Deadness

March 5th, 2023

I was recently reading The Journey of Desire by John Eldredge, and I came across this quote

“I continue to be stunned by the level of deadness that most people consider normal and seem to be contented to live with." (p.165)

I’ve been thinking about this idea a bit recently. I wrote God is Able which kind of touched on this idea of deadness but not completely.

To expand on the above quote want to start with another quote from that same book

“At this point in our journey, we have only three options: (1) to be alive and thirsty, (2) to be dead, or (3) to be addicted. There are no other choices. Most of the world lives in addiction; most of the church has chosen deadness.” (p. 182)

I found this to be really interesting and true. The world is certainly addicted, just look around: addicted to love, addicted to drugs, addicted to work, addicted to power, etc. The world is certainly addicted.

The second point is that the church is often “dead”. We try to kill our desires and wants. We should desire things. We should recognize that the world is so far from the world we were created for, and it is natural to long for and desire Eden, which leads to the final option: Alive and thirsty.

We shouldn’t kill our desire for more, even though it will never be fully fulfilled in this life. We should still desire Eden, and we should desire God.

Don’t live your life in deadness. Live your life alive even if it leaves you thirsty. Make sure to recognize that your thirst is for God and for the sinless world that we were made for. Don’t fall into addiction by trying to fill that desire with things other than God.

When you kill desire, you’ll live by duty. For example, you might force yourself to read the Bible each day, but you don’t really desire it. God wants us to desire Him.

This applied to me personally as I recently discovered what it feels like to desire to read God’s word. For a long time, it felt like duty, now it doesn’t. I’ve even lost track of time while spending time with Him, and it doesn’t feel laborious.

I’ve started filling my desires with God instead of killing/suppressing them or giving them to addictions, but I believe that even as I fill my desires with God, I’ll still long for more until the day I get to live with Him forever in a perfect world. Alive but thirsty.

I feel like a lot of people especially Christians can get used to life. We just keep going through life, doing the same things day after day. We slowly start to forget what God is calling us to do. We start to live in deadness. We kill all our desires and just become ok with life. God wants to use you! Let Him!

Lastly, I want to touch on contentment. The book had another really good quote which I think covers the idea pretty well.

“Contentment is not freedom from desire, but freedom of desire. Being content is not pretending that everything is the way you wish it would be; it is not acting as though you have no wishes. Rather it is no longer being ruled by your desires” (p. 182)

We can desire more and still be content.

Are you living in deadness? Are you addicted? Or are you alive and thirsty for God?