Are Your Desires At Stake?

Categories: RECENT RESEARCH

An excerpt from Souls Like Stars: Renew Your Mind, Heal Your Heart, Unveil Your Shine by Margaret Nagib, PsyD.

God’s plan to give you the future you hope for involves allowing him to fulfill your deepest desires. You can’t know love without embracing them. They are good, and the fulfillment of them draws us deeper into God’s transformative love. Desires of the heart powerfully drive us. They are designed to steer us back to the one who satisfies our heart with good things (Psalm 103:5). When we allow God to fulfill them, we find the kind of satisfaction that’s almost too good to be true—because he is so good.

God cares about our desires because we are his desire. With every desire that is fulfilled, we become more of who we were created to be.

God is not the only source we turn to in order to meet our wants. We can look to other sources, but because God designed our deepest heart’s desires to be fulfilled by him, other sources eventually leave us empty and disappointed. Other sources are often destructive—and they always have strings attached. Instead of a tree of life, a deep ache is created inside. When this happens, we begin to believe that our heart’s desires have caused the ache. We feel betrayed by our own wants so we numb them and forgo our heart’s wisdom. Instead of following our heart, we run from it. We become afraid to want because we can’t afford to be disappointed or hurt again.

Isaiah 55:1-3 explains that all of us thirst and hunger— we have real desires—but only God’s grace and love truly satisfy us. Our heart’s desires aren’t the problem. The critical question becomes, “Who and what are your heart’s desires driving you to?” We are only afraid of our desires when we have gone to other sources to meet them, and our dreams have been shattered. When we become afraid of want, we are no longer powerful stakeholders of our desires but powerless people putting our desires at stake. We become objects of desire instead of subjects of our desire. If God “satisfies your desires with good things,” his way of fulfilling them never leads to destruction because he is the source of love and life. When God fulfills our desires, it always leads to life, love, joy, and meaning. He is the source of these things, and he delights to give them to those he loves.

Margaret Nagib, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist specializing in Christian counseling, inner healing and treating eating disorders, trauma, addiction, self-injury and mood disorders. For 15 years, she has provided individual, family and group therapy. Today, as a key faculty member of Timberline Knolls’ Clinical Development Institute, she travels throughout the country providing clinical training and presentations to professionals. Additionally, Dr. Nagib provides individual, family, group and pastoral counseling. Her goal is to restore Timberline Knolls’ residents to wholeness through a deeper relationship with God, helping each one to find her voice, purpose, and passion.