Covetousness vs Wholesome Desire

March 5, 2013

As I am arriving at the end of a sermon series on the Ten Commandments, I have been given occasion to reflect upon the difference between covetousness and acceptable or even good desire. After all, it is God Himself who has created good and desirable things, and He has not given all of them to each of us. And indeed, He Himself promises desirable things to us: “Delight yourself in Yahweh, and He will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4)?

How then are we to distinguish between good and wholesome desire, on one hand, and covetousness (which, in the words of Paul in Colossians 3:5, is idolatry), on the other?

Several passages, including Psalm 37:4 mentioned above, help us here.

The Psalm reminds us that the ground of good desire is not our heart, but God Himself: “Delight yourself in Yahweh, and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

This center of delight leads us to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, confident that as we do, the other things we need and desire will be added to us as He sees fit in His goodness and kindness (Matthew 6:33).

The “seek first” passage furthermore instructs us not to be anxious. The God of the kingdom is abundant in kindness and clothes even the lilies of the field and feeds the ravens with good things; and how much more will He care for us His children?

And then, too, James 4:15 teaches us to bound are desires and plans about with an acknowledgement of God: “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

Much more could be said, but the above passages and principles do provide us with some very helpful criteria to determine what is healthy desire, and to reshape us so that the desires of our heart are indeed good rather than forms of covetousness.

First, godly desires are grounded in an acknowledgement that God is God, and I am not. While there may come times that I see something that would be enjoyable and useful to me, even in my desire for it, I am to remain strong to the confession that God is the dispenser of His own creation, and the giver of every good gift. If He sees fit to give it, I will rejoice in the gift; and if He sees fit to restrain me from having it, I will likewise rejoice in His wisdom and authority to determine that for me, as well.

A simple way of saying that is that godly desires are contented desires.

Second, and related, godly desires are desires liberated from anxiety. When we remember that God is both the powerful authority behind the dispensing of creation’s gifts, as well as our loving Father, we are liberated from worrying and fretting: “I must have this or that, and how on earth will I be able to get it?”

Third, godly desires are tempered, refined, and redefined by the centrality and priority of the kingdom of God. When I delight myself in the Lord and in His kingdom, my value scales change, and the importance of various things will be reordered.

Of course, we need to be careful not to reinterpret that to mean that God does not will our enjoyment of life. That is a falsehood. The beauty of myriad aspects of creation puts the lie to that, and the biblical position is not some sort of spiritual utilitarianism. (I.e. something is only desirable if it can lead “souls to salvation,” and so on.) The kingdom is full-orbed and brings shalom, which means a peace that carries within it full and abundant life.

That said, a life that is kingdom-oriented is surely going to revalue luxury and ease over against a life that is defined by me and my fallen preferences. We are not materialists and do not worship materialism. Kingdom-oriented life will set Jesus as Lord and enter into the priorities of His mission. And that will mean an alteration in how I look at things. Not that I will look at all luxuries as bad or useless—God doesn’t think that way—but that I will look at them with a different scale than the world does.

The calling to holy desire is a call genuinely to worship God as God and to seek first His kingdom. When we do that, we will, as Paul says in a different context, “earnestly desire the best gifts.”