DESIRE
Terry W Lock
Luke 22: 14-15
Psalm 132: 13-18
John 17: 24-26
1 Peter 2: 1-3
Nehemiah 2: 11-12 (to ‘Jerusalem’); 3: 1-3, 8; 4:6
I would like to say a few words, with the Spirit’s help, in relation to desire. It is a very interesting thing, because it is driven by the impulse of the heart. For the children of men it may be something that they can look on and see, or something that they want to arrive at, or something that they want to achieve. All of that comes from a desire generated in the heart; it comes from something that they feel after. Speaking very carefully and very reverently, God has operated in the same way; God has done what He has done because of desire. At the very beginning of scripture where He says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1: 26); it was in relation to His heart. It was not just so that He could have one more creature; it was so that He could have an intelligent being with a capacity to love Him according to His revelation; that was the reason for it. It was a desire from His heart that He would have an answer to His love; that is why Adam was created.
So we have all the times, periods, generations of men until you arrive at Christ; and you can understand, when you look back at the history of men and all the failures that there have been, why when Christ came on the scene, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good pleasure in men”, Luke 2: 13, 14. You can understand why the angels said what they said; you can understand the beginning of Luke because now God had His Man, One who was absolutely in accord with everything that had been the desire of His heart from before Adam. What a glorious thing the incarnation of Jesus was! Look at it from God’s perspective. We tend to look at things from our perspective. Think of what it was for God to see Jesus here as a Man. Perfection in manhood is what God had arrived at. This glorious Man when He was here set out the testimony of God, set out the glory of God, set out the substance of God, set out the desires of God.
So at the end of Christ’s life here, before He died, we come to His desire. You might wonder why it is put that way, why He has desire here, and He puts the desire in relation to the passover. He does not speak of desire in relation to the Supper. You might wonder at that because we are in the day of the Supper; we are in the time when we enjoy what the Supper is on Lord’s day morning. But He is with the disciples who were going to go through for the testimony; they were going to be here after the Lord was gone and were going to be the first ones to eat of the Supper that the Lord provided here after the passover. So the Lord says, “With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you”, which was the Lord setting forward in Himself that the feelings of God were not going to change because the dispensation changed. The passover was originally provided in relation to setting Israel - or the saints in type - free, and to give them access to God; and Christ was desirous of showing that according to the feelings of God’s heart that was not going to change: “With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer”. They would know the reality that the love of God that had set out the passover was the same love that was going to set on the Supper. The perfect expression of all that it was going to be for the saints was seen in Jesus: “I have desired” this. What a wonderful Man that He should confirm the hearts of His own before He died. Nothing, as far as God was concerned, had changed; what a wonderful Man; what a wonderful God!
So, “With desire I have desired to eat” has a distinct sense of fervency attached to it. You will find this in relation to the heart of Christ; everything that He does in relation to His own He does with fervent affection. Beloved brethren, there is nobody who loves you like Christ does. That is why, in your own heart, you cannot share the place Christ must have with anyone. His desire in relation to you is nothing but blessing. He has come with the object of bringing you to His God; that is the desire of His heart. But until that day He wants you to know that nothing has changed. And He wanted His disciples to know that. Things were going to be drastically different after the Lord died and rose again; the whole dispensation was going to change. Everything that they had been accustomed to, all the Jewish systems that they had known, all the things that they had been taught, were going to change; but the love of God was a constant - that is what Christ set out.
Then we might go on from that and the reason for it, and come to Psalm 132. Here it is in relation to what God desires. One of the things that is an absolute truth in relation to the life of Christ is that He always considered for God first. Everything He did, every action, every expression, considered for His God. He came out from God, He was going to God, and He lived for His God. He lived in relation to the desires of His God, speaking carefully. He wanted to establish things for God and subsequently, as coming out from God, He knew what God was looking for in relation to response. He knew what it was going to take to establish it. He knew what it was going to be, that in order for God to have what is mentioned in Psalm 132, in order for God to have His desires fulfilled, Christ knew He would have to come and die.
Jehovah hath sworn in truth unto David; he will not turn from it:
Of the fruit of thy body will I set upon thy throne;
If thy children keep my covenant, and my testimonies which I
will teach them, their children also for evermore shall sit
upon thy throne.
