Gooding, David: 6 - Our Desires and Pleasures

Now this morning, before we come to our epistle by James, we have some preliminary reading to do in the book of Genesis chapter twenty seven. Genesis chapter twenty seven. This is a famous and well-known story. We shall not read it all. I read now a few verses to remind you of one of its prominent themes. That theme is the theme of the five senses. Most people, I think, have five senses, we'll say. If I can remember them, they are sight and hearing and touch and taste and smell. Some folks claim to have a sixth. I'd like you to notice, as we briefly survey this story, that all five senses are here mentioned. The story then of Isaac coming to bless his sons. Genesis twenty seven one: and it came to pass that when Isaac was old and his eyes were dim, so that he could not see. And there immediately you have the sense of sight. He called Esau, his elder son, and said unto him, My son, and he said unto him, Here am I. And he said, Behold, now I am old, I know not the day of my death. Now therefore take, I pray thee, thy weapons, thy quiver and thy bow, and go out to the field and take me venison, and make me savory meat such as I love, and bring it to me that I may eat, that my soul may bless thee before I die. There for you is the sense of taste. Come down now, if you will, to verse twenty one. And Isaac said unto Jacob, Come near, I pray thee, that I may feel thee, my son, whether thou be my very son Esau or not. The sense of touch. And Jacob went near unto Isaac his father, and he felt him. He said, the voice is Jacob's voice. The sense of hearing. But the hands are the hands of Esau. Verse twenty six: And his father Isaac said unto him, come near now and kiss me, my son. And he came near and kissed him, and he smelled the smell of his raiment, and blessed him and said, See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed. The sense of smell. And this all in connection with what is its major theme, the theme of blessing. And it will move us later to inquire what is the relation of our senses and our sensations to the question of blessing. Now over to our main reading from the epistle by James. James chapter four, beginning in verse one. Whence come wars and whence come fightings among you? Come they not hence even of your pleasures that war in your members? You lust and have not. You kill and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. You have not because you ask not. You ask and receive not because you ask amiss, that you may spend it in your pleasures. You adulteresses, know you not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore would be a friend of the world maketh himself an enemy of God. But now here we must pause for five minutes and do some rigorous thinking. Verse five of chapter four of James is perhaps one of the most disputed verses in all the New Testament, disputed as to what it actually means. There are some questions that I ought to investigate with you just at this moment before I give you what my humble opinion is. I am sure that when I give it, a lot of the learned theologians present here will disagree with me anyway, and we shall go on disagreeing until we get home to glory. Then we shan't need to know who was right. You will say, but, um, in due deference to them, I must just explain what the difficulty is and what I think the right interpretation and translation should be. First question is this: is verse five one whole verse? And is it meant to be a specific quotation from the Old Testament? Shall we read it thus? Or do you think that the scripture says in vain that the spirit which he made to dwell in us longs unto envying? Is it all one verse with a quotation from Old Testament? And of course, the learned point out that there is no verse in the Old Testament that explicitly says that the spirit which he has caused to dwell in us longs unto envy. So there are some who would divide the verse in two, or think you that the scripture speaks in vain. What scripture? Well, not any particular scripture, but a whole array of scriptures in the Old Testament that warns us against the sin that James has just mentioned in verse four, the sin of spiritual adultery and worldliness. There are, of course, many scriptures in the Old Testament that warn God's people against this fragrant sin, the sin of spiritual adultery. And so they say James is referring not to a particular scripture, but to Old Testament scriptures in general on this topic. Very good. Well, what shall we do with the second part of the sentence? Now that's the problem. And the problem lies in many different things. First of all, how it should be translated even. Um, shall we take it as, uh, a statement? The spirit which he made to dwell in us longs unto envying. Which spirit is he talking about? The learners say, but it can't be the spirit of God, because look what he said about him, he longs unto envying. And here we must pause to try and grasp the, the precise meaning of the noun envy. Normally in scripture, envy is a bad thing. In scripture, it is true we read of God being jealous, but jealousy can be a good thing, can't it? Some jealousy, of course, is bad, but there is a type of jealousy that is good, and the Lord our God is a jealous God. And you'll see. The word is used against a background of marital infidelity. A woman whose husband is being taken off by some other woman will quite