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For more than two decades, as your pastor, you've heard me occasionally use this phrase. I've repeated it a lot in 20-something years. The proof of desire is in pursuit. In other words, the level you truly love something, want something, desire something, will be proven by how passionately you go after it, how passionately you pursue it. For example, over the years as pastors, Haley and I have had couples, married couples, that will come to us no problem in their marriage, verbally expressing love to each other. But in spite of that, there will often be one spouse, not uncommon, that one of the spouses confesses to feeling maybe unloved or unwanted, all while the other spouse frustratingly says, But I tell you all the time that I love you. Here's the problem. When your words express a certain level of love, but the level of your pursuit doesn't confirm, it leaves room for doubt. You can tell your spouse you love them, but if you never actually pursue them, or you don't take time for them, or you don't regular choose them over other things, then what you're describing is a certain degree of affection, but your desire may be questionable. Desire moves toward what it wants, desire acts. Desire will reorganize your schedule around what it longs for. So here's the real question: if you don't have that kind of desire, how do you awaken it? Because what may be true in a marriage situation is even truer in your relationship with God. The proof of your real desire, the proof of your real love for him is manifested, it is proven by your level of pursuit of him. You can say you want more of him, you can say that you love him, but the question is, what are you really pursuing? What does your week actually look like? What do you spend your money on? How much of your focus does God actually get in your life outside of a Sunday morning? Because your real loves and desires are measurable and they always tell the truth. You just have to look in the right place. Which is why I introduced you last week to the word interiority. We don't use it a lot. It's a common, I mean, it's it's a it's a word been around since the 1700s. Interiority is making your inner life a priority. It's focusing on the life within the life, the hidden and unseen part of you. It is making the formation of your eternal soul the priority of your life. And we've anchored this entire conversation in a few verses from Colossians, specifically a phrase of Paul from Colossians, Colossians 1, verse 27, to them God chose to make known how great are the riches of the glory of this mystery. Here's the mystery Christ in you, that the glory of Christ would actually dwell in you. That's the hope of glory. Christ inside you, living his life through you. That is our present hope and our eternal hope. Then a couple chapters later, Paul gives us the other side of the same coin as he goes deeper with this. In Colossians 3, he says, For you died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God. So in chapter one, it's Christ in you. In chapter three, it's you hidden in Christ. Here's what he's saying: your real life, your actual life, the part of you that God is most concerned about forming, may be invisible to people on the outside because it's hidden with Christ in God. But for a believer, your inner life, where Christ dwells, is where everything that is real and lasting and eternal happens. But that's the part of us that gets the least amount of attention because everybody focuses on the exterior what can be seen. But if we want to be formed into the image of Christ, we're gonna have to learn how our inner life gets forged and shaped, which is why we're having this conversation about developing the life within. You can talk a lot about the inner life, but you can't talk about it without talking about how desire, love, is shaped and how it's forged. Last week I ended the message with a quote from A.W. Tozer, and he talks about spiritual desire, and he says, I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present lowest state. The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire, which simply means strong desire, passionate desire, must be present, or there will be no manifestation of Christ to his people. Here's the question that Tozer's really driving at. Because what you actually want will be proven by what you chase, by what you pursue. It is measurable. Philosopher and theologian James K.A. Smith wrote a book called You Are What You Love. And the premise of his book is that we see ourselves primarily as thinking people and reasoning people. We are rational people, people who believe things, people who process information, and then we go make decisions. So when we want to grow spiritually, we do what thinkers do. We take a class, we read a book, we listen to another sermon, we learn something new because we think that's how we change. It may be part of it. But Smith says it's not how humans being change or how they're formed at the deepest level. And he draws on the ancient teachings of St. Augustine that tell us we are not primarily what we think, we are primarily what we love. And our loves at the deepest level are not shaped by what we decide to believe. They are shaped by what we repeatedly do over and over and over again. Your habits and your actions will shape your loves and desires more than anything else. Smith says this in the