For Jehovah hath chosen Zion; he hath desired it for his dwelling.
You might ask, ‘Why Zion?’. Why not Jerusalem? Jerusalem is connected with the glory of the king, that is David. Zion is connected with the glory of mercy. Mercy is what God spoke of earlier on in Exodus; He had delight in showing mercy, Exod 33:19. Ephesians says, “but God, being rich in mercy”, chap 2: 4. God desired Zion because it was the place where He had the opportunity to express His heart in relation to those that would be there.
So it says here -
For Jehovah hath chosen Zion; he hath desired it for his dwelling.
God is going to spend eternity in the midst of those who have a conscious knowledge of His love and choose to respond to it: “here will I dwell, for I have desired it”. Now I trust everybody here loves God. Why do you love God? If somebody was to ask you the question, ‘Why do you love God?’, what would you say? If somebody in the world said, ‘You are a Christian, you are a believer, you must love God; why do you love God?’, what would you say? I will tell you why I love God; you will have your own reasons, but I will tell you why I love God: it is because He took me from the worst of circumstances and showed me the brightest of His love in the Man of His choice. I had no right to any of this and He gave me all of it! That is why I love God. What is your reason for loving God? That I know that I am going to spend eternity with that God and respond to the love that He expressed so fully in Christ is the greatest blessing that my heart and my mind can even conceive. What about you?
So that God desired to dwell there:
For Jehovah hath chosen Zion; he hath desired it for his dwelling:
This is my rest for ever; here will I dwell, for I have desired it.
What a wonderful thing it is that God will have a conscious, intelligent, response to His love. That is what marks Zion. There is nothing greater: “but God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love wherewith he loved us”. The greatest thing about mercy is that you cannot deserve mercy; you cannot earn mercy. Mercy is given from a person who has a right over you - may even have the right to destroy you - and chooses not to because of their affection for you; that is Zion. Zion is the place where love operated to create its own resting place, and God has desired to live there forever amidst the persons that He has saved who have come to the conscious realisation of mercy. What an atmosphere! So you can go through the Psalms, read about Zion, and see its bulwarks and all those things, see all of its battlements, the structure, indestructible in every way. Why? Because it is established by the love of God and nothing can stand in the way of the love of God. And then in the centre of it you will find a Man. In a coming day in the centre of the city you will find a Man who will give character to the whole thing, and His name is Jesus.
I read in John 17 because the Lord desires you. He says, “Father, as to those whom thou hast given me, I desire that where I am they also may be with me, that they may behold my glory which thou hast given me, for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world”. This scripture has been used to speak of the Lord in a relationship of Sonship before the incarnation; which is not something Scripture speaks of. The “foundation of the world” had in view God’s purpose; and the Lord Jesus as a Man was going to fill out every desire that He had ever thought of and ever hoped to see; all that was going to come into display in Jesus for God. And the Lord desired that His own should see it, a glory that is particular to Him as a Man. The Lord desired that we should see this glory bestowed upon Him, not only because He gives character to everything that is for God, but, beloved brethren, this is the Man that gives the certainty in our souls that we can never ever be moved out of the atmosphere of what God is to us either. When we see the excellence of Jesus as He is for His God, it settles our hearts; because we understand all rests in what Christ is for God. It gives certainty to the soul that our place will never change before the face of God because of the Man that is there, and not because of what I did or did not do. The Lord has desired this in relation to the saints, that we should take account of His glory; so that we should have liberty to respond to God because of what we see in Jesus. Christ wants us to be settled in our relationships with His God. To think that a divine Person set Himself, came into manhood, and set Himself in relation to your surety of soul is a remarkable thing. It is an act of love and Christ desired it; it was an impulse from His heart.