rightly be jealous over her husband. If she weren't jealous, she wouldn't really love him. If she could see her husband carted off by some other woman and say, well, that doesn't matter, I got plenty more where he comes from, then she never did love him really. The more she loves him, the more she will be jealous if her husband's loyalty and love to her is tampered with by somebody else. And using that figure, God informs us that he is certainly jealous, jealous for his people. If the world or the devil or whatever passing pleasure takes the love and devotion of his people away from the heart of God, then God rightly becomes jealous. So jealousy is a good thing. But some people say, you'll see, but the word here used is not jealousy, it is envy, and envy is always bad, uh, and it cannot be used of God. So it can't be the Holy Spirit that longs unto envy. So those who think that the Holy Spirit is referred to translate the whole thing as a question. Do you think the scripture speaks in vain? Of course not. Does the Spirit, that is, does the Holy Spirit whom God has caused to dwell in us, long unto envy? Of course not. Perish the thought. Therefore, if you become envious of other people, you are offending against the Holy Spirit himself, that gracious person. And that makes good sense, doesn't it? So all of you who believe that may go home feeling that, uh, at least it makes good sense. It's true anyway, whether that is what James is saying or not. But then you'll see, I'm not quite sure myself that the word translated envy cannot be used of God. For this word in Greek,thonos, it's, it's the word is, can be used of envy in the sense of begrudging somebody something. The Greeks talked of their pagan gods as being envious, and we can see that their ideas were false and wrong. They said, you see, that if you were exceedingly wealthy, that would become dangerous because the gods would become envious of your wealth. And so the best thing you could do to stop them smiting you would be to get the thing that you treasured most and throw it away so it couldn't come back again, and thus stop the gods being envious. That's pagan superstition, isn't it? God is never envious in that sense. But I'm going to suggest to you seriously this morning that God can begrudge us things. Let me use a a stupid and absurd and exaggerated illustration. Here is a charming young gentleman, and he has a magnificent wife, and when they marry, he's so in love with her that he endows her with five hundred thousand pounds in the bank to do as she pleases with. You can see how enamored he is of the dear lady, you'll see. Of course, he's hoping that she'll use it now and again to, to for his advantage, but anyway, he wants her to use it to develop her personality, you'll see, and uh, so that she should be an even more wonderful woman and love him more intelligently and fervently. And he smiles as he see her buying a set of oil paint brushes, and he says that will do her good to get her out from the kitchen and into the countryside and develop her artistic sense, and it'll have a spin-off in the home anyway, and the home will look marvelous, and she'll be a more wonderful person, and all that will be gorgeous. Yes, and so she doesn't mind when, uh, he she spends so much on the old oil paint kit. But, um, one of these days he comes home with an exotic racing car, and he says, what's this, my dear? Well, he says, I met a chap down the road in the painting club, and he's into s- uh, to racing, and he's shown me what a marvelous thing it is, and I'm going into racing. In actual fact, I was going to tell you that I should be away all the summer. I'm doing the racing circuits in France. Oh, you are? And what about me and the kids? Oh, I can't help that. There's nothing wrong in racing, and I'm going off. I'm going to have my pleasure. Oh, I see. Well, that's bad enough. He manages to eke out the summer. And when she comes home, one day he finds, uh, a firm downtown delivering the most exotic skiing equipment you could ever see. And he says, my dear, there came a parcel for you this morning. Oh yes, he said, there's the skis I ordered. I meant to tell you I'm going off this winter. I- I- I've taken them skiing, you see, and I bought a little chalet in Switzerland, and I'm going off swing, uh, skiing, you see. Hope you don't mind. I should be back about next March when the snow is gone. And he says, you are? Tell me, would you think it's a wrong thing if the husband now began to begrudge the woman that five hundred thousand pounds? He may feel jealous under the notion that it's some other man that's taken away her love. But in addition to the jealousy, he could very well begrudge the money. If this is how she's going to use it, I wish I'd never given it to her. I wish I could take it from her. For all my money has done is to lose me, her heart, on other things. Whether that's what James saying, I think it is. It is so possible, isn't it? Sometimes God finds it difficult to be kind, you know. When he would want to give us lovely things. The danger is in the end that the lovely things take our hearts away from the Lord and consume our time, so we've no time for him. And it wouldn't be wrong to say that then God begrudges even the lovely things he's given us, if that's going to be their result. And why do I think this is God, who is the subject of the verb? The verb is, as you see