Too often we wrongly assume desire to be something innate— something we can’t control or change. This is a false belief, and as long as you hold it, you will be a slave to whatever limited outcomes your present desires lead you to.
Desire is a choice. Desire is how you wish things were. There is nothing external or transcendent about desire. Desire is completely within and completely up to you.
Agency is the ability to choose to act independent of what is felt. Our feelings do not dictate our actions. God made us free to choose based on our thoughts. We can choose to submit our thoughts to our feelings, and thus enslave ourselves to a narrow, often incorrect perspective, but we do not have to.
You change desire through choosing differently. You choose differently as a result of having different reasons. You change desire through changing your reasons.
Desire is a judgment of value. When the value we perceive in things changes, our desires immediately change. The value we perceive in things is not an innate quality. It is a choice, and to the degree we are honest, it is a choice based on how things really are.
Changing your desire is a process of reason, not a question of willpower. Jesus said: “I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33) As long as you are overcome by the world, you are missing something he has to teach you.
Jesus was tempted like we are, but he did not succumb:
For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews 4:15)
If you have to avoid all sorts of situations in life to avoid succumbing to what you know isn’t right, you aren’t lacking willpower. You are either lacking information, honesty, or both.
The solution to temptation is not a matter of what you want, but why you want it.
You change your desire through using your faculties of reason to better understand the consequences of what it is you desire, to evaluate whether better consequences exist in another desire, and to exercise the honesty to prefer what is truly best for you.
Desire is completely independent of reality. Your desires can be completely aligned with reality, or completely opposed to reality. The more your desires align with reality, the more successful you will be in obtaining the outcomes you seek. To encounter the greatest joy, you must reconcile your desires and actions to reality—to things as they really are, not how you wish they were.
Limited understanding of reality will cause us to place our desires on things that have less value than available alternatives. Only God, who knows all things, perfectly understands what actually benefits, and by how much. It is essential that we use reason and effort to figure out God’s desire, and not merely seek whatever vain desire crosses our mind. The best desires are those that align with God’s, because they are the desires that align most with reality.
Wise desire is fueled by accurate valuation of future outcomes. God has all things before him continually through faith. He acts in the present with equal deference to the future.
Humans, by default, assign enormous preference to the present, even at the expense of the future. To become more like God, we must learn to weigh the future honestly, which will result in our willing sacrifice of the present for the sake of the future.
Don’t constrain your desires to an understanding of reality as what it seems to be here and now. Your desire should be reconciled to the fact that future outcomes exist that are far beyond your idea of what is possible—far beyond the best thing you can currently imagine. Your desire should also include the fact that things can be worse than you can currently imagine. Prepare accordingly.
Without faith, our understanding is limited to things as we think they are. With faith, however, we are provided a way to “see afar off,” or accurately assign present value to outcomes that are distant in time (see Moses 6:27 and Hebrews 11:13).
With faith, we gain the belief that things as they were, are, and will be consist of more than what we presently perceive. This means we gain access to the lessons from the past that we don’t currently know, opportunities in the present that we don’t currently recognize, and outcomes in the future that would otherwise be outside of our reach.