The Christian life is to be one of passion in which we pursue the deepest desires of our new heart without settling for lesser, sinful desires. This is what Psalm 37:4 means when it says to “delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
Only a regenerated heart can be delighted with who God is and what He does. As the regenerated heart delights in God, He places deep desires in the heart. Because those desires are His desires, then the delighting Christian and God share the same desires. Thus, born again Christians pursue with great passion their deepest God-given desires; in doing so, they worship God not just by obeying what He commands in duty but also by obeying in delight, as their will and God’s will are one and the same.
This biblical understanding of regenerated new desires completely undermines a common error of religion. Religion in its various forms does not understand regenerated new, deep desires and wrongly assumes that Christians, at their deepest level, primarily have an appetite for sin. As a result, religion seeks to deaden a person’s desires with guilt and man-made legalistic rules, assuming that passion will lead to sin.
However, the biblical understanding of regenerated desires is not that we overcome sin by religion and rules or by diminished passion. Rather, we overcome sin by not settling for lesser, weaker, sinful desires and by becoming more passionate and by pressing onward for the satisfaction of our deepest new desires, which are God’s desires implanted on our heart by the Holy Spirit.
What are the deepest new desires that God has given you since being born again?