Hoping for Rightly Ordered Desires
Even when they are not promised to you
One of the most difficult truths to internalize in this life is that you are not promised all that you desire, even when your desires are rightly ordered. For example, you may desire friendship or a spouse or children or a job, and none of them are given to you. Or at least, not on the timeline you expect. Each of these are good desires, and when you desire them rightly (not excessively, not before God, not as idols, not selfishly), they are good things to desire and work towards. But God, in his perfect will, does not promise to give us all our earthly desires.1 It was a rightly ordered desire for Paul to pray for the thorn in his flesh to go away (2 Corinthians 12:8), but in verse 9 Paul says that God denied him and said “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” Unlike Paul, God rarely tells the rest of us “No, never” to our rightly ordered desires (although sometimes God does close the door on our desires). Usually the answer we receive is, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness. And wait and see.” And that requires endurance and the virtue of courage combined with the virtue of hope. Endurance allows us to persevere through denials and rejections, and hope keeps us working toward that good desire in whatever reasonable way is possible. All while accepting that ultimately, God’s will will be done, and if that rightly ordered desire is not in his will for us, it is for our good, and he will give us the grace to endure.
Our culture makes it incredibly difficult to deny ourselves any desire, let alone desires that the Bible itself designates as good, like friends, spouses, children, sex within marriage, jobs, health, and so on. As I’ve argued before, the prominent stance of our culture is to say, “Yes!” to everything. “Yes!” you deserve that sex. “Yes!” you deserve that experience. “Yes!” You deserve that product. You deserve the things you desire, especially if you have to go into debt to pay for it. So we’re programmed to think in terms of affirming our desires and giving in to temptation from a young age. And it’s doubly hard to endure the denial of desires when those desires are not perverse. When it’s not a desire for pornography but the desire to wait patiently to save sex for marriage with a spouse, only you can’t find a godly spouse. Here’s a rightly ordered desire that isn’t being fulfilled, meanwhile the World is screaming at you “Fulfill your base desires now with pornography or erotica! Give up!”—which is actually the sin of presumption in addition to lust, but we’ll discuss that in a minute.
Endurance is the better part of the virtue of courage, according to Aquinas and Aristotle, for it takes more courage to endure suffering than to charge into battle. So the longsuffering that goes on with desiring things that are good but which you are not given is a form of endurance and takes great courage. For the person looking for friends or a spouse or trying to have children or looking for a job, there will be rejections and failures along the way. Endurance allows you to take those hits and get up and keep trying. There will be suffering and disappointment, but with courage comes a vision of the good which you are pursuing and suffering for. And your task is to keep that desire rightly ordered, don’t allow it to become an idol, and prayerfully submit it before God and say, “Lord, I believe this is a good thing to pursue, and so I ask that if it is your will that you grant this to me. Purify my motives. But not my will but yours be done.”
Hope enables us to rightly pursue those desires without falling into the twin traps of presumption or despair. When you have prudently (another virtue which I don’t have time to discuss) decided that there is a rightly ordered good which you should pursue, you have a responsibility to act, to do something about it. For example, if you desire a job, you have the responsibility to look for a job, to prepare yourself for a job. If you desire a friend, you have the responsibility to go out and invite someone to coffee, no matter how awkward that may feel to you. And so on. You must act. Hope allows you to act because it gives you the longing for some future fulfillment. God may have a different plan to fulfill that desire in your heart, but for now, you can hope in that good. It cannot become your ultimate hope (Christ) or it will be an idol, but it can be something you hope God provides for you. The dangers are presumption and despair. Presumption is when you presume that you deserve your desire now, there’s nothing to hope for, so you resort to sinful and unethical means to obtain that desire out of desperation. Despair is when you believe there is no hope of obtaining your desire, so you stop trying, stop looking for a job or a spouse. Despair is not God telling you that you are called to a life of singleness or that you are called to a different line of work. That’s God calling you to a different life. Despair is when you give up, when you stop trying, when you lose hope that God is sovereign and is working all things together for your good. We fight these twin temptations by continuing in hope to pursue the rightly ordered goods we believe God has called us to until God tells us otherwise.
But what if we continue in hope and come to the end of our lives and never find a spouse or have children naturally or our married sex lives are not as fulfilling as we desired or we never find that job we feel we were called to? Does that mean God was unfaithful? No.
Matthew 7:7-11
7“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. 9 Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? 11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
Our task is to ask God for good gifts. Our loving Father’s promise is to give good gifts to us. He won’t give us a serpent, although we all will go through difficult times in this life. And through those times we will grow in sanctification and become Christlike. He will give us bread. But sometimes that bread won’t look like what we expect it to. And we have to accept that and trust that our Father who knows all things and loves us intimately and perfectly is caring for us.
It is right and good for us to pursue rightly ordered goods in hope and endurance with the full knowledge that we are not promised those goods by God. But we are promised the bread of life, life abundantly, the hope of the resurrection, and life everlasting. We are promised that our Father will give us good gifts. It’s nearly Christmas, and like children who sometimes make out Christmas lists thinking they know the best gifts for themselves but who are surprised on Christmas morning by something infinitely better, our Father knows what we need and will give us good gifts. Because he loves us.
If this essay interests you, please preorder my next book, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times, which uses these virtues of hope, courage, and prudence, as well as four others to navigate the contemporary world.
Although, as Psalm 37:4 teaches, if we delight in the Lord, he will give us the desires of our heart, which I take to mean that when we are spiritually oriented toward God’s desires, our desires will be fulfilled in his.
This tracks very closely with my understanding from childhood, which I do believe, but I have always had these two issues with it:
1. Qualifying promises about desire by talking about things being rightly ordered, or in moderation, or prudential, makes it seem as though the simple normal human feeling of unexamined desire is always wrong, and instead we are to always be making a kind of chore or discipline out of it, or we are to take our food in the form of vegetables - in other words, the qualifying statements leach out the prospect of satisfaction in terms I understand.
2. The bigger issue is that it is one thing to defer desires to the eschaton, and in fact anything other than that ends in despair, because anyone can see that all one's desires will never be fulfilled even in an ideal life, which no one has - but it's entirely another thing to suspect that one cannot rightly defer desires to the eschaton, because those desires might be perverse, or simply because delayed gratification may be a kind of unreformed selfishness acting in prudence. But if the promise is to be transformed to have alien desires, that itself is an unsatisfying and even horrifying prospect, because even if one thing is better than another thing, aesthetically specific things are not interchangeable - the better thing does not actually fill the place of the lesser thing, if they are not the same.