This is YOUR bullseye God is aiming for …

Sin — that horrendous destroyer of our relationship with God, and life as a whole — is defined as “missing the mark.”

Imagine God, our great Creator, setting a “mark”, a standard, for our lives … we’ve all missed the mark!

“For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard,” Romans 3:23.

Although we have ruined things, so much so it has resulted in our spiritual death and a physical death yet to come, God has fixed things! Through Jesus Christ, we can have new life as new creatures in Christ, and life everlasting with our loving, redeeming God. But in order for us to receive this redemption from sin, there is something each one of us must deal with – we have to address this HUGE question:

WHAT DO YOU WANT?!

It was a desire for something other than God Himself, a desire to be like God, that brought about the downfall of humanity (see Genesis 3:1-7). In order to be saved from such sin, we must give up our selfish, sinful desires. THAT is the target God is aiming for in our lives — giving up our desires to see and value all persons and things as God does. In other words, to make His desires our desires.

It is our desires that are usually the last thing we’re willing to give up, even for God. We human beings selfishly want what we want, and in volume! Pastor Tim White of First Baptist Church of Eula-Clyde, Texas, tells a story that highlights how we idolize our own desires …

When I was a boy, my family played a wishing game. My dad would ask me and my siblings if given one wish, what would it be? Every time my brother or one of my sisters thought of a better wish than mine, I would change my wish to match theirs. Then one day my dad unplugged all the fun by coming up with what we determined to be the greatest wish ever. He said, “I wish that every wish that I wish would come true.”

The unending wish! One wish that grants all other wishes! That would be the greatest wish of all!

Through the years, however, I have contemplated how tragic being granted such a wish could have been. For instance, my fifth grade teacher would have exploded right in front of the whole class! The school bully would have come upon a tragic end to teach all other bullies a lesson. I would have been a murderer … a rich, greedy, spoiled murderer.

No wonder James warned us, “You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (James 4:2-3). Somehow, without ever having met me, the Apostle James knew of the wickedness that lived in my heart.

Oh to have the power to make come true all the desires we have! That would wreck us; it would result in utter ruin.

We human beings are proven moral failures.

That’s why God aims at changing our minds and hearts so that the desires we have are the desires He has.

Have you asked yourself that all-important question: WHAT DO YOU WANT?!

Have you come to the place in your life where your you have a great desire for God to transform your mind and heart so that the longings of your heart are the same as His? So that you desire no one or thing like you do God Himself?

“Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart’s desires,” Psalm 37:4.

“Then he said to the crowd, ‘If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross daily, and follow me,'” Luke 9:23.

Scotty