in verse five, long unto envying. Notice that word long. It stands in contrast to our lusts. This is God's longings. The word is always used in the New Testament in a good sense, says Paul of his believers, I long after you. Here is a verb that is telling us the marvels of the heart of God as he longs over his people. He wants them. Can you not see, my brother, my sister, how he longs after you, longs after your heart, longs after your time, longs after you more than anything else? For he gave all heaven had in his longing to buy your heart and buy your affection. He longs. And he longs over you to the point of getting envious, uh, jealous if your loyalty and love is tampered with. He longs after you to the point of begrudging you, even those otherwise harmless things, if they take your love and heart and time from him. And his begrudging may go so far that if we don't cure it ourselves, he might remove those things and feed us on bread and water for a time until we learn to come back to him. Finally, what shall I make of the phrase, the spirit that he has caused to dwell in us? I think it is not the Holy Spirit, though it is true God has caused the Holy Spirit to dwell in each of his people. But the verb in Greek, to long, must take an object. You have to long for something. I take the verse to be saying that God longs for the spirit that he has caused to dwell in us, and he does, doesn't he? He longs for that spirit that he put in us, that made us capable of fellowship with God. Here is the wonder of our creation. Unlike the brute beasts, we were made so that we might have fellowship with God, who is spirit, and God caused a spirit to dwell in us for the very purpose that we might respond to him and be able to have fellowship with him. And Almighty God, who put that human spirit within us with all its potential, longs for that spirit. And it will break his divine heart eternally if that spirit is alienated and perishes at last in the outer darkness. So that at least is how I'm going to read the verse, and excuse that diatribe. We come back now to reading James before we get down to our study, Papa. You were hoping the study was now over, weren't you? But no, it isn't. It's, it's only just begun, actually, you'll see. Right ho. Or do you think that the scripture says in vain that God longs for the spirit that he has placed within us, and longs for it to the point of envy and begrudging. While He begrudges us certain things if they will take us from him, he will always give more grace. Wherefore, Scripture says, God resisteth the proud but giveth grace to the humble. Be subject therefore unto God, but resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be afflicted and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to heaviness. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall exalt you. Speak not one against another, brethren. He that speaketh against a brother or judgeth his brother speaketh against the law and judges the law. But if thou judgest the law, thou art not a doer of the law, but a judge. One only is the lawgiver and judge, even he who is able to save and to destroy. But who art thou that judgest thy neighbor? Go to now, you that say, today or tomorrow we will go into this city and spend a year there and trade and get gain, whereas you know not what shall be on the morrow. What is your life? For you are a vapor that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away. For that you ought to say is the Lord will, we shall both live and do this or that. But now you glory in your vauntings. All such glorying is evil. To him therefore that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin. And may God give us good understanding of his word. Now, as you know, we are currently studying James under the general title of James's vision of the perfect man and woman. And in the course of his chapters, James has been setting before us conquests that we must make if ever we are to reach spiritual maturity. Yesterday we saw that in James's last three chapters, he brings before us certain major features of our human character and personality, our human makeup. He talked to us yesterday about the faculty of the tongue, the faculty of speech, a major high endowment of our human personality. Tomorrow, God willing, he will talk to us about our moral sense that distinguishes mankind from the brute beast. Once more, one of the godlike features of a human personality, our moral sense, our sense of justice. This morning, James wants to speak to us about those powerful engines, those powerful motors and motivators that are our desires, inbuilt by the Creator himself. James wants also to talk to us about those delightful side effects that God has built into our personality, our capacity for pleasure. They say that one of these days, uh, computers will be so marvelous that you won't be able to tell the difference between a computer and a human being. Roger Penrose, the great mathematician in Oxford, he will not agree to that proposition, and he proposes a simple test to see whether you can distinguish a computer from a human being. A computer may know vastly more than any one of us or all of us put together, and be able to do marvelous sums in its head. But, says Roger Penrose, you could put this question to a human, what does it feel like to be a human being, and they would know what you meant, even if they couldn't