Then we come on in the light of the things that God has done, in the light of the things that God has desired, in the light of the movements of God because of His desires, to the desires that should be created in us. So I read first in 1 Peter 2 because there are certain things that we lay aside, and I do not want to occupy us with that, but there are certain things that we need to put down, and ways and actions that are better not done, but then it goes on, “as newborn babes desire earnestly the pure mental milk of the word, that by it ye may grow up to salvation, if indeed ye have tasted that the Lord is good”. It is not that ye may be saved; it is “that … ye may grow up to salvation”. We may quite often think of salvation only in relation to what it is to be saved from our sins; but it is a great salvation for any individual to be saved from themselves. We often think that our actions are the things that we are saved from, which is true, but the greatest salvation, as has already been said, is to be saved from yourself. If you have tasted that the Lord is good you will begin to prefer the kind of manhood seen in Christ. You will begin to be formed by that kind of manhood; and that is where salvation lies, that is where permanency lies, that is where what is for God lies, that is where settled affections lie. So here it says, “if indeed ye have tasted that the Lord is good”. Can you say that you have? Have you desired this? Often we may find, and have found, that for a long time after we are saved from my sins, we do our own will. We go places we should not go, we do things that we should not do, we act in ways we should not have acted; but what saves us from that is if we “have tasted that the Lord is good”. You are not going to do it automatically; you have to have a desire for it, because it means you are going to put a whole lot of things down that you found your pleasure in, found your interest in, that you found your life in; you are going to put them down, but you are not going to put them down out of rule: you are going to put them down because you love Christ more than those things. You are going to put them down because you desire “the pure mental milk of the word, that by it ye may grow up to salvation”. What a wonderful thing.
But then as well as that, there are things that motivate you according to desire that you are going to do for God. Do you have a desire to do something for God? Do I have a desire to do something for God? I thought Nehemiah was a scripture that could relate to this, because Nehemiah had a thing that God had put in his heart; and, beloved brethren, you will seek after God because the Spirit of God has worked and He has created a desire in your heart. So Nehemiah went to Jerusalem, and if you think about Jerusalem as it was in his day, it was a wreck; it had been burned by fire, the gates were off, walls were knocked down, it was a complete disaster, but it was the city of God’s king! That was the public testimony of Jerusalem; that is what God had allowed to happen because of the state of Israel. In the midst of all that there was a man that God had put into his heart to rebuild it. We live in a day - and I am using Jerusalem as the analogy here - when the breakdown that is extant in Christendom is very extensive. There has never been a day like it in the whole of the testimony when there is such a need for workmen. In the midst of all this breakdown, who here has it in their heart - the thing that God has put there - to do something for Jerusalem? Well Nehemiah did; he went around the city and checked it all and then he told the people what was in his heart, and they began to build. The reason that I read the parts that I did in chapter 3 in relation to the people is that nobody excused themselves, other than those who did not have the desire, but I did not read about them. We read about the ones who were the priests, and priests were not supposed to have to do this kind of work, but they did. The goldsmiths: was this their trade? No, but they built. The ones after them, the perfumers, was this their trade? Were they stone masons? No! But they did it. Why? Because their hearts moved them in relation to their God. There is no such thing as saying, ‘I am not fit for that work, or I am not gifted for that work’. There is no such thing! In the day in which we live everybody is necessary and everybody should have this desire! I feel very tested by what I am saying but, beloved brethren, we are in a day where the enemy has worked very hard to destroy what is for God. Are you going to help build this wall? Are you going to help in relation to the glory of Jerusalem as God desired it? It says on the following page in relation to it, “but we built the wall”; that is, Nehemiah and all those whose hearts moved them, all the ones who had desire, and it says, “But we built the wall; and all the wall was joined together to the half thereof; for the people had a mind to work”. The note to that is note i, ‘heart’.
Beloved brethren, without laying anything on anybody other than what love would lay, do you love your God enough, do you love Christ enough in relation to all the things that He has desired for you, that has it created a desire in you to be for Him? Has it done enough that you will govern your life and your circumstances that you should live and build for the God of our Lord Jesus Christ? It is quite a word I know and it is very testing. But the thing that does this, the thing that makes all of this happen, is that this is love answering to love; that is what makes it work. It is not because they were ordered to do this; there are some places in Nehemiah where some built a second section of wall and you might wonder why. It was because they were eager to have it done for their God. Beloved brethren, in the day in which we are where there is so much breakdown, we do not need to live according to the breakdown - we must live amidst breakdown, but we can live in the purposes of God.
May we be exercised to live in the purposes of God, in the things that are for God until Christ comes.
May it be so for His Name’s sake.
Birmingham
13th November 2023