What do you want?

What do you want?  What do your really long for and crave?  What do you want so badly that even thinking about not getting it leaves a knot in your stomach?  What do you want so badly that perhaps your friends think you are consumed with that passion?

There are many ways we might answer that question:

• A high school student might want desperately to be out of his parental home and on his own.
• A college student might long for graduation day and getting a job and getting on with her life’s dreams and vocation.
• An engaged couple might want so badly to be married and to consummate the marriage that thinking that Christ might return before their wedding day fills them with even a sense of dread.
• A married couple might be longing for a retirement day and the time when their time “is their own” — they can travel and do what they want when they want.

What do you want?  For what are you passionate?

In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul offers us a pair of related desires that should be ultimate in the life of every believer.  First, he notes that because of the gospel and because of God’s redemptive work in our lives and because of the temporal and failing aspect of our bodies, “we long to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven” (v. 2).

The great longing of every believer should always be upward and eternal.  How tragic when a believer in Christ is consumed with short-term passions and yearnings that cannot ever ultimately satisfy.  As good and profitable as an education or career or family responsibilities or marriage or parenting are, they are not ultimate.  And the person who focuses his desires on these short-term goals will always, eventually, be dissatisfied.  They may bring pleasure for a time, but because they are not eternal, when they are gone, he will be sad, discontent, or disillusioned.  The only thing that is ultimate is to see everything we do from an eternal perspective and from a desire to see all those activities culminate in our eternal home and presence with God.

And that leads to the second desire Paul gives in 2 Corinthians 5 — everything we do should be oriented around the desire to please God (v. 9).  When we get home to heaven, we will have one great and singular passion — to be with and to please the Lord.  And because of our perfected state, we will always be able to please Him in every respect (and we will likewise always find pleasure and joy in Him).  And since that is our eternal preoccupation, that also should be our desire while we are now away from him, while we are not yet home in heaven.  Whether at home in his presence or absent (still on earth), we have one longing — to please Him.

Later in this same chapter, Paul will also say that the reason Christ died was “so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf” (v. 15).  As believers, our lives are no longer our own.  We are enslaved to a (gracious and benevolent) Master who orders not only the affairs of our lives, but also the desires of our hearts.

As one person has well said, “There are only two decisions on the shelf, pleasing God or pleasing self.”  Which do you want?  And what do your activities and desires today reveal about what you want?