Should Desire Rule?

“Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.
…. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.
What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 6:19-23

Bob Dylan used to sing a song called, “Gotta Serve Somebody.” The idea of it was that whenever we think of “freedom” we are missing the point: even when we do what we think we want, we miss the fact that we are obeying our appetites, our desires…and we never wind up getting what we were aiming for when we started out on that road. St. Paul’s message is that we were created for something else, for a life lived freely in love with God, which is where we find real freedom. He calls it “slavery to righteousness,” but it feels no more like slavery than forward motion does to a car: it is what we were made for.

It seems to me that in public life it has gone out of fashion to say that a desire should not necessarily be satisfied (unless of course it is the desire for high-carb bread!). We act as though a desire is a natural and good thing that has no other end but our long life and prosperity. We forget the evidence all around us that desire can spring from selfishness, ambition, hatred and rage, just to name a few natural but not-good sources. Lining ourselves up with God puts us in a better place to know what desires should be acted upon, and which need to be separated from.