C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, suggests that we are a people of deep and unending desire (https://www.cslewis.com/us). He further states that our unending quest for satisfaction reveals a deeper and often confounding truth about what it means to be human; what it means to be whole!
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”
We are a people of deep desire. We find that our desires, by in large, remain unfulfilled. It
seems we are an ever longing and always wanting people. The shopping saturated Christmas season is one of our most prolific expressions of this reality. Many will search and seek and hunt and barter; attempting to find items – items that will bring us joy. But we long for more than mere items and the joy possessions can provide.
Perhaps it is from this perspective, in this context, that we can best hear the words of the prophet in Isaiah 64:1 when he exclaims:
Oh, that you would burst from the heavens and come down!
Isaiah pictures the heavens as a vast curtain concealing God and he asks that God would rip them apart and step into his world with his presence felt! Isaiah’s yearning, his desire, is so deep that he asks for God’s fullest and most awesome presence.
In this yearning and longing – expressed in Isaiah’s posture of watching for and waiting on God – his desires (for God’s presence to burst forth) are unearthed by and aimed toward God in the hope that He will come down, dine and dwell!
Continue reading “Advent – Unearthing and Aiming Desire as We Wait on and Watch for Him!”