The Depths of Our Desire

There’s something embedded in every human heart: eternity.

He’s also summoning me to realize the gospel is about going deep regarding the longings of my humanity in the midst of my Mondays. Yes, it’s about God the Son who became fully human, was crucified in my place, and raised again. But it’s about him doing that in order to resurrect me into a new life and a new humanity, not just to introduce a new ideology and a new set of rules.

Christ beckons me to engage with the gospel, not as a religious person wanting a Christian label or a church person looking for something to do on a Sunday morning, but as a human being yearning to come alive.

Let me highlight a key truth that’s becoming increasingly clear to me:

A superficial and therefore short-circuited engagement with my longings leads to a superficial and therefore short-circuited engagement with the gospel.

Jesus wanted this woman to understand that her ultimate longing was actually not for a man but for living water. She just didn’t know it yet.

Living water. Life water. Something that addresses my soul’s thirst. He’s using the drinking of this living water as a metaphor of what it means to experience eternal life.[1] There’s something eternal about what he’s offering. Why is he bringing that up with a woman who’s been pursuing her heart’s longing through multiple failed marriages? Why not just offer a couple of marriage counseling tips and call it a day?

Hear the words of Ecclesiastes: “I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (3:10-11, NIV 2011).

There’s something embedded in every human heart: eternity. It doesn’t matter who I am—young or old, male or female, a left-brained engineer or a right-brained musician, always or never in church—this eternity comes planted in my heart from birth. When I determine to go deeper with my longings, I’ll ultimately and inevitably have to embrace something eternal.

Jesus is referring to water that addresses our thirst for eternity.

This woman is already thirsty for it, and she’s been desperately seeking to quench it with any number of pursuits, the most obvious being men. Time and again she’s come up wanting, disappointed, heartbroken. With her heart gasping for air as her soul is dying of thirst, the hopeless monotony of her story is now being interrupted by One who says he knows what kind of water she needs.

Blaise Pascal, a seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher, was also a passionate follower of Christ. In his classic Pensées, he conveys a resonance and understanding with this issue of longings, or as he put it, avidité (“ardent desire” or “craving”): “What is it, then, that this desire and this inability proclaim to us, but that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.”[2]

As I begin to submit to Jesus’s invitation to go deeper regarding my ardent desires, I increasingly realize that my ultimate longings—all of which are connected to my desire to be fully human—are bigger than any earthly pursuit can fulfill.

Adapted from Matt’s book, Life with a Capital L: Embracing Your God-Given Humanity.

Hear Matt Heard on this week’s Key Life by clicking here!

[1] John 4:14

[2] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: Dutton, 1958), 138-139.