book: you can't think your way into new hungers. The orientation of the heart happens from the bottom up, from the formation of our habits of desire. Learning to love God takes practice. You can't attend enough Bible studies or listen to enough sermons or to produce enough genuine burning desire for God. If while you're doing that, all the rest of your habits are still pointing somewhere else because the heart is formed from the bottom up through what you do over and over again until it becomes a part of who you are. Now that may sound simple, but it's incredibly significant because this is what it means. It means the real problem in your spiritual life may mean that it's not that you don't know enough. For most of us, that is not the issue anymore. It's not that we don't have enough information. It may be that our habits and our desires and our actions are aimed in the wrong direction. And this is not an original idea with James Smith. God said it first in Scripture, and he said it blunt and honest. One place, the 115th Psalm, the entire 115th Psalm is this contrast between the living God and the dead idols of the surrounding countries. And it describes those idols in brutal honesty. He says in verse 4 their idols are merely things of silver and gold gold shaped by human hands. They have mouths but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see, ears but cannot hear, noses but cannot smell, hands but cannot feel, feet but cannot walk, throats but cannot make a sound. And listen to this. And those who make idols are just like them, as are all who trust in them. Listen to what God's saying. Those who make idols become just like them. The people who carve these life things with mouths that can't speak, and eyes that can't see, and ears that can't hear, slowly become spiritually deaf, spiritually blind, spiritually mute, unable to hear God's voice, unable to see what he's doing in the world, unable to speak what is true. Most of us will never carve an idol out of silver or gold. But the principle of Psalm 115 doesn't change. You become like what you worship. You are shaped by what you love. Whatever you give your consistent attention, your habitual focus, your deepest desires to is quietly forming you into its image. John Mark Comer says it this way: what you give your attention to is the person you become. Which is why the writer of Proverbs was so adamant about us guarding our interior life. He said in Proverbs 4, guard your heart above all else, because it determines the course of your life. Solomon is saying here that what goes on in your inner life determines everything else about your life. The stakes are so high that you have to place a guard there. You have to keep watch over it. You've got to post a guard like a sentinel at the door of your own interior because the direction of your entire life flows from what you let in, from what you love and desire there. Now just think about that for a second. Think about the older saints among us or the ones that you've known that have already gone on to be with Jesus, those respected pillars of the church, of the faith, people that spent decades faithfully pursuing God, reading Scripture daily, praying daily, worshiping, serving. There's usually something noticeably different about those people. A kind of settled peace, a depth and maturity, a gentleness that doesn't rattle easily. Their interior lives, their souls have been gradually shaped and formed over the years by what they've been worshiping. On the other hand, think about the people who have spent decades giving their deepest attention and energy to lesser things. The pursuit of beauty, status, money, comfort, approval. There's something usually very noticeable and different about these people, too. A kind of restlessness, an emptiness, a shallowness, a chronic dissatisfaction that never seems to be satisfied. Why? Because we become whatever we worship, which is why the formation of our interior lives begins with some really honest questions. What am I giving my attention and worship to that is shaping what I am becoming? What am I repetitively doing that is shaping my desires and loves and forming who I am as a person? A religious leader once walked up to Jesus and asked him the most important command in the entire Hebrew Bible. There are 613 commands in the Jewish Torah. And this man wanted to know what Jesus would classify number one. And Jesus responded without hesitation. In Matthew 22, he said, You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And second is equally important, love your neighbor as yourself. The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commands. The whole law. Every command, every principle in God's word, every expectation that God has for how human beings are to live, Jesus said, hangs on these two things: love God, love people. Not know facts about God and be able to quote Bible verses, not perform for God out of religious obligation, but love him. And pay attention to how Jesus says we're supposed to love him with every dimension of our interior life, with our emotional center, our heart, with our eternal self, our soul, with our intellectual capacity, our mind. Jesus is describing a love that penetrates all the way down. This is not a surface-level affection. This is not a compartmentalized faith. This is more than a Sunday morning feeling. It is a love that soaks all the way into the core of who