What Do You Desire? Do Your Desires Carry You Along? Do You Give Yourself Over to Them? Then They May Be Your Master and You Their Slave! A Point to Ponder . . .

A Devotional for Friday September 26, 2025

From the Pen of John Bunyan author of Pilgrim's Progress

Our Desires Carry Us Along

“For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, no beauty that we should desire him”

Isaiah 53: 2.

All convictions, conversions, illuminations, favors, tastes, revelations, knowledge, and mercies will do nothing if the soul abides without desires. All is but like rain upon stones or favors bestowed upon a dead dog. O! but a poor man with desires, a man that sees but little, that knows but little, that finds in himself but little; if he has but strong desires they will supply all. His desires take him up from his sins, from his companions, from his pleasures and carry him away to God. Suppose you were a minister and was sent from God with a whip, whose cords were made of the flames of hell. You might lash long enough before you could so much as drive one man that abides without desires to God. Or [drive him] to his kingdom by that you could with a whip. Suppose again that you were a minister and was sent from God to sinners with a crown of glory in your hand, to offer to him that first comes to you for it. Yet none can come without desire. What is the reason that men will with mouth commend God, and commend Christ, and commend and praise both heaven and glory[?] And yet all the while fly from him and from his mercy, as from the worst of enemies? Why, they . . . [require] good desires; their desires being mischievous, carry them another way. You entreat your wife, your husband, and the son of your womb, to fall in with your Lord and your Christ, but they will not. Ask them the reason why they will not, and they know none, only they have no desires. “When we shall see him, there is no beauty in him that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53: 1-3).