What do you desire? You can answer this in many ways. Maybe you desire connection and intimacy, to know and to be known deeply and truly. To be seen and loved and enjoyed and delighted in. We desire to have good friends, to be affirmed and approved, to be judged in the right, to do meaningful work, to make a difference, to create things that are beautiful and useful, to play and laugh and run and be free from every encumbrance, to be healthy and whole and stable and have peace of mind and a good conscience, to rest, to be strong and wise and deep and knowledgeable, to explore and discover and grow and become something greater than you are. These are foundational and godly things we all desire.
Yet our desires often go unmet. Living in the bottom of your heart are holy desires for things you were made for and long for but cannot seem to attain. This is one of life’s most frustrating realities! But be encouraged – you are not the first one to wrestle with unmet desires. The wisest man to ever live said, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Pro. 13:12a). King Solomon understood that it hurts the heart when good desires go unmet.
But he also understood that when they are fulfilled, it feels like a taste of heaven. He continues, “A desire fulfilled is a tree of life” (v. 12b). Interestingly, Solomon uses an image from the Garden of Eden, the tree of life, to describe our desires being fulfilled. Presumably, eating from the tree of life is what sustained Adam and Eve’s life in the unstained world of Genesis 1-2, which is why the Lord had to block them from returning to it after they sinned so that they would not live forever in a fallen state or in a fallen world (Gen. 3:24).
Comparing fulfilled (godly) desires to tasting the tree of life also teaches us that heaven will be a place where the fulfillment of our deepest desires will be a perpetual and eternal reality. In heaven (the new heavens and new earth to be exact, Rev. 21-22) we will find in the Lord’s right hand “pleasures forevermore” (Ps. 16:11).
We can find echoes of this reality even now, in our hearts. As Peter Kreeft says, “What you will find in your heart is not heaven but a heavenly hole, a womblike emptiness crying out to be filled…What you will find in your heart is not heaven but a finger pointing to heaven.”
Holy but unmet desires are one of the best evidences for the existence of heaven. The existence of these good desires is one of the surest ways to know we were made for another world, that there is a real place called heaven where our desires will run free and will not be hindered by sin. In his book The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis says, “There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.”
The writer of Ecclesiastes says God put “eternity in our hearts” (3:11). I take this to mean that God put something deep inside us to tell us that this world is not all there is. This is why life in this world can feel so meaningless and empty. God made us to live in unhindered enjoyment of him and the world he created us to inhabit. This is why unmet desires (“hopes deferred”) make our heart sick. We were made for more. We were made to be at home with God.
In Mere Christianity, Lewis tells us to press on through unmet desires until we are finally home: “Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.”
Pressing on to Our True Country, With You,
Pastor John