How Does Jesus Meet Us in Our Desires?

I meet a lot of men whose sexual desires dictate so much of their lives, and they find themselves time and time again falling prey to its demands. These men are regularly pursuing carnal sexual pleasure, but they aren’t satisfied. They aren’t content, and they certainly aren’t fulfilled.

By nature, our desires long for satisfaction. We all know the experience of being hungry and having a wonderful meal set before us. And if we don’t give in to the temptation towards gluttony, we know the feeling of being pleasantly full, satisfied, and content enough to stop eating. That experience of peace, joy, satisfaction, and rest is absent from sexual sin. At best, there may be a brief reprieve from intense desire, but it’s largely overshadowed by greater guilt and shame.

And here’s the perpetuating cycle that many of us find ourselves in: the more we try to satiate our desires through sinful means, the further out of reach contentment becomes. It’s like trying to put two positively charged magnets together. No matter how hard you try to connect them, they’ll never come together. Or think of poison ivy. You long to scratch that itch, but the more you scratch it, the more it itches. Your scratching takes you further from the relief you desired.

Satan has so many Christian men and women stuck in this cycle, stuck in a never-ending loop of discontentment, dissatisfaction, and emptiness. If that’s you, or if that’s someone you love, I hope these brief words will help you.

First, all pleasure was meant to point us to Jesus, the only one who can satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts. God did not design any pleasure in this life to be an end in and of itself. All pleasures in this life point past themselves to the lover of our souls. As soon as you disconnect pleasure from worship of Christ, you are setting yourself up for insatiable desires that will never be satisfied.

Second, in Christ, as a new creation, you have a new heart that fundamentally delights to follow God and obey him. I’ve never met a Christian man who resisted forbidden pleasures and then said he regretted it. Why is that? Because our hearts resonate with Psalm 119, which contains 176 verses all about delighting in God’s law. I believe that Psalm 119 is describing the deepest longings of your heart in Christ. If you are a new creation, then at your core you can say, “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day. How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” You can never find fulfillment in sin, because that’s fundamentally opposed to who you are in Christ.

Lastly, it is by God’s design that even the best moments of fulfillment in this life still leave us longing for something better. They will always come up short, because Jesus has yet to return. He has yet to usher in the fullness of the coming age. We get so many glimpses of it as we live between the overlap of this present evil age and the age to come. But that day will come when we see Jesus face to face, and we will be able to say, “I am satisfied. I am thirsty no more.”