionally, but at all levels—spiritually, intellectually, everything—by increased sensual indulgence. And worst of all, we become turned on not by what is good and able to give enjoyment, but we become turned on by what is unclean and unholy. And once we reach that state of deadness, then we need to indulge in the artificial arousal of desire as an end in itself, so as to feel physically, and emotionally, and perhaps even spiritually, alive. So you no longer find enjoyment in chasing the thing, but you try to arouse desire as an end in itself.

Okay, what's the solution to this? Well, wait for tomorrow. Thank you.