Redeeming Desire: Why Christianity Doesn't Want You to Want Less

If you know anything about Buddhism, you probably know its most basic idea: life is suffering, and that suffering is caused by desire. So the way out (the goal, the most "saving" thing that can happen to a person) is to extinguish desire. Kill it. Want nothing, and you suffer nothing.

I want you to hear how different that is from the way of Jesus. If you've only ever heard "kill your desires" language in church, you might assume Christianity is teaching something similar. It is not. Not even close.

C.S. Lewis said almost the exact opposite

In his sermon "The Weight of Glory," Lewis argued that God doesn't look at us and see people who want too much. His point, as I understand it, was that we're actually far too easily satisfied: settling for cheap pleasures like drink, sex, and ambition, entirely unaware of the far greater joy actually on offer, the way a child might be content making mud pies in a slum, with no idea what a holiday at the sea could actually be like.

Do you see how radical that is? Lewis isn't saying our desires are the problem. He's saying our desires are pathetically small: pointed at the wrong things. God doesn't look at you and think, "If only this man wanted less." He looks at you and thinks, "This man has no idea how much more there is to want." The problem was never that you desire too much. It's that you've been settling for so little you've mistaken it for the whole world.

That's the actual bottom line here: not less desire. Real desire. Bigger desire. Desire finally aimed at something big enough to deserve it and satisfy it.

The autopilot of the soul

Now let's talk about something running underneath most of our lives that we rarely name out loud. I call it the autopilot of the soul.

Even after you're saved, even after your guilt is gone, even after years of walking with God, there's a leftover default setting in you. A quiet, constant assumption that you are the one in the driver's seat. That your comfort, your preferences, your will, your self-life is what actually runs the show. God gets consulted. God gets prayed to. God gets worship on Sunday. But the autopilot is still set to you.

This isn't usually loud rebellion. It's quieter: the reflex to protect your own comfort before you even think to ask what God wants. And here's the problem with an autopilot set wrong: you can fight it, and fight it, and fight it, and it will still pull you back toward the same course every time you get tired and let go of the wheel.

Think about what that means for the fight you've been in. Every time you've white-knuckled your way past temptation, gripped the wheel, forced yourself back on course through sheer willpower: that's real, and that's good. But the moment your grip loosens, even for a second, where does the plane drift? Back to autopilot. Back to self. Back to the old course.

Two options

You can spend the rest of your life wrestling the wheel: muscling the plane back on course the instant it drifts, never resting, never letting go, because you know what happens the second you do.

Or you can reprogram the autopilot.

This is what real sanctification looks like from the inside. Not a lifetime of gritted teeth, holding the wheel against a soul still aimed at self-sovereignty. A soul radically reprogrammed: so loving God, wanting God, choosing God isn't the thing you have to force anymore. It's the thing that just happens when you let go.

Notice how this connects back to where we started. Buddhism reprograms by starving desire until nothing's left to steer with. Jesus reprograms by giving you something so much bigger to want. Not less desire. Transformed desire. Real desire, finally pointed where it was always meant to go.

Victory was never just about what you say no to. It's about what you're saying an even bigger yes to.

This is Day 36 of Victory Over Pornography. Continue to Day 37 →