God For Our Needs and Desires, Not Against Them

As you can see if you have spent any time around my blog before, I have spruced things up a bit (a lot!) visually with the help of my talented graphic-designer friend, @belindalovelee. The inspiration behind the new logo is my favourite Bible verse, Jeremiah 2:13. I thought I would write today about why I love this biblical text so much, what God might be saying to us through it today, and why this text is the inspiration for this entire blog (not just this blog post).

Jeremiah 2:13 in the NASB reads:

“For My people have committed two evils:

            They have abandoned Me,

            The fountain of living waters,

            To carve out for themselves cisterns,

            Broken cisterns

            That do not hold water.”

The context of this text is that God is taking the kingdom of Judah to task through the prophet Jeremiah with the language of the law court. He is condemning them for their unfaithfulness to the covenant he had made with them, with this unfaithfulness primarily taking the form of 1. Idolatry and 2. Reliance on foreign military alliances to keep them safe rather than relying on their God to keep them safe. God rebukes this unfaithfulness in 2:13 in poetic language within which he describes himself as “The fountain of living waters”. God contrasts himself, the abundant fountain of life, vitality, health and goodness with “broken cisterns that do not hold water”, that is, the idols after whom his people are chasing. The contrast is stark, and the context highlights the foolishness of this decision: why abandon the ultimate and perfect source of life, YHWH, for false gods that are entirely unable to give you what you need? It is foolishness! And yet the ancient Israelites still did it… and yet you and I still do it today.

One of my favourite authors is James K. A. Smith. In his very popular book You are What You Love, he writes “Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow” (page 2). One of Smith’s key points in this insightful book is that human beings are not primarily driven, formed or constituted by abstract intellectual beliefs which they hold. Human beings, according to Smith, are primarily creatures of desire. Who we are and who we are becoming depends primarily not on what we know cerebrally, but on what we most deeply desire within the secret recesses of our hearts. In the many years that I have been chewing on Jeremiah 2:13, I agree with Smith, but want to add another facet to our understanding of the nature of human beings/human flourishing: I would say that we are not only creatures of deep desire, but creatures of profound need.

Let us return now to the scripture’s metaphor of YHWH being a fountain of living waters. Do human beings desire water? They certainly do, because without it they would soon die. But do they not also need water? The language of YHWH satisfying our spiritual thirsts with spiritual, living water is the language of God meeting our deepest, most profound and fundamental needs. For many years I demonized the language of ‘need’ as a Christian. I believed that I needed to deny myself, take up my cross and be willing to suffer well for Christ. I still believe all of this, but I have come, through a long and winding road of life lived, prayers prayed and scripture chewed on, to conclude that I love God the best, and am most able to obey him and exalt him when I allow him to be the source of all that I mostly deeply and truly need and desire. As the title of this blog post suggested, I think that in Jeremiah 2:13, and umpteen other places in the Old and New Testaments, God reveals himself as the one who is for our needs, not against them. Now is it possible to misconstrue this and live a navel-gazing, self-centred life within which we misjudge what exactly it is that we need, and what exactly it is that God is calling us to desire? Certainly, see my previous blog post called ‘The Opposite of the Health and Wealth Gospel’! YHWH, who came to us and most fully revealed himself to us in the person of Jesus Christ, wants to be our ultimate source of all that we most deeply need and long for both internally (love, belonging, joy, peace, comfort etc.) and externally (protection, provision, guidance etc.) God is not against your basic and fundamental needs, or your sanctified desires. He wants you to be awash with these! And he knows that it is when you have what you need most deeply and long for most powerfully that you will live the holiest and most joyful life you can.

What does all of this have to do with this blog? My new logo (designed by Belinda!) shows several water droplets coming up out of a fountain, echoing my favourite Bible verse, Jeremiah 2:13. My specific goals with this blog are to encourage charismatic Christians to 1. Hold on to our strengths – God does meet our needs and transform us, individually and corporately, by the power of his Spirit, but also to 2. Begin to recognize that emotive, spiritual experiences are not all we need! God also refreshes, fills, revitalizes, revives his church through the wellsprings of Christ-honouring academic theology and Christ-exalting reflection upon the Christian tradition. But, hang on, didn’t I just say that we are primarily creatures of need and desire, not brains-on-a-stick? Yes, and this is why when I teach theology and when I preach, I try to help people see that academic theology done well is, at its heart, a spiritual discipline – we engage our minds rigorously as we wrestle with difficult concepts and texts, but we do this so that we can love, desire and lay hold of Christ more fully. My hope is that those who take the time to read these posts would, even if only briefly, taste some of the living water that flows from the fountain of living waters, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Smith, James. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016.