I came to Jesus during the Jesus Movement of the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s. There was a lot going on in those days that brought great uncertainty and great restlessness to my generation (not a whole lot different than where we are today in terms of uncertainty, restlessness, and even fear).

My generation was promised that sex, drugs and rock ’n roll were the answers to all our problems. In fact, we were sung to, talked to, and read materials that encouraged us to have unlimited desires. Unlimited desires were our ticket to freedom from anything that held us captive. We were told to have faith in the unlimited exploration of our desires as a ticket to freedom.

Well, here we are a generation later, and what our generation promised in terms of what the exploration of desire could afford us, actually brought us deeper into addictive patterns and behaviors.

Here is the problem: desire is always goal-oriented and specific, never limitless. Desire always has a limit. There is no such thing as limitless desire, and the moment you believe that is the very moment when faith can no longer operate.

Let me explain:
If I am thirsty, I desire to satisfy my thirst. Thirst is a very specific desire that only has a limited set of options that can satisfy that desire. The most obvious satisfier of the desire of thirst is to drink water. In other words, the goal of the desire of thirst has a limit, and that limit is water.

Even in sugar-laden beverages like sodas and fruit juices, most of what is contained in them is water. Ironically, the sugars actually cause your thirst not to be satisfied and create a false desire that you need more, only to actually violate the goal of the desire of thirst and ruin the signals between the brain and the body as to knowing when that desire was actually satisfied. Hence, we have people that are addicted to sugar-laden beverages, and they pay a price in their blood-sugar levels, in their energy levels, and in their brain functions.

Desire is always goal-specific. (Read that again).

I have been around for a “little while” in the people-helping business, and I have both heard and preached on this text many, many times. I have heard some of the best and some of the worst teachings on this passage that have been spoken, broadcast, and written about.

There is a great deal to learn about the relationship between faith and desire that is often overlooked in our effort to “name and claim” whatever it is we think we “want”, treating God the Father as if he is some “Cosmic Bellhop” who caters to our every whim.

Mind you, God is good all the time. Yet, his ways are not our ways, and his thoughts are not our thoughts. There are “ways” that God operates in whether we are aware of them or not, that often are not something we hear taught about these days. The ways of the Spirit (who is the Spirit of faith by the way), that are revealed in Scripture that can provide profound awareness and insight as to how God works in us, through us, and for us.

We all readily can quote, “Without faith it is impossible to please God”. Yet, how often do we fully comprehend how the inner-workings of the Spirit, the very ways of the Spirit, in relation to the shaping and forming of our lives as tied to desire, and in particular specific desires, with specific outcomes in mind, go unnoticed, and therefore in our blindness we fail to cooperate with the ways of the Spirit?

In Psalm 86:11 David prays this prayer:
Teach me your way, O LORD, that I may walk in your truth; unite my heart to fear your name.

Please notice this:

• Teach me your WAY
• O LORD (The Name of the Lord: Yahweh / I AM)
• That I may WALK
• In your TRUTH
• UNITE my HEART
• To FEAR (Reverence, Worship)
• Your Name (Yahweh, I AM, known as “The Tetragrammaton)

WAY, WALK, UNITED HEART, REVERENCE, all in relation to the One who calls himself “I Am that I Am”, is something David asked to be taught by the Spirit.

Ask yourself this question:

“How often have I claimed Mark 11:24, asking for whatever I desire, and it didn’t happen?”

Ask yourself this question:

“How often have I felt like I just didn’t ‘do it right’, ‘didn’t confess it right’, ‘didn’t pray it right’…so I didn’t get what I asked for?”

What if “doing it right”, “confessing it right”, and “praying it right” are all about techniques based on Western Civilization’s influence from the ancient Greeks who taught that cause and effect required knowing techniques in order to master life, and have NOTHING TO DO with the ways of the Spirit that you and I need to be taught from Scripture?

• How does the Spirit of Faith bring us to faith?
• How does desire actually function in the soul? In other words, how does it operate and how is it influenced by the Spirit when we are yielded and surrendered in our:
• Imagination?
• Intuition?
• Cognition?
• Perception?
• Reasoning?
• Will?
• How do I learn how to discern which desires lead me further into the freedom of the Spirit and which desires lock me up and imprison me to keep repeating my known past and never enable me to arrive at my hoped-for-future?

When you turn faith into a technique, you don’t realize that you lose the Triune God of faith in the process. Faith is NOT a technique. It never has been. Faith is “substantive”. It is the essential foundation upon which you build your hopes for your desired objectives specifically, those desired objectives that are rooted in the promises of God, and their particular application in your personal journey to both be and become all that the Father intends for you to be an become in Christ by the Spirit.

We tend to focus far more these days on faith as a technique than on the ways of the Spirit, and therefore get sidetracked in our walk, our understanding of who the “I Am” the “God of Truth” (Isaiah 65:16), who wants to bless us and who reveals to us Jesus the Truth (John 14:6), by the indwelling “the Spirit of Truth” (John 14:17), to bring us into all that He has ordained and promised.

Your ways and your walk flow from your heart. The heart is the seat of desire. Desire is the fuel from which love is generated. Faith is energized and efficiently expressed through love. 

You cannot fully separate love and desire, as they are intimately related. Neither can faith operate in the absence of love, or in the presence of desire that is non-specific, non-goal-oriented, and non-godly. You may say, “I am godly”, and I will affirm that. However, the culture we live in is not, and there are all sorts of ideologies and beliefs that are tied to secular thinking that have invaded the sacred places of God’s habitation in us and in his community, that we are not even conscious of that are present in our deep hearts that pollute God-given desire, and turn faith into a manipulative ploy and divorce it from the ways of the Spirit, and the revelation of the One who says he is “I Am that I Am”. 

If there is any interest at all in your heart and your mind about rediscovering the ways of the Spirit, and how “I AM that I AM” manifests and reveals Himself and His will and desire in our lives, and how faith is the foundation for the work he does to unite our hearts at the depths so that our imagination, perception, cognition, intuition, and will are undivided rather than fragmented, then you might want to join me on Thursday evening November 15^th, 2018 from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM EST for a most encouraging and illuminating webinar I am calling “Faith, Desire, And The Ways Of The Spirit”. 

I tend to think it will be one of the most paradigm-shifting, consciousness-raising, Mind-of-Christ awareness-building, faith-enriching journeys in some of the stories of faith in the Sacred Text you have ever taken. Life-long learning insights will challenge false assumptions that have hindered your ability to discern and desire the will of God for your life, and set you free from the kind of “how-to’s” that our culture is addicted to that actually take us further away from intimacy with the God of faith because they de-Personalize God and ourselves and turn us into robotic computer programs that operate by the touch of a button.

Faith and desire are in a dance with the Triune God who dances in His own being as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the “I Am that I Am”, and who invites to learn the ways of His Spirit that we might dance our way into the future fueled by the passion of desires that are anchored in sure and specific promises that ignite the flame of faith and bring us to a full assurance of what we have hoped for.

This may be a game-changer for you. If you are hunger to be taught the ways of the Spirit, who is the Spirit of Faith (one of among the many titles he holds in Scripture), this webinar will build you up in the Scripture and give you eyes to see aspects of your inheritance in Christ that yet await you apprehending them by faith, rooted in specific desire.