adequately describe it. But you could stand there forever and ask a computer, what does it feel like to be a computer, old boy? I wouldn't know what the question meant, let alone be able to answer it. Aren't you glad God didn't make you as a computer? You'd be very brainy. We should pay you, I don't know how many thousands of years, but what you would miss if you were just a computer. God has made us human beings. There's that marvelous capacity for pleasure and enjoyment. All these great features of our human personality were, when they came from the hands of God, of course, perfect. But through the fall, alas, all of them have been injured, damaged, spoiled. They have not been completely destroyed or eradicated. Much of the original glory still remains, but it is the fact that in very serious respects, these great faculties and features of the human personality have been harmed and damaged and put to some extent out of control. So that James's point in reminding us of them is this, that if ever we are to attain spiritual maturity, we shall, by God's help, have to face these faculties of our human personality, and by the gracious power of the Savior and his Holy Spirit, bring them back to heel, and bring them once more under the beneficent reign of our holy Redeemer, so that once more we may be integrated personalities, wholesome personalities, glorious princes and princesses as God designed us to be, fit for the very mansions above. So this morning we have to think then of the desires and pleasures. And as we said yesterday, we must start off by thinking what lovely things they are, mustn't we? And do honor to the Creator who gave us them. Yesterday we thought of the desire of food and the marvels of hunger, and the sheer glory of satisfying that hunger and all the tickling lovelinesses that go down with the sausages. And I noticed that perhaps there were an undue number of gentlemen that approved, in obvious terms, you'll say, too much perhaps than they should. But, uh, food is not the only desire, is it? Or thirst. There are other lovely physical sensations that God has invented, and they are the more remarkable because you don't get hungry for them. They come all the unexpected. You'll see food is glorious, but it has this disadvantage, you might think, that when you're hungry, the food smells marvelous, and you have a tremendous appetite, and you start to eat, and you enjoy the lovely feeling, but the more you eat, the less, the less the feeling gets. Till most people, at least, get to the point when they don't want anymore. And when you've had a very good dinner, then the smell of the old bacon in the frying pan becomes a little bit revolting, doesn't it? You just to get away, so say. Ha. There are other marvelous physical delights, aren't there? Not like that. Take the fragrance of a rose. You don't get hungry for it necessarily, do you? You've been in the smoke and the grime of Belfast all day long. Uh, you happen to turn a corner, oh, there's a flower shop, and the fragrance of a hundred roses greets your nostrils. You say, how delightful. You weren't hungry, but you got this for nothing, unless you've gone and buy the rose. You've got the smell for nothing. And God took you by surprise, didn't he? And you've forgotten you had a smellery. And now, oh, how lovely the thing is. What a God he is, our God is, you know. What an inventor of delight. So what heaven is going to be, to be sure. You'll be coming down the golden street, and you'll turn a corner and you'll meet such a delight as you never knew existed. For the God who loves you and has given you a capacity for enjoyment and pleasure is a God of infinite ingenuity. Oh, praise his name. And it's not merely desire for food, is it, that he put in us, or enjoyment of food as a pleasure. There is aesthetic pleasure. Bible tells us that in the Garden of Eden, God made trees, and the historian puts them in this order. He says trees good to look at, and then good for food. You'll say, some trees are there simply for being beautiful. So are some plants, aren't they? You can't eat daffodils. Well, you'll get a bad stomach if you do. You say, what use are daffodils? Give me turnips any day of the week. Oh, I see you put a great, uh, value on the stomach, do you? God happens to think that tulips perhaps are even more beautiful than turnips. He puts first the trees that are good to. Look at. We need food for our minds, don't we, as well as our stomach. How marvelous God has been to supply flowers with all their color. They do for us, even when we're not thinking, a marvelous amount of good, don't they? Soothing us and bringing us joy and gladness and stability. How grateful we ought to be that we don't live in a world that's gray all the time. And if you were going to visit a friend very ill in hospital, you mightn't think it appropriate to take him potatoes or turnips, might you? If he were too ill for grapes, you might consider taking him a bunch of beautiful roses. And the sight of the roses would charm the lady's mind, pacify her, calm her, perhaps give her a sense of the beauty of life, and begin to reinvigorate her desire to live and enjoy life. Oh, what a magnificent God God is! And not only flower and color, but music. Taught us by the very birds that sing. And when we get home to heaven, there'll be singing up in heaven, like as angels never hurt. And with it our ability to be