you are. That's what spiritual formation is. And it's what Augustine called our disordered loves. It's having those disordered loves, we go through a process of spiritual formation to have those disordered loves reordered and get them in a line with God, moving from loving the wrong things most to loving God the most. And that reordering of our desire, that reordering of our love, doesn't happen simply by learning more information. It happens through practice, through habit, through the things that you do over and over again until it becomes the fabric of your life. It becomes a part of your identity. Now I know that somebody obviously has to be. We wait until we feel close to God or Him close to us before we turn up our pursuit of Him. We wait until we feel generous before we give. But both scripture and science has proven that if you take action first, the feelings will eventually follow the behavior. This is not a trick. It's not psychological, it's not a technique. It's actually what the whole Bible describes. Faith acts before it sees. Abraham left before he knew where he was going. The disciples followed before they fully understood. You step toward God even when you don't feel it, and the desire and the love starts to be reordered on the inside. The heart catches up with the behavior. Listen, the love grows in the space that the habit creates for it. So if you want to love God more, start acting like somebody who loves God more. Be more faithful even when it's inconvenient. Pray when it feels like nothing is happening. Open the word even when it feels dry, not as performance, not out of self-improvement, but as an act of trust that your desires and your loves will be reordered and they will follow in the direction of your pursuit. The proof of desire is in pursuit. But here's the other side of that practice. The practice of pursuit is what deepens your desire. They feed each other. In chapter six of Luke's gospel, Jesus says something really intriguing. He says, a good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart. An evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what's in your heart. Now Jesus is pointing out something really important here. He is saying to us, what's going on in your inner life is measurable. He says that you can tell what a person's inner life is made up of by what happens to that person, how they respond when they're under pressure, when they're facing adversity. Because your character is not formed in adversity, it is revealed. Who you really are is revealed when you're facing adversity. And in this example, Jesus uses the mouth as an example. He says, you can tell what's really in a person's heart by what keeps coming out of their mouth when they are under pressure. When somebody is stressed or tired or provoked, what surfaces in that person? Because that's the real them. To use Jesus' words, that's the treasury of their heart. That's their interior life, the real them speaking. That's who they really are. The word Jesus uses here, treasury, is thesaurus in the Greek, and it's where we get the word thesaurus. It's a carefully organized repository. And Jesus is saying your heart is like a storehouse, and it will give out exactly what has been deposited into it. No more, no less. So let me give you an honest question, like for every single one of us, that I think is really important on the heels of this conversation this week. And I don't want you to rush past this. Like I use the word, Lord, let this marinate in me. Like let me sit in this until it gets in me. I'm gonna do this. I encourage you to do this. Here's the question. If someone followed you around for a week and watched what you actually do with your time, your attention, your energy, and your money. They're just an outsider watching all those things at the end of your week. What would they say you love most? Not what you tell them you love most, not even what you think you love most, but what would your habits reveal about your real desires, your real loves? Because your habits aren't benign. They are not neutral. They are forming you. Every single one of them. The scrolling before bed at night, the way you spend your recreational time, what you're thinking about when your mind is quiet, what you reach for when you're stressed or bored or lonely. Those are the practices that are quietly, faithfully, relentlessly shaping the person you are becoming. Last week I read a quote from Mark, John Mark Comer where he says, the modern world is a virtual conspiracy against the interior life. And here's what that conspiracy looks like in real life. It's not one big dramatic moment of walking away from God. It is a thousand small habitual choices to give your attention to something else, and over months and years those habits start adding up, and one day you look up and wonder why God feels so distant. And the reason is that your loves, your desires have slowly, quietly been aimed somewhere else. This is not a conversation to stir up condemnation. It is a conversation to help every single one of us come to a diagnosis. Because the same principle that got us to this place of being lukewarm or spiritually cold, that same by turning our heads the wrong time, the wrong direction, our habit got us to this place, that same principle can take us back. You can't think your way into new hungers, but you can practice your way there. One habit at a time, one intentional