What is the desire of your heart?  Chris Brannon continues in our Wisdom for Life series by speaking on reordering desire.  The heart is the seat of your deepest trusts, commitments, loves and desires.  What the heart most loves and trusts, the mind finds reasonable, the emotions find desirable and the will finds doable.  Our desires can be influenced from the outside:  what material goods we have, who we hang out with and the activities we take part in.

Our desire should be God, but there are four God substitutes that Chris gives us.  The first substitute is approval.  Feelings will get hurt easily and we will tend to over commit out of a desire for acceptance because we fear rejection.  The only thing that will cast out that fear is a deep love for God.  Another substitute is comfort.  The Bible isn’t anti-pleasure, but it is the wise person who can identify and destroy anything usurping God’s place in their heart.  The next one is power and their greatest nightmare is humiliation.  The last one is control.  Rather than a failure to plan like the sluggard, the opposite error is to think you can control your entire future through planning and management.  Their greatest fear is uncertainty and they tend not to delegate and share power.

What would the dashboard for your soul look like?  There would be red and green lights and the red lights would be impulses in your soul that have the tendency towards departure from God.  Some examples of these are fear, pride, greed, anger, coldness in worship and any sense of going through the motions.  Watch the direction in which things are moving in your heart and keep your heart with all vigilance.

Chris leaves us with two questions to help us reorder our desires.  The first question to ask is: Is there a way in which you are failing to guard your heart?  The second is: Are there things you are seeing or doing that nay be moving your heart away from God?