creative in art ourselves. And the sight of the roses would charm the lady's mind, pacify her, calm her, and give her a sense of the beauty of life and begin to reinvigorate her desire to live and enjoy life. Oh, what a magnificent God God is! And not only flower and color, but music. Taught us by the very birds that sing. And when we get home to heaven, they'll be singing up in heaven, such as angels never heard. And with it, our ability to be creative in art ourselves and copy the creator. Hey, what? And then there's intellectual desire, isn't there? An intellectual satisfaction. And it comes best when it's pure. Like the scientists who study the universe just because it's there, not in order to be able to make video nasties or something and make a lot of money, but because the the universe is there. Like the great scientists Kepler and Faraday, who studied the universe because they believed it was the work of God's hand. And as God gave them to understand, intellectually understand how it works, it moved them to awe and to worship at the wonder of the mind of God. Said Kepler, we are thinking the thoughts of God after him. Berusal of the intellect of God brought such profound intellectual satisfaction as, uh, bow their hearts in worship. And then there's not only desire for those satisfactions, there are other desires, aren't there? One that you might call ambition. Do you think Adam had any ambition? I hope he didn't. He was put to sea after the garden, you know, and responsible to tend this garden and keep it in a good state of repair, and then he was told outside there was a big, big world that he had to go forth and to organize and to develop and to rule. I hope he had somewhere in his head the a- the ambition to do the great task that God has given him and make something of the earth with all its potential. And isn't. But in all those great desires and powers and motivations that God put into man, there was, as you notice, one great controlling thing. In the middle of the garden, there was a tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God put the restriction on it. All the other trees you may eat, but this tree you mustn't eat. The day you eat it, you shall die. So that amidst all those delights and desires and pleasures, God put this supreme controlling element, God, his word, his command. God straightly charged them that if they would enjoy things, their desires must be under this limitation that first they obey the law and honor his word, that never, never, never, never must they attempt to let their desires move them to seize pleasures independent of the Lord or in disobedience to his word. And as we know, that is precisely where the tempter ruin. Go for it, Eve, he said. Here is marvelous satisfaction for your pleasures, good for food, aesthetically pleasing and satisfying, stuff there to keep you intellectually amou- amused and give you wisdom. Go for it, E. But he said, what about God? And what about his word? And what about our relation to him? Oh, bother it, said Satan. Life, you will get the most out of life. Life is that physical satisfaction, intellectual satisfaction, aesthetic satisfaction, and that is all there is. And God and his word, go hang. God had warned them that in the day they ate thereof, they would most surely die. It didn't mean, did it? That from that very moment on, they didn't ever again enjoy hunger and the satisfying of hunger with food, and forgot the significance of color or became deaf to music. No. They died. For an exceedingly subtle change had taken place. There had come into being at that moment what the Bible technically calls the world. Now the world has many aspects. One of its chiefest aspects is told us by the Apostle John in his first epistle in chapter two. Love not the world, says John, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the desire of the flesh and the desire of the eye and the vainglory of life is not of the Father anymore, but is of the world. You see, what had happened was this, that all those lovely things that we long for and rightly hunger for and enjoy using, they were meant to be under the control of God, enjoyed as we were responsible to him, making him our chief desire, and under the control of his word, so that these very joys should express to us God himself and lead us back to God, ever to God, in gratitude and worship and humble and willing obedience. And that is what went wrong. Cruelly enough, Satan had taken not the bad things, for there weren't any bad things at that point. Sa- Satan had not taken the bad things of life to take Adam and Eve away from God. He had used the beautiful things of life, the charming things of life. And I tell you now, there will be more people damned in hell and lost as a result of the lovely things of life. And they will be damned for the vicious perversions of life. It's not the vicious things that take our believing hearts from the Lord, is it? But it could be the lovely things of life, the beautiful things of life, that eventually so fill our time and hearts that they draw us away from the Lord. That is worldliness. The world gone from the love of the Father, and now its great aim in life is no longer the Father and his good pleasure and serving his pleasure and serving his will. Now the great aim in life is our own desire and satisfying our desire and enjoying our pleasures. These become goals in themselves. It's like a girl who comes to work one day and you notice on her finger she has an engagement ring. And you say, hello, my dear, is that an engagement ring? And she says, yes, of course it is. You say, let me have a look at it, even though you are an old grungy man, you like to to to take notice of these things. And it was, oh, that's a beautiful ring. Yes, what is it? Is that gold? No, it's platinum that. And three gem stars, all you know, diamonds are forever. Isn't that an exquisite work of art? Beautiful. And you admire its aesthetics, don't you? And then when you've done that, you, you ask the next question, tell me, who is the fortunate young man? What is she? She'd turn around and say, what do you mean, young man? Well, you say the young man who gave you the ring. And she turns around and says, but there isn't any young man. There aren't young men. Don't believe in young men. What will you say next? Oh, she said, well, I say yes, well, all right then, but it's a lovely ring, certainly. Now the ultimate significance has gone out of it, hasn't it? And all the pleasures in all the universe heap together marvelous pleasures. But without the Lord. The significance is gone, hasn't it? The engagement ring without the eternal lover. What happens to people? Well, we better come back to James and read him as briefly as we can. In extreme cases, pleasures can take over, and now instead of being under God's control, or even under the control of the man and woman who is trying to enjoy them. In extreme cases, pleasures can take over and rule the person. Whence come wars and whence come fightings among you? Come they not hence even of your pleasures that war in your own members? We've all sorts of desires, haven't we, in our bodies, and we ought to learn how to order them and put them in their hierarchy of values and control the pleasures. Woe betide the man or woman that loses control of his pleasures and his desires, and they come to rule him or rule her. In the end, they'll tear him to pieces. Now and again, I met an occasional student, you know, who had certain abilities and could have passed his examinations if he pleased. His trouble was this, that he wasn't in control of his desires and pleasures. So he would tell you most seriously, oh, I do want a degree. Yes, I, I do, I really want a degree. Ah yes, so that was one desire. But come, uh, the morning, his friends were going off to play golf, and he did want to play golf, so he went off to play golf. You'll see. And then he tried to settle down to study at night, and, uh, he desired a degree, but then he heard the music away in the disco set in the students' union, and, well, he desired the disco set music, you see, so he went off to the music, and that was the study that was done that day, and sometimes that week. I vividly remember a good gentleman. He'd had many attempts at his exams, and in the mercy of the university, he'd been allowed many more. Till now he had come to the last attempt to pass his, uh, finals, we'll say, and he told me he did really want a degree, and the university arranged that he should have a resit examination in September. And when the resit examination came, he didn't turn up. He wasn't there. At last, I was able to track him down somewhere at the beginning of November. I said, old chap, as a matter of interest, uh, I've been missing you. Um, uh, where'd you got to? You didn't turn up to your exam. Oh, well, he said, uh, my uncle gave me a free ticket to America, and I'd like to see America. Oh, he said, I hope you enjoyed it. Well, what's wrong with la- wanting to see America? Nothing. But he's wanting to see America quite cancelled out the other desire to get a degree. That's an extreme case, isn't it? Where people allow their desires, the whole menagerie of desires within them, to pull them this way and pull them that way and pull the other way, until it leaves them a wreck. Pray to remember James is talking to believers. I have a desire to be holy. And I've got a thousand and one other desires, and in themselves they're quite legitimate. What must I do? I must decide what's going to be the ruling desire, mustn't I? And under a believer, see, as a believer, see that all my desires are, are arranged in their proper hierarchy, and all of them under the supreme desire. This one thing I do, and this will I seek after. That is the Lord and his will. Of course, most unregenerate people have learned this, haven't they? To submit, to subdue one desire and put it in subjection to a bigger desire. The man who wants to get on in business has to curb his desire to play golf all the day long, because he'll never acha- attain his commercial, uh, desires, and he'll never have the money to play the golf. So he's got to arrange them in a hierarchy. But you know, there's something dangerous here too. For if the supreme desire is not the Lord, but merely my desire, it can turn me into a ruthless kind of a creature. You fight, you war, says James, you're prepared to murder. Of course, he's using metaphorical language, isn't he? But what he's expressing is the utter ruthlessness of our desires. Take the man who has a love of money, this is his chief objective. He won't mind who he cheats, so long as he gets away with it. Morality goes out of the window. The ruthless, supreme desire in life is to make money. Here's a man whose ambition and desire is for power. And if that