act of pursuit at a time. Let me point you to what might be the most misquoted psalm of them all. It's uh in Psalm 37, verse 4, it's a very popular psalm. It says, Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart's desires. I'm gonna ask them. Leave that there for a minute so that we can focus on it while I'm talking about it. Because when most people read this the way it's traditionally been thought about, this is more like a transaction with God. Like if you delight in God, in turn, the transaction is He will reward you with what you want. He gives you what you desire. And that's a misinterpretation. It's not what David's saying. That's why this cup, that's why this verse is on everybody's coffee mugs. I get up and I read my Bible and I delight in God, then by the end of the day, I'm gonna get what I want. That's why it's a popular verse among prosperity preachers. But that reading is fundamentally missing what David is actually trying to say here. The correct reading of this verse is deeply connected to what we're talking about today. The psalmist is telling us that delighting in God, pursuing Him, changes what you desire. What you delight in, what you pursue shapes the desires of your heart. When you genuinely delight in somebody, your desires start to align with theirs. You begin to want what they want, and you start finding joy in what brings them joy. And the promise of Psalm 37, verse 4 isn't that if you delight in God, he becomes a vending machine for all your existing desires. The promise is that delighting in him is itself the mechanism by which your desires get shaped. By the way, your loves are transformed and reordered. Psalm 37, 4 is the biblical proof for the statement: you are what you love. Your loves are formed by your habits, and your inner transformation comes through reorienting your desire, and your desire is shaped by delighting in him. David says it, delight in the Lord, and he will give you. I'm cooperating with Christ in me. That's why this is my hope of present salvation, my hope of spiritual formation, my hope of eternal rest is Christ dwelling in me, and I am cooperating with the Christ in me to be shaped into his image. And as I cooperate with him and aim my loves and my habits and my desires towards the thing he desires day after day, he will turn me into the person he wants me to be. Here's a little more grace. This is a popular verse in Philippians 2. We've quoted it. Listen to this. For God is working in you. Where? In you. What is he doing? Giving you the desire and power for what? To do. Because you're shaped by what you do. To do what pleases him. He's working in you, putting desire in you to take action and form habits that please him. Even the desire to desire him more, he puts that there. He awakens that. He's doing both at the same time. If you're sitting here today and you feel like your love for God has gone cold, maybe, maybe you felt like your love for God really has never been that deep to begin with, or you're not satisfied with where you are in Christ, and you shouldn't be. We none of us should get to that place because the depths of the riches of Christ are they're unsearchable, like there's no bottom. We shouldn't get satisfied. What Tozer said, complacency kills spiritual growth. But if I want to want Him more, if I thirst to be more thirsty still, Tozer said, how do I get there? Start here. Start with one act of pursuit. Not because you feel it or you got goosebumps, but because the proof of your desire is in your pursuit and the practice of pursuit is how your desires and loves get shaped. Act your way toward the life that you want to love and watch God work with the way you aim your habits and desires. Last week I told you that I wanted you to end every sermon with something you could take home. Very practical, easy, simple next step. Last week it was noticing. We called it examine, an ancient practice of church fathers, where they sat at the end of the day with a series of questions. I gave you a couple last week. Today is more, you could call this a love audit, and it goes back to the question we asked a moment ago. I asked you to sit with this week. Here's the love audit. Look at your calendar and your spending from the last 30 days. Why? Because time and money are the most honest maps of desire. Your loves and desires are measurable. And time and money will tell you what you really love. Not what you say you love, not what you're supposed to love. They will tell you the truth about what you really love. Look at your money, look at the way you use your time, your calendar over the last 30 days, and ask, what do these reveal about what I actually love the most? The purpose of this is not judgment, it's honesty. It's evaluation for spiritual growth. Write it down. Measure it, write it down. You don't have to like what you see, just be honest, and then ask honestly, is there a gap between what I profess, what I say I love as a believer in Christ, and what my habits actually reveal? And if there is, name it honestly. And then make the decision I'm gonna do what I can do to start closing that gap. And it's not, there's nothing wrong with more information, reading another book or attending another class. But most of us the problem is that is not that we lack information. We gotta start acting on what we know and moving in the direction, habits and desires that push us toward God. Do one