What Are Your Personal Desires? Are They Holy? Do They Please God? Or Do Your Desires Only Please Yourself? A Point To Ponder . . .

Are your desires holy? Are you trying to satisfy your desires for your own selfishness?

A Devotional Reading for August 22, 2025

From the Pen of John Bunyan, Author of Pilgrim's Progress

The Desires of the Righteous

“The desires of the righteous ends only in good, the expectation of the wicked in wrath”

Proverbs 11: 23.

We . . . now come to . . . [a] particularly thing intended: . . . To show what are the desires of the righteous; that is that which the text calls us to the consideration of, because it saith, “The desire of the righteous shall be granted.”

We have . . . spoken of desires, as to the nature of them, without respect for them as good or bad. But now we shall speak to them as they are the effects of a sanctified mind, as they are the breathings, pantings, lustings, hungerings, and thirstings of a righteous man. The text says, “the desire of the righteous shall be granted,” What then are the desires of the righteous? Now I will . . . speak to their desires in general or with reference to them as to their bulk. Next, I will speak to them more particularly as they work this way and that.

For their desires in general, the same Solomon said, “The desire of the righteous shall be granted,” said also, “The desire of the righteous is only good” (Proverbs 11: 23). This text gives us, in a general description of the desires of a righteous man and a sharp and smart description it is. For where, may some say, is then the righteous man or the man that hath none but good desires? And if it be answered they are good in the main or good in the general, yet that will seem to come short of an answer. For in that he said, “the desires of the righteous are only good,” it is as much as to say, that a righteous man has none but good desires, or desires nothing but things that are good. I must labor to reconcile the experience of good men with this text [in the following devotions].