is his supreme desire, he won't mind who he climbs on and pushes down so that he gets to the top. I remember James is talking to believers, won't you? It can happen, my dear brethren, even amongst believing peoples in a Christian church, that the old unregenerate desire for power masks itself as godliness, and the man is determined to have his way and determined to control it. He doesn't mind who he pushes out of the way to be the boss. And you know, if you make one pleasure your tyrant boss, go for it. It can ruin both you and other people. A man who has made sexual pleasure his tyrant doesn't mind whose heart he breaks. It will in the end depersonalize him and those he sullies. What he wants is pleasure, sensation. And presently he loses all concept of love, that is loyalty to a person is simply out for pleasure. Our modern world is going that way, isn't it? Sometimes they tell me that some young gentlemen will say, come to marriage starry-eyed, don't they? You say, how do you know? I read it in a book. And I imagine it's all going to be stars and ecstasies and glories and wonders, and for the first six months it is, perhaps. But then... the normalities of life, the prose of life takes over more than the poetry. Ah, but you see, the man wasn't in it for love, he was in it for pleasure, for sensation. When the pleasure begins to diminish and the sensation begins to drop off, then he thinks he's perfectly right to ditch the good woman. There's no sense of loyalty and true love, and he's off to the next victim to keep up the sensations and the pleasures of novelty. And when that wears off, he's on to the third. My dear good brethren, let me say it with bated breath, but this thing is becoming a scourge among the people of God in some countries. It is a serious thing then. It is more serious. How shall we put it right? Well, not by denying desire, that would be impossible, wouldn't it? And foolish. To deny all desire is the Buddhist way of trying to reach perfection, it's not the Christian way of reaching perfection. God has put within the heart of everybody, hasn't he, a deep-seated desire, whether they know it or not. We are contingent creatures, we depend upon God. If we try to live as though we were independent of God, we shall feel always some empty gap within. And oh, how lovely is our Christian gospel that doesn't ob- uh, order people to suppress their thirst, but offers to satisfy it. He that cometh to me and drinketh this, of this water shall never thirst again. Come, why do you spend your labor for that which is not bread, and your money for that which satisfies not, says the Lord? If any man thirst, let him to come unto me and drink, and out of his inward part shall flow rivers of living water. Yes, the very gospel talks to us in terms of our desires that will bring us back to the true fountain of all pleasure. But when we get converted, Peter will come alongside and tell us, now look here. If you are now born again, then begin to look to your desires. Don't fashion yourself according to your desires, your former desires, in your ignorance, letting your desires pull you all over the place, but get this consuming desire predominant among the rest. As he who calls you is holy, so be you holy in all manner of conversation. And let that desire be a consuming and controlling desire. As newborn babes, says he, long for the milk of the word, that you may grow thereby to salvation. We've got to begin to take our desires in hand as believers, haven't we? And see to them that all our desires are under the supreme desire of pleasing the Lord. But here even there is a little danger. You don't receive because you don't ask, says James. And then sometimes you ask and you don't get because you want to spend it on your pleasures. And he's talking to believers. You'll say, but Mr. Preacher, haven't you said that pleasure is a good thing? Doesn't the Lord like to give us pleasure? Well, yes, he does. But now let me talk to you about Isaac for a moment and his experience, his experience of the blessing of God. And in order to do that, I shall have to set up for you a little framework. What do we mean by the blessing of the Lord? Well, what we mean by the blessing of the Lord is first God and his word. So that God promised us forgiveness, for instance, if we will repent and believe, he offers us the blessing of forgiveness, yes? So we listen to his word, and we hear about his offered gift, and we're moved to repent and believe it, and in believing it, we get the blessing that is forgiveness of sin. Good. And notice how good God is. Sometimes, along with the blessing, we get lovely emotions, don't we? Like David did when he got forgiven. Oh, he said, all the blessedness of the man whose sins are forgiven, and he nearly danced for joy, and he wrote a lyric that came top of the pops. As a result of it, you will say a marvelous lyric that comes to us still, the glories and wonders, the emotional joy of having got forgiveness. But you know, you have to get the gift first, don't you, before you can get the emotion. And even if you don't get the emotion, it doesn't matter if you've got the gift. What? The order is first God's word, believed, that brings the blessing, that may or may not then have an added emotion of joy. Sometimes God, and he's so rich in his mercy, not only gives us emotions of joy, but he gives us marvelous sensations as well, doesn't