Fighting Desire with Desire

I'm continuing to benefit from this excellent book, The Bookends of the Christian Life by Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington.  I did another post on it here.

Today, I want to share another quote with you that I read this morning.  It's kind of long, so please bear with me here!

Ultimately, our godly desires must overcome our sinful desires if we're to obey God.  So to win the battle against sin, we must strengthen and encourage our godly desires.  How?  By simultaneously growing in our awareness of: (1) our sin--our knowledge of the moral will of God and how far short we fall daily; and (2) God's love--the grace and blessings purchased by Christ in the gospel.  Though we work hard at this, we ultimately need the Divine Encourager to make it happen.  Jesus said that when the Helper comes, "he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness" (John 16:8).  As the Spirit testifies to our sin and to the righteousness Christ graciously provides in the first bookend, our hearts are gripped by the immensity of the gap between what we deserve and the blessings purchased by Christ's obedient death.  As we become increasingly desperate for the gospel, our sinful desires are expelled from our heart because they're replaced with a new desire for the God who demonstrated "his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).  As a simple yet practical application of this understanding, we might preach the following one-sentence sermon to ourselves every day: "Because he loves me so much, I love him more than ________________."  As we see how incomparably desirable God is, he becomes our superior satisfaction, our all-surpassing treasure (Matthew 13:44).  Our appetite for sin grows weak by comparison, and we expel it because there's not room enough in our heart for both.  Our affection--our love for God--is then expressed in personal obedience and deepened relationship with the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit.  As Jesus said, "Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.  And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him...And we will come to him and make our home with him" (John 14:21, 23).

Reading about this made me think about how wonderful it would be to have no room for sin in my heart because my love for Jesus is so great.  I want to grow in that day by day, by his grace and the power of his Holy Spirit.

And at the same time, I want to look forward to a day when there will be no more sin at all, and all I will do is praise and worship God forever in Heaven.