desire on Mind and Body

The late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck was convinced that buried in our explicit pursuit of sex is an implicit pursuit of God. He noted that sex is likely to be the closest that most people ever come to ...

Pastor: For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. All: For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the...

Let us love the Lord God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength. Let us love Him with all our understanding, powers, and fortitude. Let us offer to Him our every effort, ...

Preaching commentary Speakers in the Text First, let’s sort out the text on the basis of the speakers. The books of the major prophets, much like the Psalms, are anthologies of the respective proph...

preaching commentary The context The parables we hear this week are part of a collection of parables of the Kingdom collected by Matthew in chapter 13 of his gospel account. As with the Sermon on t...

Lent 2021: A 40-day Heart Restoration The Broken Heart Bonus Content: Video prep session with Jin Cho on Psalm 51 . Password:  Bn*=61p! AIM Commentary Introduction Ash Wednesday Ash Wednes...

The context The parables we hear this week are part of a collection of parables of the Kingdom collected by Matthew in chapter 13 of his gospel account. As with the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7),...

The context The parables we hear this week are part of a collection of parables of the Kingdom collected by Matthew in chapter 13 of his gospel account. As with the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7),...

What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.

In her engaging treatment, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes both the beauty and pain of seeing our own sinful nature: It is often true that once we are made to see, we don’t like w...

Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.

Let temporal things serve your use, but the eternal be the object of your desire.

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

It is not the things of this world that either occupy the soul or cause it harm, since they enter it not, but rather the will and desire for them.

In her book Invitation to Retreat, Ruth Haley Barton shares some of the many insights she has had since she began intentionally taking inattentional retreats to re-connect with God and her own desires...

Part of the suspicion of desire undoubtedly has to do precisely with the fact that it threatens a rational, controlled, and protected understanding of a mature human being.

Desire haunts us. In its deepest sense, it is a God-given dimension of human identity. As such, desire is what powers all human spirituality. Yet at the same time, spirituality in Christianity and in ...

All of us live inside of an economy of desire.

We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves; we desire to live an imaginary life in the minds of others, and for this purpose we endeavor to shine.

My suspicion is that we have simply lost our way. I suspect that our material longings are more largely formed by our culture than by the Christ and that our spending habits do not differ radically fr...

Pastor: Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name! People: Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, Pastor: who forgives all your iniquity, who h...

Unsurprisingly, whenever we bring the topic of desire into view, our imaginations easily wander in the direction of sex, which can be as discomforting as it is arousing—but it is certainly not irrelev...

Bit by intelligible bit, a vocation lets us express our healthiest instincts, our noblest desires… In small things and in large, we can attend to the haunting inner summons of our soul.

This excerpt from the Catholic priest Ronald Rolheiser is quite profound. It is reminiscent of that great line from Dr. Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park: “Life finds a way.” Speaking on the subject of desi...

The fourteenth-century Italian mystic Catherine of Siena recognised this positive and extraordinary power of our desires when she wrote that it makes them one of the few ways of touching God because “...

Intro These are incredibly rich texts. This guide recommends taking a detour through salvation history to put them in their right context. This helps your congregation expand their understanding of ...

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to r...

But the main point is that there is nothing passive or limp about desire, for it gives energy and direction to our psyche.

Sin comes when we take a perfectly natural desire or longing or ambition and try desperately to fulfill it without God. Not only is it sin, it is a perverse distortion of the image of the Creator in u...

Intro These are incredibly rich texts. This guide recommends taking a detour through salvation history to put them in their right context. This helps your congregation expand their understanding of ...