Straight to the Heart: Communicating the Gospel in an Emotionally Driven CultureНамуна

Desire

God designed us with desires. We may disagree with the manner in which people seek to gratify these desires, but we must admit that it is natural to pursue them.

The issue in a Heart Culture is not that people have desires but that those desires are unsatisfied, and unfulfilled desires spawn emotional responses. Instead of “emotional,” a better word to describe the Heart Culture may be “restless.” People are filled with desires that can be satisfied only in Christ. And yet they continue to hunt for satisfaction in the world, finding temporary emotional highs but nothing of transcendent value.

Christians have an incredible redemptive opportunity to guide the restless souls of our Heart Culture to where they can find relief (Matt. 11:28-29). Jesus declared that He is the lasting answer to our needs: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35). Instead of condemning the passions of the Heart Culture, we can demonstrate how those desires are properly satisfied only in God.

In fact, when the Bible speaks about the relationship between God and His people, marriage is the most common metaphor used. Jesus said that the greatest commandments are to “love the Lord your God” and “love your neighbor as yourself,” for “all the Law and the Prophets hang on these two” (Matt. 22:36-40).

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once stated, “If you want to build a ship … don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

For those being tossed upon the waves of a Heart Culture, maybe what they need most is not a well-rehearsed lecture or detailed step-by-step outline of what awaits them on the other side of the tempestuous ocean of faith. Perhaps we can seek to provide a glimpse—faint as it may be—of its splendor, igniting a fire that reorients the bearing of their life in this world and draws them onward to pursue that distant shore.

How could your life better model the pursuit of desires in God above all else?