Danny ChaiAnother life changing reading for men’s group. I dunno, maybe I mention this group too much but yeah, I think it’s been really good for me.
So this particular reading, which was from like the 1800s (SN – did people in older times just have better vocabularies or something? Just, the grammar and language of some of these old things are just difficult and amazing. He rips of words like vituperative and Antinomianism like they’re common terms. I dunno, just something I wonder.) had this key insight: it is nearly impossible to remove a desire without replacing it with another desire.
I won’t go into his proof of it, but yeah, I found it compelling. Anyway, the implication is this – if the Scriptures command us to not love the world, the wrong thing to do is show how useless and worthless the world is. No matter how convincing that is, if there’s nothing to replace that desire, it’s nearly impossible for us to give up.
So his argument is, instead of focusing on the worthlessness of the world, we need to focus on why an alternative, God, is far better. Geez, I’m manhandling his stuff. But whatever, it really resonated with me. I dunno, I feel like I’ve been struggling a lot to give up stuff of this world, like money, status, whatever. I mentioned before how that song Surrender has been really meaningful lately. But I dunno, I think I’ve been missing the more important part of the equation, why God is so awesome, why it’s awesome to want to be with Him all the time. And that’s why the giving up part has been so hard. I dunno.
Boring.