small practice. Do something different this week. Maybe if you're the kind of person that the minute the alarm goes off, you reach for your phone, you're looking at notifications, you're running through to wake up in the day. It's Instagram, it's Facebook, it's text, like what did I miss? Checking the news. If that's the first grab of the day, don't do that tomorrow. Stop and say, I'm gonna lay this idol down for a minute. I'm not even gonna pick it up. God, my day is gonna start with gratitude that I woke up this morning. That you put life in my lungs, and I'm grateful I give my life and myself to you. You wouldn't be shocked at how something that small shifts your entire day. Start somewhere acting in the direction where your heart's loves and desires can be shaped. If it's not that, read a psalm every night before you go to bed. Take a 10-minute walk and just talk to God. One thing, act your way toward desire. This week I finished a book about historical revivals and spiritual awakenings. I often read those books about God moving in history in these incredibly profound ways. And I'll often hold that book up and pray the prayer of Habakkuk. God, will you do it again? Do it again. I want to see this in my day. Do this again. And one of the books I was reading, I finished this week, spent a lot of the time dedicated to George Whitfield, an Anglican preacher from England, was considered the catalyst for the first great awakening in the American colonies. And Whitfield, if you read him, he spoke and wrote a lot about his broken heart. He was from England and he would often travel to the U.S., go back to England, and he would talk about how brokenhearted he was over the spiritual coldness and lukewarmness of churchgoers in England, that they were going to church out of tradition and culture, but not really because they had this deep passion and desire for God. And I read an actual quote from a sermon Whitfield preached in Bath, England in the 1700s. And when I'm reading that quote, man, my heart just synced up with his 300 years later. Like I could feel his words. Because honestly, as a pastor, I could stand in about any church in America today and say them now. I'll read them straight from his manuscript. He said, There are a great many who bear the name of Christ but do not know what real Christianity is. I am persuaded that a majority of preachers talk of an unknown and unfelt Christ. The only way to restore the church to its dignity is to live and preach the doctrine of Christ. When you have once tasted of his love and felt the power of his grace upon your hearts, you will then love to talk of Jesus. Oh, let there be joy in heaven over some of you who believe. Let me not go back to my master and say, Lord, they will not believe my report. No longer harden your hearts, but open them wide and let the King of Glory enter in. Believe me, I am willing to go to prison or death for you, but I am not willing to go to heaven without you. The love of Jesus Christ constrains me to lift up my voice like a trumpet. That moves me. I could say yes and amen to Whitfield. I'm willing to go to prison or death for you, but I don't want to go to heaven without you. Then if you're here today and you've never met Jesus, or you're a prodigal running hard and fast the wrong direction, or you've got a cultural Christianity, but you don't have the real thing, open up your heart to Jesus and invite him in. Don't settle for a cold, dry religion or a lifeless Christianity, because I can promise you that's not why the Savior bled and died on a cross. He died for more than that. That's not his will for you or for this church or for this world. Open up your heart and let the King of glory come in. Would you stand with me today across the room and across all of our campuses? And I'm going to ask our prayer teams if they would to use this opportunity to start making their way towards the fronts of the buildings to serve you. And I have a prayer. I want us to pray together before we go. And then these altars are going to be opened up. If you want to pray with somebody to accept Jesus, if you want to, as a prodigal, you want to come home today. If you have any other need in your life and you need a miracle, we're here to pray with you. But let the Spirit of God take this word and stir your heart from a place of complacency and lukewarmness and start acting toward the life you know God is calling you to. Don't wait till you feel it, act in faith. This prayer will be on your screen. Father, we confess that our loves have not always been aimed at you. You've given our attention, our habits, our best energy to things that don't have the power to form us into anything worth being. Today we offer you what we have, not feelings we've worked up, but a desire, however small, to desire you more. Work in us to will and to act according to your good pleasure. Christ in us, the hope of glory, begin the renovation of our hearts, and Lord, I pray today that you would stir this seed planted in somebody's heart and let it bring forth spiritual life, an awakening in their hearts for spiritual desire and a longing for God. And then would you meet them at the place of that longing? God, would you bless them and keep them? Make your face shine down upon them, be gracious to them, turn your countenance their direction today, and grant them peace in Jesus' name. Amen. These altars are open. God bless you.