he? Kind of pleasures, you see. Have you seen somebody weeping for joy? It's a very funny thing, isn't it? That funny sensation that dissolves people into tears through their very joy. Funny thing, sensation. You can weep for sorrow, you can weep for joy, but there you are. God allows us sensation as well sometimes, doesn't he? Of sheer joy, sometimes going into tears. But... we mustn't get it the wrong way round, may we? What would you say if a man and wife had a quarrel, Josie? I read this in the book as well. Sometimes when their husbands and wives quarrel, they tell me, it, uh, is terrible, but then comes a moment when they make it up, and they say it's heavenly. Marvelous! Make it up, you'll see. What would you say to the man who said, my dear, I'm thinking it's about time we had another quarrel, whatever for? Well, that was so marvelous and joying, you know, the sensations were so delightful when we made it up that I'd like to get those sensations all over again, you'll see. A man has gone silly. There is a hymn that says it, though. Where is the blessedness that once I knew when first I knew the Lord and felt my heart deeply moved with contrition? Well, they were marvelous sensations, weren't they? You want it all over again? No, that's not the way. The way is not to try and rake up past experience, but to go on with the Lord and thank him for his past blessings and go in for the new blessing. But sometimes, you know, we make the mistake, don't we? And we go not for the blessing, we go for the sensation and the joy and miss the blessing. It happened, didn't it? With Jacob. He had been blessed of God, and now came the time in his life when he was, uh, going to pass on that blessing to his sons, you see. And he felt he couldn't just pass it on just like that, stone cold. He must sort of work up a kind of a feeling, you'll see, so that he'd been in the mood to bless them. Now, how should he have blessed them? Well, actually, he had a word from God, or his wife did, that the elder son should serve the younger, and he ought to have put the younger first. Ah, but that was the word of God. And just now, Isaac wasn't particularly interested in the word of God. He preferred Esau anyway, and in his heart was that beautiful smell of venison, you know, uh, made in its beautiful gravy and tickling the old palate. And God had blessed him with, uh, land and crops and animals and herds, and often he'd tasted this venison out of the goodness of God. But now, when he came to pass on the venison, it wasn't the word of God that he went by. What he was looking for was the sensation and the taste of roast venison. So he sent out Esau to get it, and you know the story, how Jacob deceived the old boy. He came in dressed up. Ja- Isaac's eyes were dim, and he couldn't see, but he could hear. He said, the voice is the voice of Jacob and not Esau at all. It's Jacob's voice, and would to God he had listened to his hearing, but no, nothing would do. He said, come near, my boy, and I, I can feel you, so he felt him. Oh yes, this is something solid here now, and hairy flesh this was. This must be Esau, you'll see? It wasn't, was it? The sensation deceived him. Wasn't Esau. And then he said, come near, my boy, I'd like to smell you. Oh yes, he said, that's the real thing I can smell it is. This is the smell of the field which the Lord has blessed. Now, I don't know about you, but Esau coming in from a day's hunting, I wouldn't have thought the smell of him was particularly what you would regard as blessing, but never mind, you'll see. Mm, it smells, he said. And going by his smell, was deceived, wasn't he? Wasn't the real thing. And then he ate what was supposed to be the venison. Oh, he says, magnificent taste, oh, marvelous. Deceived again. It wasn't venison, it was a Chinese takeaway that Rebecca had cooked up. And instead of going for God's word, he went for the sensations and was horribly deceived. Oh, my dear fellow believers, there's a lesson there, isn't there? You ask even in your spiritual devotions, and you don't receive. Why? Because you're more interested in getting something that's going to tickle your sensations, you're asking that you might spend it on your pleasures. It is possible even in the spiritual life to make the pleasures, the sensations, the emotions, the chief thing we're going for, and as long as in the meeting our emotions are moved, we think we're doing marvelously well, and we go for the sensations and the excitement, but let God begin to talk calmly through his word, and we say, well, that's a bore. You couldn't expect us to put up with that boring stuff. In there lurks a very big danger. If we would enjoy what God has given, we must start with God and start with his word, and believe his word, and then receive the blessing, and let what emotions will and what sensations and pleasures will come or not come, as God pleases. Now, this is a big topic, isn't it? And our time has more than run out today. I want to thank you for your willingness, or some of you, to come tomorrow, that we may hear the end of this story, how we are to deal with our desires and our pleasures, and then finally tomorrow to say a word or two about that other major faculty of the human personality, our moral sense, and how to bring that too under the control of our blessed Lord. The Lord use his word to speak to our hearts for his name's sake. Thank you.