How Much Victory Can I Expect over Sinful Desires?
00:00:00.000 | Last week we talked about the challenge of why our theology does not change our
00:00:08.520 | lives quickly, at least not as fast as we wish it would. We also talked about the
00:00:13.640 | expulsive power of a new affection, that those new holy affections we have for
00:00:18.060 | God help push out of our lives the fallen desires that we have for sin
00:00:22.200 | still yet within us. But from those topics emerges another related question,
00:00:28.340 | namely this one. Realistically speaking, how changed will my desires become in
00:00:34.440 | this life? The question is from a listener named Emma. Pastor John, hello, I
00:00:39.200 | think I understand Christian hedonism. By the sovereign grace of God in
00:00:43.360 | regeneration, God gives me new desires that align with his desires. This
00:00:47.800 | includes a new delight in what most delights God, which is himself. Amen and
00:00:52.640 | amen. But boy do I sure struggle with a ton of desires within me that are not
00:00:58.320 | God honoring. So how in the world can I be sure God has given me new holy
00:01:03.840 | desires when I so often feel inundated by my old unholy desires? Even Jesus
00:01:11.360 | seemed to be more motivated in his earthly life by future joy, Hebrews 12
00:01:15.040 | 2. So how much desire victory is realistic and normative in the Christian
00:01:20.760 | life inside this fallen flesh and inside this cursed planet? Pastor John, what would
00:01:26.520 | you say to Emma? So Emma asks two questions as I'm hearing it. How can I be
00:01:34.320 | sure that I have been given new holy desires? And this is really a question of
00:01:42.360 | how can I be sure I have been born again because that's what the new birth does.
00:01:48.560 | It gives us these new God-centered, Christ-exalting, Spirit-empowered desires.
00:01:54.400 | And the other question she asks is how much desire for God and victory over
00:02:02.280 | contrary desires, sinful desires, is realistic or normative for the Christian
00:02:09.600 | life? So let's go about answering these two questions this way. Let's describe
00:02:17.000 | how the New Testament pictures the desires of the person who has been born
00:02:24.360 | again and the kind of battle this introduces into the person's life. And
00:02:30.000 | then see if the answers to Emma's questions don't flow from this
00:02:35.880 | description of the new birth and what comes with it. Before we're born again—and
00:02:42.680 | I mean born again by the Spirit of God, through the Word of God—before we're
00:02:47.400 | born again, the Bible describes us as natural persons, meaning we don't have
00:02:54.760 | the Holy Spirit and therefore we do not have the spiritual ability to see the
00:03:01.660 | beauty of Christ and his gospel for what it really is or the ability to feel them
00:03:08.600 | for what they really are, namely precious. 1 Corinthians 2, verse 14, the
00:03:14.640 | natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God for they are
00:03:21.240 | foolishness to him and he's not able to understand them because they are
00:03:27.040 | spiritually discerned. Christ and the gospel are foolishness, folly, unreal,
00:03:34.440 | boring to us until we are born again and we're no longer natural people
00:03:42.400 | but supernatural people. We've been made children of God, inhabited by the
00:03:47.400 | supernatural Holy Spirit. Now here's how that happens and the effect of it.
00:03:53.680 | 2 Corinthians 4, 6 and 7 go like this. God, who at the beginning in creation said,
00:04:03.360 | "Let there be light," has now in our hearts shown—same kind of miracle—shown to give
00:04:11.960 | the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ but
00:04:16.520 | we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that the surpassing power belongs
00:04:22.920 | to God and not to us. In other words, God overcomes—this is what happens in new
00:04:28.760 | birth—God overcomes our blindness, our deadness to the glory of God in Christ.
00:04:35.720 | He shines into our heart with a spiritual—not a physical—but a spiritual
00:04:42.080 | light and the result is that we see—Paul calls it the eyes of the heart—we see
00:04:49.840 | the glory of God in Christ as a treasure. The word "treasure" is used by Paul
00:04:58.600 | in verse 7 to describe what he's talking about when it happens. We have this
00:05:04.160 | treasure—the one I just referred to back in verse 6—when we saw the glory of God
00:05:09.880 | in the face of Christ. We have this treasure in jars of clay. That's our
00:05:14.920 | mortal bodies—these fragile, sickness-prone, depression-prone bodies of
00:05:20.800 | ours. But the key thing is that the effect of this miracle of sight—seeing
00:05:29.040 | Christ and his gospel as beautiful as they really are—the effect is that we
00:05:34.020 | now know Christ as a treasure. He's not boring, he's not foolish, he's not
00:05:40.840 | mythological anymore. He's a treasure. Our desires, therefore, our preferences, our
00:05:47.720 | pleasures are transformed by discovering that what we once thought was foolish,
00:05:56.280 | unreal, boring, is now the most precious reality in the world. That's the
00:06:02.880 | fundamental change at new birth. So Jesus describes this transformation like this.
