Suffering From Desire
Suffering from Desire
Proverbs 13:12 States that a Godly “Desire is a tree of Life”
Proverbs 21:25 “The desire of the slothful killeth him; for his hands refuse to labour.”
James 4:1-4 “From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.”
Ecclesiastes 5:10 ‘He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver.’
“In the Religion of Buddhism, desire and ignorance lie at the root of suffering. By desire, Buddhists refer to craving pleasure, material goods -all of which are wants that can never be satisfied. As a result, desiring them can only bring suffering. Ignorance, in comparison, relates to not seeing the world as it actually is. Without the capacity for mental concentration and insight, Buddhism explains, one's mind is left undeveloped, unable to grasp the true nature of things. Vices, such as greed, envy, hatred and anger, derive from this ignorance.”
One doesn’t need to look any further however, than the Word of God found in the Book of Proverbs, the writings of Hosea, and confirmed in Paul’s letter to Timothy, to find the origins of this Truth, and to clearly provide answers to this condition that is the human condition. (Illumination demands that we must all examine and answer what condition our condition is in.)
Notice the contrast of desire that we find in the book of Proverbs- one tends to life and the other to decay and death. The difference is one is rooted in selfishness and the other is not, and it is as simple as that.
One man’s desire is not only the cause of his suffering but many times the cause of the suffering of others.
One man’s conquest is the spoil of another man.
Ignorance, lust and selfish desire, and the ‘love of money are the roots of all evil.’ (1Tim6:10) These are intertwined, intermingled and interchangeable as they intersect each other over and over and over again in and throughout the greater history of humanity and even in the smallest details of my own history.
How many lives destroyed by desire for drugs? Not just for the one for whose addiction destroys their own life, but of the collateral damage to the lives of those around as they witness the self destruction of one they love. How many others suffer from one person’s inability to cope and resorting to substance abuse? How many children are raised without parents? How many lives destroyed because the ones they depended on were dependent on substance? How many lives have been destroyed because of the doctors whose love for money drove them to write prescriptions that broke families apart? The opioid epidemic is seeing 50,000 souls a year to an early grave. One group prospers and flourishes at the expense, suffering and death of others. Those in the pharmaceutical industry have profited on the suffering and pain of everyday people, and have enriched themselves and hid the truth with lobbyists, propaganda, slick advertising, and in many cases contributing the curriculum that is taught in and donations to, the schools of higher education.
For the students who become doctors it is their indoctrination that benefits these pharmaceutical companies and blinds the future doctors to alternative treatments.
Of course there are exceptions, but many of the 50,000 a year plus dying from opiate overdose, were either currently prescribed their opiates from a doctor or recent to their death had been prescribed by a doctor. A very small fraction of those were introduced to opiates on the streets. Thankfully, for the next generation the light has made manifest some of these things, but the damage has already been done and so many lives lost, as the love for money was demonstrated to be truly a ‘root of evil.’ Since we are on the topic of pharmacy it is important to note that all the major pharmaceutical companies, have a collective income that grosses more than every other major industry combined— to be certain this is understood correctly, the top five Fortune 500 companies are all pharmaceuticals and they gross more than the other 495 companies combined.https://pharma-industry-review.com/the-top-5-fortune-500-pharma-companies-2019
How many have suffered so these companies could reign supreme? Albeit last week Johnson and Johnson said they were going to discontinue making opiates. But how many lives destroyed to get them to number one? How many people poisoned so they could signal virtue now?
Besides this they had their biggest year yet as the world braces for mandatory vaccination- which is not yet but very soon on the horizon. The vaccine that is harming more children than the virus.
There is much to say of these pharmaceuticals whose greed has driven them right over the lives of so many- and the last point being this- the largest shareholder of those top 5 companies who seem in competition with each other, is the same. The same ‘investment firm’ owns the largest portion and controlling stock of these publicly traded companies. BlackRock.
In the grand scheme of things, the untold suffering of the many lives, cannot be fully calculated neither can it fully be calculated how enriched these entities have become.
So we find that money and it’s interests trump virtue at every turn. If it turns a profit, it doesn’t matter who gets hurt. They have risk assessment specialist that carefully calculate the legal fees of being sued as opposed to a recall, and there is no shame in the making of money. It is just business.
The desire for money is in my mind the root of much of the fracturing of families today. Working for stuff. What’s in my wallet?
“And through covetousness they with feigned words shall make merchandise of you.” This was speaking to the church of the last days and I believe that speaks directly to the American Church, who as a result of prosperity have fallen away from the truth and ‘heaped unto themselves teachers’ of prosperity, and abundance, forgetting we were called not to ease but tribulations and labor. We must ‘work the work of the Lord.’ In our prosperity our desire for more grows as our desire for the spiritual weakens. What desire you feed will be what aspect of your life that is strengthened. If you feed only the appetite for the material then you will never rise above the material plane, if through self sacrifice and service and seeking the Lord and obedience to His Word you feed the desire for the Spiritual, then you are led by the Spirit and the same are given power to be sons of God. Observe: “The desire of a man is his kindness.” Proverbs 19:22 “The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace..”
We can stay right there all day and discover truly where our desire lies, by our manifestation of simply the first three fruits of the Spirit, not even to mention “longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance.” (Galatians 5:22). The Word declares “against such there is no law” — but let us look inwardly simply at our kindness to see whether we ‘savor the things of God’ or the things of this world.
Our Kindness is the indication of our hearts desire. Benevolence is the antithesis of the survival of the fittest- the evidence of another world, a city whose builder and maker is God. There is no morality in evolution, and when our hearts are corrupted in desire for the material over desire for the spiritual our lack of kindness is a demonstration of that, along with ‘adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, murders, drunkenness…” —basically everything we are reading in the headlines every single day are the evidence of a National disease of covetousness that has crept inside the church and infected everyone so that our ‘love has waxed cold’
‘What man is he that desires life?’ “The desire fulfilled is a tree of life.” When we find our purpose to be in something greater than ourselves, when we find our purpose to be simply seeking God with our whole hearts, to be led by spirit, to reject the wisdom of the world for heavenly wisdom and to reject the greed and desire for money and things— we find then that this ‘tends to life.’ That our desire for God is the tree of life, that our desire for the things heavenly has fulfillment in this earthly body, and this is manifested by our love and kindness one to another.
God help us to see inwardly and reflect and ‘examine ourselves to see whether we be in the faith, and prove ourselves,’ whether we have Jesus Christ living in us. ‘Jesus on the inside working on the outside.’
God help me to recognize what desires are for life and those that tend only to death. Father teach me not to ‘labor for the wind,’ but to ‘labor for your rest,’ help me not to become ‘pierced with the many sorrows that come from coveting money, and not to err from the faith.’ God help me to fight the good fight of faith and lay hold on eternal life, and let go of the consuming desires for this world and the things in it. Help me Lord to build my hope on things eternal and to set my affections on things above and to know that my natural affections are good and pure when they are found in moderation and subjection to Christ. ‘For unto the pure all is pure.” God ‘purify our hearts through obedience to the truth, and help us to love one another fervently, out of a pure heart and faith unfeigned, in Jesus name I pray,
Amen.