God is very interested in what we want. The Christian walk can be very difficult at times, and the things we find ourselves wanting, can clash with our own personal values, the Word of God, our consciences, and can work against our desire to know God and to honour Him with our life and actions. God is pin pointing this subject of what it is that I want.
When it comes to the flesh, it wants what it wants to satisfy our base desires and these wants are defined by what it is we think we need to meet our own needs and what has worked in the past to comfort, to ease us from the pain - but they have never worked in the long run, and have only been temporary, like the sacrifices under the Old Covenant, they appease only for a time, and really only cover up a problem, they bring no real permanent resolution.
As a young Christian we still rely on many of these mechanisms, but as we become more intimate, and grow closer to God, the very things that have brought us comfort and peace become the things that separate us from Him and His true comfort, and as we come to know His holiness and we learn why it is we do the things we do, and the shame that binds us because of the compromise we make in doing them, the very real battle of Romans, “I do that which I don’t want to do” becomes very real and we see the dual natures within us warring over what it is we want. And I think that even the fleshly wants are really just us trying to get what God wants us to have – only our way, not His. We want peace, we want healing, we want the comfort of knowing we are loved, but it’s not our way that will cause us to obtain it, but coming into God’s Way.
We learn obedience through the things we suffer – it can take a long time to realise that what we think we want is not really what we want at all, and that it harms us instead of doing us good, and what we really want is what God wants for us - and He is making a way for us to enter in. He is teaching us to receive from Him, freely, instead of trying to obtain what He has by our own efforts. Jesus is the door we must come through, not some other way.
That other way might be sexual interaction – to feel loved or accepted, or it might be self harm just so we can feel. But God is liberating us into His Will, by showing us what these things really are, and showing us the truth and how He intended things to be, the way He designed them, so that we can come into true acceptance, true identity, true worth. The Truth really does set us free.
It’s amazing when we find out that we don’t need these inferior crutches to find the peace we need, that the gift of God is freely given in Christ – and it does take time to realise this in a way that we can really walk in it. But this is the time we are in, where God is liberating those that truly want Him. Because He’s always known what it is that we want, what it is that truly satisfies, when we thought we have known. He knows what we have lost, what we have gone through, why we have tried to cope in various ways, and He is the answer. And He is drawing us up, and drawing us out, of the mire, out of the quicksand of our lives into the glorious liberation, the freedom of the sons of God into our inheritance.
We were never meant to be slaves, but we were meant to serve, He uses everything for good. The amount of treasure that He will extract from our hardships and our darkest hours will be amazing and it will furnish the very Temple of God. There is no one like God. He has wrought a work like no other. He is the True Victor, and He conquers like no other.
So He has put His finger on this subject of want. And He says, “I know what you want, and I know what you truly need.” And honouring our free will completely, He answers the deepest cries, and longings of our hearts, and although we might not know what it is we need at times, and we look in places where there truly is no help, trying to find a way, crawling in the dark on our hands and knees, He hears our cries, and the utterances that are not heard by any other ear – He can interpret the cries of our heart! – and attends to our need. He is the author and finisher and He is a good God – how GREAT IS OUR GOD!