00:06:08.040 | This is Matthew 13, 44. "The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a
00:06:13.720 | field which a man found." That's the point of conversion, the point of new birth. He
00:06:19.040 | found, he covered up, and then in his joy—because that's what happens when
00:06:24.040 | you have your eyes open to a treasure—in his joy, he goes and sells everything he
00:06:29.040 | has and buys that field. And then Paul describes it like this in Philippians 3:8.
00:06:33.720 | "I count everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ
00:06:39.640 | Jesus my Lord." So the effect of the new birth is that we are made alive
00:06:48.760 | spiritually by God with the effect that we now see Christ and his gospel as our
00:06:57.800 | supreme treasure. We prize him, we love him, we treasure him and enjoy him, are
00:07:05.000 | satisfied in him more than in our former dearest pleasures. Now here's what causes
00:07:15.640 | the problem for Emma and for all of us. This new reality does not yet completely
00:07:23.960 | destroy the old reality called "my flesh." In a sense, a decisive victory has been
00:07:32.320 | won over my flesh. I have been crucified with Christ, Paul says, Galatians 2:20.
00:07:40.520 | Done. Decisive. But in another sense, we must lay hold on this decisive victory
00:07:48.000 | by faith, hour by hour, and reckon our old self, our flesh, dead, according to the
00:07:56.720 | reality that it really is. We have to make war on the flesh and count ourselves
00:08:03.080 | dead as we really are. So Paul says in Galatians 5:16, now here's the reality
00:08:10.400 | we're dealing with, "Walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of
00:08:16.280 | the flesh, for the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires
00:08:22.440 | of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other." War.
00:08:27.800 | These are opposed to each other to keep you from doing the things that you want
00:08:32.560 | to do. And no book in the Bible is more insistent that the new birth produces a
00:08:40.200 | real change than John's first epistle. And yet this book emphasizes that we're
00:08:47.080 | not sinless. The battle goes on. Here's what he says in 1 John 1, 8, "If we say
00:08:53.760 | we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." So we do sin.
00:09:00.520 | That is, we don't value God the way we ought to. We do value the world
00:09:04.280 | sometimes the way we shouldn't. Then he continues, "If we confess our sins, he is
00:09:09.220 | faithful and just to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
00:09:13.480 | And Paul describes his own battle like this, "I delight in the law of God in my
00:09:19.140 | inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law
00:09:25.660 | of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members."
00:09:31.960 | Romans 7 22. So what should we say? How should we answer Emma's two questions,
00:09:38.560 | which are really our questions? Number one, "In view of this battle, how can I be
00:09:44.080 | sure that I have been given new holy desires?" And my answer is that the
00:09:50.460 | question is one of authenticity and reality of our desires for Christ, not
00:09:57.640 | primarily a question of intensity or frequency of the battle. Because we are
00:10:05.360 | talking about God-given spiritual delight in the glory of Christ and the
00:10:10.600 | beauty of the gospel—a delight which in any quantity the natural person does not
00:10:16.520 | have. So pray that the Lord would not only show you the fruit of such
00:10:22.240 | spiritual desires, but would by his Spirit bear witness that your sight and
00:10:28.320 | your delight in Christ are real, are authentic. That's the work of the Spirit—
00:10:33.840 | to witness with your spirit that you have really tasted Christ and your
00:10:40.160 | desires, however small or big, are the real thing that no natural person has.
00:10:47.040 | And here's the second and last question. "How much desire for God and victory
00:10:52.920 | over sinful desires is realistic or normative for the Christian life?" And I
00:10:59.480 | would put it something like this. Never expect in this life that you will get
00:11:06.280 | beyond warfare with your flesh, and never assume that the Lord may not have a far
00:11:15.840 | greater victory for you than you have ever known. Yes, this fight continues for
00:11:22.600 | us all. Thank you, Pastor John. And whether you listen in the car or at the gym or
00:11:27.840 | doing chores, thank you for inviting us into your busy day. If you have not yet
00:11:31.280 | done so, you can subscribe to Ask Pastor John in your favorite podcast app, in
00:11:35.880 | YouTube or in Spotify. And if I know there are other episodes in our archive, or to
00:11:40.400 | submit a question to us of your own, like this really good one from Emma, go online
00:11:43.840 | to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Next time we turn our attention to
00:11:50.600 | prayer, specifically prayerlessness, if we are not happy with our prayer lives, how
00:11:56.320 | can we kick-start this essential discipline? Pastor John has three very
00:12:01.320 | practical suggestions that will help us out. That's up next time. I'm your host,
00:12:05.040 | Tony Reinke. We'll see you back here on Wednesday.
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