Winning the war within with the right motives

Posted by Timothy

May 21, 2009

Isn’t it the whole army of evil desires at war within you? You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous for what others have, and you can’t possess it, so you fight and quarrel to take it away from them. And yet the reason you don’t have what you want is that you don’t ask God for it. And even when you do ask, you don’t get it because your whole motive is wrong — you want only what will give you pleasure.

The war within wages because we have desires, “evil desires” in the sense that it makes us jealous of what other people have.

Do we long for more power, wealth and prestige driven by the fact that others around us have it? In an area where I live where there is much money and wealth, it becomes easy to desire that and covet it. I know deep down inside, as much as I may consciously deny it, I do. I think there are far more people out there who, if they honestly asked themselves, are jealous of it. They may react differently by spurning all materialism altogether and being unhappily poor and judgmental of those who are wealthy. It’s a passive-aggressive way of trying to “take it away” from them.

So what is the way to address this evil desire?

By checking the motive.

This has been hard, checking to see if what I ask is “only what will give me pleasure.” But the Scripture doesn’t say to not ask. Throughout Scripture God wants us to ask. But in this passage, it shows what the exact posture is: