healing

money

“Jesus wants me to have this $65,000,000 jet.”

“You do not have because you do not ask

God.” James 4:2“You may ask me for

anything in My name and I will do it.” John 14:14

comfort

answers

Afraid to WantAnd Afraid to Ask

Not supposed to be about desires

Goal of the Christian life is obedience

a case of wanting gone wrong

GENESIS 3:6 When the Woman saw that the tree looked like good

eating and realized what she would get out of it—she’d know

everything!—she took and ate the fruit and then gave some to her

husband, and he ate.

We often want what God has expressly forbidden.

Don’t we also want to be God?

Isn’t it better to want NOTHING?

MATT 16:24-26 Then Jesus went to work on his disciples. “Anyone who

intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am.

Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-

help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What kind of deal is it to get

everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for?

“When we love, give, and serve without reluctance or resentment, pride, or self-congratulatory impulses, when we delight in doing the will of God (and feel less and less oppositional pull), this increasing ‘effortlessness’ indicates a growing congruence between our desires and God’s.

God is at work in us, ‘both to will and to work for his good pleasure.’ (PHIL 2:13). Our desires are being transformed

—and we are being formed into Christ.”Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us To Want (IVP, 2014:28)

It’s kind of like this.

The more we do what God wants, we gradually begin to want that too.

“The gospel of Jesus Christ meets our holy hesitations about

desire, without eliminating the tensions or minimizing the

dangers, yet suggesting it can be reformed.” Ibid.

ROM 6:4 Therefore we were buried with Him by baptism

into death, that just as Christ was raised up from the dead

by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk

in newness of life.

Newness of Life! Newness of Desires?

JER 31:33 “This is the brand-new covenant that I will make with Israel when the time comes. I will

put my law within them—write it on their hearts!—and be their God. And they will be my people.”

we will want God!

we will want what God wants!

ISA 53:3-5 One look at him and people turned away. We looked

down on him, thought he was scum. But the fact is, it was our pains he

carried—our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us.

We thought he brought it on himself, that God was punishing him for his

own failures. But it was our sins that did that to him, that ripped and tore

and crushed him—our sins! He took the punishment, and that

made us whole. Through his bruises we get healed.

The more people in our church do what God wants, the more our church will naturally want what God wants too.